Charlie Chaplin Film by Film Thread

One other odd feature about His Trysting Places is that (unless BFI made a mistake in listing the date as Oct 1 when it should perhaps be Nov 1), is that it was finished and shipped prior to His Musical Career and Gentlemen of Nerve but not released until after them - staying on hold for 6.5 weeks. This was the first time there had been such a delay or such a significant discrepancy in order (it happened on a smaller level with Those Love Pangs being shipped a day before D&D).

My best guesses for why this occurred are

1. They did not want to release two two reel films in a row. Perhaps this was an issue for exhibitors as longer running times mean fewer showings a day, a factor which exerts pressure towards shorter films even today.

2. With the huge success that Dough and Dynamite was meeting with, there may have been even less desire to compete with it by rushing another two reel film to market.

But actually, if I had to bet, I might go with BFI or Flicker Alley making a mistake as to shipping date of this one.

 

"Is it possible that neither the Flicker Alley recreation or the WA Films version have the original letter that is described in the copyright blurb?"

Yes, though I wouldn't put too much stock in the copyright pointing out "the hour and precise location" (to them, that could have been something as vague as "afternoon" and "in the park"). Another thing - they refer to Clarice as "the telephone girl," but when the lobby scene begins there's a guy at the telephone desk (not in the BFI print), and Clarice is already at the typewriter. I was going to say: "Hey, maybe she typed the original letter," but I don't think so since she pulls the note (already written) out of her shirt (say what?).

Are your lip-reading skills any use here, Ray? If we knew what Peggy and Mack were saying it might solve the mystery.

 

The release date was November 9th (which makes sense, since the copyright is stamped November 10th).

 

Right, I don't question that. The odd part is that they indicate it was finished and shipped 39 days earlier, and its release delayed while 2 other films were finished, shipped and released.

 

Unfortunately Peggy's big line is wiped out by the intertitle, so whatever she DOES say, we don't get to SEE her say it. I can't make out anything Mack says in response, other than the fact that it's clear that he's agreeing to what she's asked. You mentioned a print where the scene runs continuously if you cut out the intertitle - I've had no luck finding one on YouTube. That's the one we'd need to look at.

 

Here you go - though it doesn't look like this will be of much help.

 

Here's the footage with the telephone guy.

 

Thanks for posting but yeah, I got nothin'. :-(

 

My goodness, Rfreeman, this is dedication.

I would have just skipped directly to Charlie's First National films and continued from there. It's not that the early stuff wasn't ground breaking or inspired, there's just so...much...of it, and he only really hits a point of consistency when he's given the creative control his First National contract afforded him.

 

When I set out to do something I set out to do it right! Plus the Mutuals are pure gold, with One AM perhaps the slapstick masterpiece of all time.

P.S. This Sunday night / Monday AM (12:45 AM Eastern Time) TCM will be showing Chaplin's final Keystone (and only Keystone Feature) Tillie's Punctured Romance. Set your DVRs.

I wonder if anyone knows the last time they showed this, and if they have an HD transfer or will be showing the DVD version. I'm going to watch this twice, once from DVD and once from TCM before doing my write up. Not going to do a shot by shot comparison so I may miss differences between the two (Doug Sulpy can fill us in on what I miss I'm sure), but I will note anything I observe.

 

One A.M. is good, but for my money the slapstick masterpiece is Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr.

 

Insofar as "Tillie" is concerned, The UCLA restoration on the BFI set nails it. No other copy comes close.
kingofthejungle - Charlie had creative control about a third of the way into his Keystone films, long before the First National years.

 

Getting Acquainted (Film #33 - note: His Trysting Places was actually #32)
Shipped: November 22, 1914
Released December 5, 1914.
One reel 13:32
Scenario and Director: Chaplin
Producer: Mack Sennett
(Park Comedy #10)

The day spent shooting this film was the last time Charlie was captured by a Keystone camera and directed this now very familiar cast of players (though two more Chaplin Keystones were released after this). It was his tenth park comedy, and an awful lot of these and others of his Keystones had featured the core cast of this film (Charlie, Mack Swain, Mabel Normand, Phyllis Allen and Edgar Kennedy) playing characters similar to those they play here. In this film, Mack and Mabel are a couple, as are Charlie and Phyllis, but much mixed flirting occurs as is revealed when the wives get to talking and introduce each other to their husbands. Kennedy is a Kop who takes umbrage at the bigamous situations. The one wild card thrown into the mix (instead of an inanimate object like an umbrella, ring or lover's note) is a stereotypical Turk who pops up fairly inexplicably with a blade he is not afraid to use.

