He does things and you’re lucky if you see them.
— John Singer Sargent1
I used to do the most terrifically vulgar things in those days.
— Chaplin2
WTITH AGROSS OF HALF A MILLION DOLLARS, 1913 was a banner year for Keystone, and 1914 promised to be even more profitable if Sennett could hold down costs and maintain his production schedule. Satisfied with Keystone’s formula for comedy, Mack was more preoccupied with commercial expansion than artistic development. By the end of 1915, Keystone would boast “ten producing companies … and a herd of comedians.”3
Keeping his herd corralled was crucial to his expansion plans. Inflated egos meant inflated salaries. His clowns were not permitted to think of themselves as prima donnas. He was the chief, they worked for him. Now that the new English clown was settling down and getting the hang of it, Sennett began to relax and congratulate himself on his astute decision to replace Ford Sterling with Charlie Chaplin at one-third the cost instead of agreeing to pay Ford five hundred dollars per week.
But by late March, when shooting on Keystone’s forty-second film of the year abruptly ground to a halt, he began to reconsider the wisdom of that decision. Meeting the salary demands of a former circus clown was a minor annoyance compared to dealing with the endless personality conflicts being generated by the high-strung English comic who fancied himself an artist. Chaplin’s latest and most outrageous act of defiance was a one-man sit-down strike on the curb of a suburban Los Angeles street. Miffed when his suggestion for a gag was ignored by the film’s director because of time constraints and fading light, Charlie refused to continue.
When the crew returned to the studio with unexposed film in the can and Sennett heard the story, he stormed into the dressing room and bellowed: “What the hell’s the idea?” Continuing to remove his makeup, Charlie calmly explained that his only interest had been in “gagging up” a weak story. As Charlie tells it, Mack fumed:
“You’ll do what you’re told or get out, contract or no contract.”
I was very calm. “Mr. Sennett,” I answered, “I earned my bread and cheese before I came here, and if I’m fired — well, I’m fired. But I’m conscientious and just as keen to make a good picture as you are.”
Without saying anything further he slammed the door.
That night, going home on the streetcar with my friend, I told him what had happened.
“Too bad. You were going great there for a while,” he said.
“Do you think they’ll fire me?” I said cheerfully, in order to hide my anxiety.
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised. When I saw him leaving your dressing room he looked pretty mad.”
“Well, it’s O.K. with me. I’ve got fifteen hundred dollars in my belt and that will more than pay my fare back to England. However, I’ll show up tomorrow and if they don’t want me — c’est la vie.”4
Reviewing the little Englishman’s rapid transformation from a shy, polite greenhorn into a cocky veteran in three short months, Mack felt justified in firing Charlie if he refused to knuckle under. Without exception, every director Chaplin had worked for so far had found him equally impossible. First there was his running feud with Pathé Lehrman. But aware that Pathé was abrasive, Mack made allowances for Charlie. Sidelining him for a week as a slap on the wrist, he reassigned him to mild-mannered “Pop” Nichols’s unit.
An easygoing man in his sixties, with ten years’ experience as a director, “Pop” suffered from none of the vanities that caused Lehrman to seek vengeance in the cutting room. Nonetheless, three films later, Nichols threw up his hands and informed Sennett that Chaplin was “a son of a bitch to work with.”5
Nichols’s verdict was no surprise. After trying to direct Chaplin himself, Sennett knew how difficult he could be. Unwilling to bend his will to another’s, particularly if he considered that person’s concept of comedy inferior to his own, the scrappy bantam comedian had resorted to indirection in order to avoid a point-blank confrontation with Sennett until now. “He would agree to a scene as I outlined it, then discombobulate me by doing everything some other way,” Mack recalled.6
Through mutual forbearance and tact, the two men had managed to postpone a showdown. But the way Charlie refused to continue working with his fourth director was the final straw. Informing his latest mentor, “I’m sorry.… I will not do what I’m told. I don’t think you are competent to tell me what to do,” Chaplin threw down the gauntlet.7 In front of the entire shooting crew, he flouted Sennett’s authority.