With the familiarity of the board (the park with benches, paths and shrubbery), the cast, and their character traits and the ways that they move and interact, this film plays out for me rather like Chaplin playing another round of chess, exploring the different interactions that can be created with these characters and driving towards a "mate" conclusion that locks them into position. Remarkably, that position does not involve anyone landing in a lake and nobody gets hit by a brick or engages in much fighting either. As he says goodbye to Keystone, Charlie has largely moved past slapstick into other types of interplay and humor. Instead much of the comedy is situational and the game plays out as a well choreographed dance (something the composer BFI engaged seems to have picked up on, as a ballet could be choreographed to this score, though here it was done in reverse)

Interestingly (as this thread was inspired by another film by film thread), the other films that most strike me as watching a chess game play out are some of Woody Allen's dramatic films, like Interiors, September and Another Woman - which also often involve relationships dissolving and recombining. Unlike Woody, Chaplin does give usa good amount of comic relief mixed in with this.

Some of the memorable humorous moments include: Charlie mocking his wife's blowing her nose and snoring with trombone motions and fingers in his ears; Charlie pulling a losse thread off Mabel and then moving to balance the thread in such a way that he winds up with his arm almost around Mabel; and Charlie spanking and then reprimanding his cane after "the cane" mischievously lifts Mabel's dress.

There are also classic moves like tipping his hat by pushing on the front brim, a funny exaggerated walk with hop stop and turn and spinning cane as he first approaches Mabel, and a good bit of butt swatting and stabbing with the Turk's knife and later a pin - this isn't all high brow yet.

Eventually the girls tell the cops to forgive their errant spouses and take them back. Though the very end has Charlie trying again to embrace Mabel and Phyllis reacting by pulling him off by his ear. I wonder if we could be missing a last shot or part of one as the final title seems to come on rather suddenly - but maybe not as all the plot threads have been tied up.

One oddity has a dog appear in the film for only a few seconds. I don't know if we are missing footage that made sense of this, or (more likely in my opinon) this is just a random dog that walked into the scene in a public park and was not noticed until the film was developed - and Charlie wasn't going back to reshoot his final one day comedy once he saw it.

So with this film Charlie has come first circle. Both his first effort as a co-director (20 Minutes of Love) and his first effort as a sole director (Caught in the Rain) were one reel park comedies, and his last film for Keystone and basically his last one reeler return to this format. Chaplin famously said "All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl." With this film he proved his point and did so with style. I give this, as I did his sole directing debut, the highest content rating of any of the Keystones. With Caught in the Rain he was throwing everything but the kitchen sink into his first effort, while this is a minimalist approach shot in a single day. It shows how much he has grown in his 7 months and 17 films as a director that he can now achieve this level of excellence with so little effort.

Rating:
Content: 8.5/10
Print: 3/10

 

That's got to be my highest ratio yet of writing time to running time. Include viewing, note taking, researching and writing and I spent at least 10X as long on this film as it takes to view it. That ratio will hopefully decline as we move past his one reel period.

 

Thankfully I didn't see this film when I was 5 years old, as "The Turk" would surely have given me nightmares. Who puts a character who stabs people in a slapstick comedy? To drift slightly off topic briefly, this character (if we can even call him that) is clearly drawn from some stereotype (Google failed me) involving Turks and blades. This stereotype seems to reappear in 'The Godfather", where Virgil Sollozzo is referred to as "The Turk" even though he is apparently Italian. The novel and film offer a few possible explanations for his nickname, but his ability to use a blade effectively seems to be the primary one. And to this day, players who are cut in NFL training camps are said to fall victim to "The Turk", and the man who tells soon-to-be-cut players that "Coach wants to see you" is often referred to as "The Turk". OK, tangent over.

This is a funny and clever film with an inventive premise and loads of good "bits" from Charlie. It's interesting to note, though, that as a writer and director he seems to have a more difficult time coming up with some interesting and funny for Mack to do - the "Ambrose can't crank the car" bit that goes on and on never raises a snicker (except in his motorist "friend" who finds it hilarious for reasons unknown).

The two shot that starts the film gets us closer to the actors than we usually are, and one gets a good chance to see how much care has been taken to make Phyllis Allen look unattractive - from the "beauty mark" to the makeup around her eyes that may have inspired the Uncle Fester look 50 years down the road. Also interesting to note that Phyllis is more than double Charlie's age here (53 vs. 25).

I think the dog who makes a cameo appearance was unscripted - all part of the fun of shooting in the park!

 

A preview of my upcoming review of His Prehistoric Past:

What is this steaming pile of crap?

I am going to have to watch this film again to do a write up. It will be the first one to get only a single viewing, but even that will feel like an ordeal. I can't in good conscience recommend that any of you do the same. Maybe search out a still of Chaplin in his caveman costume from the film and look at that for a few seconds as that is the only funny thing about the film.

If you are really in the mood for a dialogue free comedy set in this era, I recommend checking out the film Caveman. I am pretty sure that if you polled folks viewing these films back to back and asked them to name based only on the films the one person in either one who acquired a reputation as a comic genius, Ringo Starr would walk away with about 90% of the votes.

 

"His Prehistoric Past" > "A King in New York" > 4 reel version of "A Burlesque on Carmen"

 

Look on the bright side - if you can sit through "Mabel At The Wheel" you can sit through anything.