The fact that Chaplin’s latest director was also Mack Sennett’s longtime sweetheart and sometime fiancée, Mabel Normand, didn’t help. But personal considerations aside, there was something unbearably arrogant about a newcomer with three months’ studio time turning a deaf ear to a seasoned veteran with four years of filmmaking experience at Biograph and Keystone. It was true that the film Chaplin boycotted (on the first day of shooting) was Mabel Normand’s maiden voyage as a director. But it was also true that she was a competent and experienced comedienne, who already had appeared in forty films as against Chaplin’s nine.
The title of her debut as a director was Mabel at the Wheel, a comedy “vehicle” with feminist undertones in which Normand played a capable lady racetrack driver who succeeds in foiling the bungling slapstick attempts of an oily male villain to fix the outcome of her race. Instructed to put on his old music hall getup from Making a Living plus a Fu Manchu goatee, a very reluctant and out-of-character Charlie was cast by Mabel to play the heavy to her juicier role as the film’s comic heroine.
If Chaplin’s latest director was four years his senior in experience, he seemed to notice only the galling fact that “pretty and charming” Mabel was four years younger as well. As payback for Charlie’s treatment of Nichols, Lehrman, and Sennett himself, Mack had turned a deaf ear to his persistent pleas “to write and direct my own comedies” and consigned him to a supporting role in Normand’s film.8 But instead of serving as an object lesson in etiquette, the strategy backfired and triggered an open clash between Charlie and Mack.
If the hot-tempered Irishman and feisty Englishman had been left to their own devices to resolve the dispute, undoubtedly Fred Karno would have been the principal beneficiary. But on the eve of their showdown, it was averted by a pair of cigar-chewing ex-bookmakers from Sheepshead Bay. Back at the Longacre Building on Broadway, where they ran the distribution end of Keystone’s bustling East Coast operations, Sennett’s business partners, Adam Kessel and Charlie Bauman, sent Mack an urgent wire instructing him to “hurry up with more Chaplin pictures” as the demand was “terrific.”9
By the time he poked his head into the dressing room the next morning to issue Charlie a warm invitation to a friendly chat in private, burly Mack Sennett was of a very different mindset than the door-slamming guv’nor of the night before. Soothing Chaplin’s ruffled feathers by acknowledging he was “a fine artist,” Mack coaxed him into agreeing to cooperate with Mabel for “the good of the picture,” in exchange for a semipromise that, in the near future, he could write and direct a movie of his own. To assuage Sennett’s financial anxieties and equally strong conviction that no novice with a mere nine films under his belt was capable of producing a Keystone comedy, Chaplin offered to plunk down fifteen hundred dollars — his hard-earned life savings — to guarantee that the picture he shot could be released and shown.10
Delighted at the possibility of gaining artistic independence to explore and develop his own brand of comedy, Charlie became all sweetness and tractability — as were his two new pals, Mabel and Mack. Stepping in gallantly to help his girlfriend to write, direct, and act in her directorial debut, Mack was able to restore an atmosphere of mutual respect and creative generosity in the crew — where a couple of extras had actually threatened to belt Charlie in the kisser for his rude behavior toward the popular young actress.
Offscreen and after hours, in a congenial arrangement that lasted long after the picture was completed, Sennett, Normand, and Chaplin dined companionably in the restaurants of downtown Los Angeles. One of their favorite after-work hangouts was Harlow’s at Third and Spring where, apart from mixing with other members of the burgeoning film colony, film stars could rub elbows with celebrities like Clarence Darrow, Samuel Gompers, Barney Oldfield, Jim Jeffries, and Frank Chance (of Tinker-to-Evers-to Chance fame). Mack even got Charlie a temporary residential membership at the exclusive L.A. Athletic Club, whose posh but affordable facilities were palatial compared to his cheap digs at the Great Northern Hotel. Chaplin had such a tendency to hoard his money that during this early period he saved almost all his paychecks in a strongbox, erroneously assuming that a Keystone check was as good as cash, until someone finally pointed him to a bank.11 Depositing the checks was another problem, since Charlie routinely arrived at the studio one hour earlier (7 A.M.) and left one hour later (7 P.M.) than everyone else, in his determination to learn all he could about filmmaking.
While Sennett may have sensed from the start that Chaplin was onto something with the Kid Auto Races costume he devised, neither he nor Charlie anticipated the instant mass appeal Chaplin’s quaint character would hold for America’s moviegoing public. But the soaring sawtooth graphic peaks representing Chaplin film revenues on Keystone’s first-quarter sales chart told the story. By the time Charlie’s fifth movie, A Film Johnnie, was released, orders for prints of films featuring the new comedian in that picturesque tramp outfit were arriving at New York headquarters from nickelodeons across the country at more than twice the usual rate for Keystone comedies.
The critics agreed. They had never seen an oddball screen character as amusing as that new English clown whose name most film reviewers had not yet matched with the quirky mannerisms, unforgettable facial expressions, and intriguing costume. As one of the few reviewers of those first nine Keystones who got the name straight put it, “Chaplin is a born screen comedian; he does things we have never seen done on the screen before”; Another talked of a “Chaplin touch,” while a third concluded, “in the three months’ experience that he has had in motion pictures … [Charlie Chaplin is] second to none.”12
Stepping back to determine what made Chaplin’s acting stand out from the rest of Sennett’s thundering herd of slapstick comedians in those “galloping tintypes” of early 1914 is not as easy as one might imagine. Spotting him in a crowd is not the problem. The distinctive “moes” he wore in six of his first nine films solved that problem as handily as they would throughout his entire twenty-five-year career playing the Little Tramp. But determining exactly what the Little Fellow was up to in those grainy, blurry, flickering one- and two-reelers is another matter. The greatest impediment is that most commercially available print copies of Chaplin’s first two years’ output in the movies — thirty-five films at Keystone and fourteen at Essanay in 1915 — are currently being sold in chemically deteriorated and editorially mutilated states, which fail to do justice to the originals. (They are being restored.)
In almost all cases, the surviving prints have been so chopped up that, while various copies of the same Chaplin Keystone film may present identical scenes, they are often arranged in different order. In some print versions of a film, entire sequences are omitted. Concentrating on worn-out prints exhausts a viewer. It is tempting to dismiss Chaplin’s entire year’s output at Keystone as more artistically primitive than it was in reality, on the assumption that those original recorded performances were as crude and inferior as the poorly preserved celluloid strips on which they are viewed ninety years later.
Nor is the task of recapturing what contemporary audiences experienced in 1914 made easier by the modern setting and mindset through which our viewing takes place. The neighborhood nickelodeon has disappeared. The ragtime beat of the piano player synchronizing his tunes to rhythms supplied by his partner, the projectionist (who would fiddle with the rheostat to adjust the film’s pace according to his own artistic interpretations), is long gone. There is no hushed whisper of excitement, no gentle rustle of shifting outer garments as a picture-show audience settles expectantly to witness a state-of-the-art entertainment event that is as much live as it is recorded. No hand-painted color slide of a bluebird of happiness flashes on the screen with a note in its mouth extolling the virtues of neighborliness by politely requesting the ladies to remove tall ostrich-plumed hats and discreetly reminding gents to remember the Johnstown Flood and refrain from expectorating on the floor (gleaming brass cuspidors have been provided). Viewing old Keystones on modern videocas-settes and DVDs at home or in the ghost-town silence of a projection booth in an academic film archive misses the original social context in which they were received.
We cannot recapture the springtime enthusiasms of our grandparents’ world of straw boaters and ankle-length skirts, when both they and those astonishing pictures in motion were at once adolescent and thoroughly modern. Their level of visual sophistication was a far cry from our own — a world in which D. W. Griffith, unable to resist the temptation to dramatize what he would soon hype in paid advertisements as one of his crowning cinematic achievements, the “switch-back,” confided to readers of the New York Dramatic Mirror that January of 1914: “The switch-back I use with fear.… I must give a very good sound reason for its existence before I will attempt to use it.” Later, rechristened the flashback, it would of course gain universal acceptance as a routine narrative convention. It took time for audiences to accustom themselves to emerging storytelling techniques and for Hollywood professionals to accept them as conventions.
For example, a few years earlier, a major studio chief had chastised a director for cheating the moviegoing public out of their full nickel’s worth of entertainment by denying them full-length views of their favorite actors and actresses. And while “foreshortening” — that avant-garde technique that arbitrarily cut off photoplayers at the knees, waist, or shoulders — was now in fashion under the name “close-up,” as late as May 1915 a cautious reporter for Photoplay still found it necessary to enclose the term in quotation marks while bravely declaring himself a firm believer in it.