 

"Thank you"
"That was NOT a compliment"

 

"His Trysting Places" is one of the better Keystones - and one of the worst represented films on the BFI set. The reason for this is that it's missing about five minutes of footage - four minutes of which is obtainable from common prints of the film.

The first missing footage comes after Mabel leaves the kitchen and receives a stack of packages from a delivery boy. This at least somewhat accounts for the packages littering the living room floor and that strange little pantomime she does as she's coming back into the kitchen (unfortunately, I don't have this footage - only a still).

Another minute of missing footage comes after she throws the horseshoe into the living room and hits Charlie. The scene continues on as he picks up the horseshoe and goes into the kitchen to confront her. She repeatedly tries to make up with him, but he's still angry and storms off. The BFI print intercuts some of these kitchen scenes with the scene between Ambrose and Clarice, but this doesn't match the copyright description, which takes us from the beginning of the film all the way to the drug store before getting into the action with Ambrose and Clarice.

Another thirty seconds comes at the beginning of reel two, where we see Ambrose and his wife independently arrive at the park. The shot of Charlie arriving back home is also AWOL, as if the footage of Charlie and Mabel leaving the house.

I also just want to mention that even though half of it takes place in a park, I don't really consider "His Trysting Places" to be a "park picture." I think it takes place in the park because that's what the plot calls for - not "hey! We need a film by tomorrow and have no sets! Let's go to Echo Lake Park and throw bricks at each other!".

Love the part where he gives the gun to the baby, as well. I'm sure this was supposed to get gasps out of the audience, even a hundred years ago.

 

Thanks so much for filling us in on the missing material!

 

The BFI print, while it contains the often missing first scene, would set up the joke better if there was an intertitle at the beginning introducing "Mr. And Mrs. Sniffels" (their names from the copyright). I'm not quite sure why Ambrose and Mabel get so excited seeing a car drive up - it's not like they were rare in 1914. While the BFI print is relatively clear, they failed to plug in footage from other prints - for example, the jump where Ambrose first goes to work on the car.

I like the slightly off-color (well, for 1914) joke of Charlie pretending to help "Mary" look for her boyfriend, then gazing at her rear instead when she bends over to pick up her purse. I agree with Ray about "The Turk." These kind of weird (to us) ethnic stereotypes would pop up all over the place in Charlie's later films.

I also like Charlie's pantomime about balancing a hair on top of his nose, just to be able to get his arm around Mabel, and how he lifts her dress up with his cane as he uses the same arm to lift his hat. Clever.

Relationships in the Keystones tend to undercut any sense of logic or reality. Okay! Hands up! If you were Mack Swain's character and married to Mabel Normand, would you really be flirting with Phyllis Allen? We see this same kind of thing over and over - Chester and Cecile in "Those Love Pangs," Ambrose and (maybe) Clarice in "His Trysting Places," the two pretty girls swooning over Charlie in "The Masquerader." It helps create the consistent, bizarre universe these films exist in, which is, to me, one of the things that set the Keystones apart from Charlie's later films.

Another particularly unfortunate gap in the BFI print occurs right after Phyllis introduces Charlie to Mabel. He deals with the situation by putting his hand over Mabel's mouth so she can't speak, pushing Phyllis out of frame, then kicking Mabel in the stomach so she's forced to sit down. All of this brief but fluid bit of pantomime is missing. Sadly, the very end of the film is also truncated on every copy I've ever seen, so we don't see Ambrose and Mabel reconcile.

 

I was incorrect about when TCM is airing Tillie. It is not tonight it is tomorrow night. 12:45 AM ET on Tuesday.

And I was bummed when setting my DVR to find that I don't get TCM in HD. So if this is a HD transfer with better resolution than the DVD, I won't get to see the benefit of that. I would be interested in hearing from anyone who does see it in HD.

Saw some footage of Bernie Sanders campaigning in Echo Park today. Much as with Getting Acquainted, nobody got kicked into the lake or pelted with a brick.

 

My guess is that it's not the car itself that interests Mack and Mabel, it's that their friend has newly purchased one ("Hey look, Tony bought a car!").

The "naughty" bits with Charlie's gaze inadvertently(?) going to the girl's backside, and his cane having a (dirty) mind of its own are two of the funniest moments in the film to me.

Of the bizarre relationships you left out the director falling over himself to get at female Charlie in "The Masquerader". Yes, the Keystone universe is a weird one, where blades inserted deeply into the buttock only sting (and don't cause bleeding), where pistols can be fired by a man wearing boxing gloves, and where every married man has a roving eye, even if that eye suffers from severe myopia.

 

I've heard that Bernie had a bit part with Milton Berle in "Tillie's".

If it is of any help, TCM streams in HD, and I believe that most films are available for on-demand viewing for about a week after airing. Personally I can't see anything fresh being done specifically for airing on TCM - there would have to be a home release tied in, and I'd have to guess that the market for such a thing at this point is tiny.