But it was imagination’s suspension of disbelief that made those choppily edited Keystones as visually engrossing and narratively seamless for our grandparents as films made with contemporary Hollywood’s most modern editing techniques and high-tech special effects are for us. Back in 1914, an audience’s desire to fuse with the dream screen and become one with the actors, action, and text of a movie like Chaplin’s fifth Keystone, A Film Johnnie, was no less intense than a later filmgoer’s hunger to merge and mingle with the players and plot in films like Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. and Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo.
In all three of these movies-about-the-movies, the protagonist is a deeply engrossed, romantically inclined member of the audience who joins or is joined by a performer/screen character from the film within the film. In what must be the ultimate cine-climax, the viewer-voyeur manages to escape the drab everyday realities that have driven him or her to seek sanctuary in a dream palace in the first place by entering filmland magically and attempting to merge with a fantasy love object — with varying degrees of comic success.13
In 1914, lacking the sophisticated technology to depict photographically the physical act of walking through a movie screen into another story, and playing to audiences not yet accustomed to the fantasy-dissolve, Charlie, a movie-struck dreamer, is forced to take the long way around to pursue his desires. Physically ejected from the nickelodeon by the management because of unruly behavior — wildly enthusiastic applause, an extravagant outpouring of tears, kiss-blowing transports of rapture, an impassioned attempt to rescue the endangered heroine of the film within the film by shadowboxing the screen villain and, ultimately, getting into a real fistfight with his irate neighbor in the next seat — Charlie makes his way to the film studio where the movie was made.
Stepping through the looking glass, he arrives in wonderland: the Alessandro Street entrance to Keystone headquarters. Still dressed in his tramp outfit, in what now becomes an authentic behind-the-scenes documentary on a day in a modern movie studio, Charlie encounters a famous film star, dapper Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, who, we discover, when he’s not in his tight-fitting Fatty costume, is a sleekly handsome gentleman of substance, accustomed to arriving at work in elegantly tailored, obviously expensive double-breasted suits.
Attempting once more to break into the movies, this time the Little Tramp tries a new approach. Sneaking through the studio gates past the Keystone guard, he installs himself in a prop armchair in the midst of a set on an open-air stage where a new movie is being shot. Completely carried away as he watches the filmed action from this close-up spectator’s perch, Charlie is no more capable of remaining a passive member of the audience in A Film Johnnie than he was as the music-hall swell in Mumming Birds. Impelled to rescue the costumed actress/heroine, Charlie assaults the actor/villain and is in turn physically attacked by the film’s furious director for spoiling the picture.
What made moviegoers sit up and take notice of Chaplin in this early film? Viewing and re-viewing a medium-quality print of the far-from-seamlessly edited Keystone celluloid supports Chaplin’s contention that, from the start, audiences were struck by his Little Fellow’s personality as conveyed through his unique character gags and idiosyncratic style of pantomime. Clothes, too, made the man. In keeping with his tramp outfit, Charlie panhandles prosperous Roscoe Arbuckle, the famous movie actor, with an earthy, streetwise aplomb entirely in keeping with their obvious social differences. Instead of engaging in the fastidious fandangos of the elegant swell in Making a Living, a much more elemental Charlie sizes up Roscoe in A Film Johnnie and puts the touch on him.
The sight gag is simple. Taking the measure of his man, Chaplin expertly slips both hands around Arbuckle’s waist as if to appreciate and demonstrate the full majesty of his girth and the full girth of His Majesty. Then, after comparing his prospective benefactor’s magnificent paunch to his own scrawny-bellied, baggy-trousered lineaments — both for our edification and his patron’s — Charlie gently prods Roscoe’s gut in confident expectation of a forthcoming coin, which plops automatically into his outstretched palm.
Chaplin’s pantomime is crystal clear. Arbuckle is a soft touch. Relying exclusively on nonverbal gestures and subtle facial expressions, the Little Tramp communicates his predicaments, motives, innermost feelings, and thoughts with idiomatic precision. He translates them effortlessly from figures of everyday verbal speech into a universal sign language. In A Film Johnnie, Chaplin’s performance is inspired by touches of verbal-visual poetry with which he metaphorically identifies or underscores his emotions using sign language — while dramatizing them simultaneously with his extraordinarily mobile facial expressions. “Flipping his lid” over the heroine in the nickelodeon movie, Chaplin the actor reinforces his impersonation of moonstruck infatuation by making the Little Tramp’s derby pop from his head, as if by magic.
But also in keeping with the Little Tramp’s elemental psychology, some of Chaplin’s expressions of rapture remain far more earthbound. In that same screen-gazing sequence in the nickelodeon, Chaplin portrays less ethereal aspects of passion by wetting his pants. “I have seen Mr. Chaplin blithely performing functions in the moving pictures that even I would decline to report,” wrote one reviewer.14
Well schooled in the music hall tradition of the sly double entendre, Chaplin is careful to establish overtly a hysterical case of handkerchief-wringing, lap-drenching lacrimation as the official explanation for those dripping baggy trousers he discovers as he gets up from his seat. Nonetheless, there is a soupçon of mischievous bawdiness in that split-second, camera-conscious aside he tosses our way, as he pauses just long enough to jiggle a few dewy drops of emotional overflow down his pant leg while being given the bum’s rush by an irate theater manager. It hints of a hidden wellspring other than his tear ducts. What was it Charlie Chaplin just did? Who can tell, it happened so fast.
His Little Tramp’s manners and deportment certainly left something to be desired. Toying absentmindedly with a revolver he has filched from the film studio’s prop room, he casually picks his teeth with it while musing on his next move. A few frames later he succumbs, for the first time on film, to what will become his screen character’s lifelong penchant for rescuing cigar butts abandoned by their former owners. Stooping to scoop his prize, he lights up with a handy pull of the trigger and puffs away. When finished, he blasts the cigar into oblivion with another shot while casually discarding the firearm as if it were the cigar.
His vagabond character’s hygiene is no more impeccable than his manners. Like some nomadic tribesman whose migratory lifestyle has taught him the virtue of making a single possession serve multiple functions, the Little Tramp employs his dirty old sock as a change purse and as a handkerchief to dab his eyes and blow his nose. Nor is there anything about this early Chaplin character that remotely resembles the soulfully poetic, self-sacrificing dreamer we came to know and love in the later Mutual and First National shorts and the full-length features.
We do get one tantalizing preview of the otherwise entirely absent soft and feminine side of the Little Tramp in Chaplin’s twenty-fourth Keystone, The Masquerader, where he does a brilliant turn as “Señorita Chapelino.” Dressed as a woman, he reveals his feminine side. No male actor can capture a female character’s feminine essence if he is not entirely comfortable with his own. Chaplin’s brief impersonation of a glamorous, flirtatious woman who seduces men and effortlessly twists them around her little finger is more than convincing; it is sexy. Not only is he more physically appealing than many of the silent film actresses of his own day, but he even makes the unforgettable star turns as women of such modern actors as Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, and Dustin Hoffman pale by comparison (except for the important fact that they do their distaff impressions for long stretches while Chaplin does his in one brief scene). Watching Chaplin impersonate a seductive woman is enough to make a psychiatrist wonder what it might have been like for the five-year-old boy to observe his twenty-nine-year-old showgirl mother’s mesmerizing star turns. If the eagle-eyed child learned how to “do” drunks by studying his father, it is equally plausible that he first learned to “do” sexy women by watching his songstress mother, whose act he later copied to perfection, even to her laryngitically cracking voice at Aldershot.
Sennett recalled that it was only after Chaplin left Keystone that “he abandoned cruelty, venality, treachery, larceny, and lechery as the main characteristics of his tramp … and made him pathetic — and lovable.”15 To this list of questionable comic virtues should be added: slobbishness, selfishness, lewdness, crudeness, and bad manners. Entirely in keeping with the prevailing morality of the rest of Keystone’s hard-hearted clowns, a not very altruistic Charlie bites, kicks, trips, burns, spritzes, shoves, and manhandles his fellow citizens out of his way in mad comic pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.
In these early films, Chaplin scales every performance for the belly laugh. The sympathetic communion he seeks with audiences at this stage of his screen character’s development is in the depiction of a picaresque misfit and incorrigible troublemaker whose idiosyncratic mannerisms and clever impersonations are considerably more witty but not a shred more honorable or refined than his fellow performers’ depictions of their desperate characters.
By the time of his showdown with Sennett in March 1914, what Chaplin the actor had already begun to realize was that to develop and project this new tramp character to its best cinematic advantage, he had to break away from the Keystone chase formula, arbitrary casting, and unsubtle conventions (including dumb facial mugging that passed for acting) that seemed to satisfy Mack Sennett’s standards as a film director. Being forced by Mack to play a wildly gesticulating, broadly grimacing, crude caricature of a comic heavy, as he was in Mabel at the Wheel, did nothing to advance Chaplin’s growing reputation or showcase his remarkable skills as an actor-pantomimist.
Choosing his own roles, slowing the pace of the stories, training and sustaining the camera on the Tramp to catch his gags and facial expressions, and making sure that the captured funny business didn’t end up on the cutting room floor were his goals. Otherwise he ran the risk of becoming one of the crowd in the formula chases and fast-paced action sequences. Looking back years later, Chaplin would conclude that his phenomenal early success had been largely the result of his decision to set his character apart visually from the Keystone herd.
While Charlie’s disagreement with Mack may have looked like a spontaneous temper tantrum, it was not unplanned. His determination to fight for artistic independence inspired his sit-down:
I had an awfully difficult time. Again and again and again I argued that I could do the directing myself, to let me direct, but the answer was always the same: “Leave that to us; we’ve been in the game for ten years.” The superior attitude … used to drive me wild.16
The full-page advertisement in the April 4, 1914, issue of Moving Picture World offering fans a complete set of eight-by-ten individual photos of Mack Sennett, Mabel Normand, Charlie Chaplin, and Roscoe Arbuckle for fifty cents attested to the resolution of his conflict with Mack, and to Chaplin’s rapid rise in the Keystone organization. On practically the same day, Chaplin began shooting Caught in the Rain, his thirteenth Keystone and the first one in which he was granted total artistic control as writer and director.
Writing credits in those days did not imply that a film’s author was capable of completing a shooting script comparable to today’s screenplay. Nor is it likely that marginally literate Chaplin would then have been sufficiently adept as a writer to produce such a document with its orderly progression of shots, scenes, and sequences. But in 1914, lack of sophisticated writing skills was not a hindrance for “authoring” successful photoplays. Chaplin’s lack of formal education actually may have helped him, as a pantomime storyteller, to reach many of the non-Western members of his worldwide audience.
Even twelve-reel epics like Birth of a Nation were being “written” largely on loose scraps of notepaper crammed in Griffith’s bulging pockets, recording or complementing the outpouring of ideas from his boiling brain. Following his Biograph mentor’s example, Mack Sennett had also learned to improvise films from the sketchiest of scenario outlines. It was this seat-of-the-pants approach to comedy and confidence in his own creative ability that Chaplin would credit fifty years later as the single most important lesson he took away from his year at Keystone (apart from his self-taught technical education in filmmaking).
There was a lot Keystone taught me and a lot I taught Keystone.… they knew little about technique, stagecraft or movement, which I brought to them from the theatre. They also knew little about natural pantomime.… Their miming dealt little with subtlety or effectiveness, so I stood out in the contrast.… I had many advantages, and … like a geologist, I was entering a rich, unexplored field.… that was the most exciting period of my career, for I was on the threshold of something wonderful.
… I had confidence in my ideas, and I can thank Sennett for that, for although unlettered like myself, he had belief in his own taste, and such belief he instilled in me. His manner of working had given me confidence; it seemed right. His remark that first day at the studio: “We have no scenario — we get an idea then follow the natural sequence of events …” had stimulated my imagination.17
In early April of 1914, having squawked and griped that he was as qualified as the next guy to write and direct his own pictures, Charlie suffered a slight panic attack when Mack finally gave him the green light. He decided to play it safe and return to his music hall roots by reprising two stage characters he had already played on film: the inebriate and the comic flirt. These roles that he combined in Caught in the Rain were actually take-offs on two standard lion comique roles, the cosmopolitan tippler and the suave ladies’ man. Yet if Chaplin’s bawdy depiction of a sloppily dressed, drunk flaneur, or urban loiterer, who ogles and flirts with women in parks and hotel lobbies can be seen as a tribute to the lion comique tradition, it was a backhanded one. Unlike the impeccably dressed, lady-killing comic flaneur gracefully strutting the Strand that his once-famous father had portrayed, Charlie’s ill-clad man-about-town was a drunken klutz.
When he made this film, Chaplin was not openly satirizing his father. There is no evidence that he even connected his screen character’s double identity in Caught in the Rain with his father’s two signature stage roles. If a paternal influence inspired him, it was unconscious, not self-conscious. Chaplin’s childhood was undoubtedly the last thing on his mind when he set out to write and shoot Caught in the Rain. More likely, he had been taking a mental inventory of his previous Keystone depictions of drunks and urban flirts.
Weaving his woozy way through barrooms and bedrooms, Chaplin had managed on those earlier filmmaking occasions to tangle hilariously with saloon doors and cuspidors. As graceful as he was clumsy, he had wowed moviegoers with his acrobatic skills. Vaulting a banister dead drunk in His Favorite Pastime, he could execute a miraculously perfect comic landing — upright and unharmed, blithely lighting and puffing a cigarette, gloriously oblivious to his near-fatal encounter with the force of gravity. And in his screen character’s other major incarnation as a great lover, film fans across the nation cheered, howled, and egged on the Little Fellow as he strove, shyly and slyly, to accost, pick up, and seduce all manner of women — single or married, homely or sexy — encountered in his shuffling satyric rambles through the parks, hotel lobbies, dance halls, boardinghouses, and street corners of downtown Middle America. During his year at Keystone, Chaplin had frequently burlesqued his portrayal of romantic feelings when the need for a seduction arose in his screen character’s life.
In Caught in the Rain, the Charlie we meet is more lust-driven than affection-starved. Satisfaction of desire is foremost. Every woman is a potential conquest. Filled with adolescent bravado and propelled by a testosterone surge that permits scant time for the niceties of courtship and preliminaries of dalliance, a very horny Charlie spies a respectable matron on a park bench, sidles up, and sits down. After crossing his legs modestly and averting his eyes bashfully, he launches a full-scale frontal assault by slinging his legs across her lap. Scolded for his audacity by this incongruously formidable-looking love object, he naughtily snatches her waggling finger and smothers her hand in kisses just as her irate husband, played by gigantic Mack Swain, shows up to give him the boot.
Discouraged, Charlie gets drunk. After striking a match on a passing cop and stunting a comedy spill in the wake of a tipsy brush with a speeding automobile, he toddles into a hotel lobby seeking shelter for the night. Stepping repeatedly on a gouty old gentleman’s painful bandaged foot while ogling an attractive pair of young ladies and drunkenly scrawling his mark in the hotel register, Charlie then proceeds to flop, lurch, belly-slide, sprawl, crawl, totter, and stagger his way upstairs — somehow managing to inflict ever-increasing amounts of pain on the hapless hotel guest’s gouty foot with almost every step.
Finally arriving at a room he mistakes for his own, Charlie tries unsuccessfully to unlock the door with a lighted cigarette. It swings open. Entering, he makes a beeline for a whiskey bottle. After taking a healthy swig, he pours the rest on his scalp and begins brushing his hair, only to discover he has forgotten to remove his derby. Suddenly, he makes the more sobering discovery that the room’s occupants are none other than the married couple from the park. Beating a hasty retreat to his own room, directly across the hall, Charlie gets undressed and prepares to bed down for the night, polishing his by-now-iconic boots with his shirt before tucking them under his pillow.
Relying on the plot device of a sleepwalking tendency in the Margaret Dumont-like matron across the hall to transform her into a sexual aggressor who turns the tables on Charlie, the remainder of Caught in the Rain is a bedroom farce in which the Little Fellow struggles desperately to escape his somnambulant female pursuer’s unwelcome attentions while dodging the mighty wrath of her husband. Although the humor is innocent by modern standards, Chaplin’s film gags were considered sufficiently bawdy by 1914 norms for the movie to be banned by Sweden’s Board of Censors.
“Well, are you ready to start another?” Sennett asked as they left the projection room after screening Caught in the Rain.18 Not only was he willing to grant Chaplin carte blanche, but he also awarded him a twenty-five-dollar bonus for each new picture he wrote and directed. The offer was less generous than it sounds, considering the enormous profits that Keystone and its distributor, Mutual Films, had already begun to realize on Chaplin movies.
Charlie’s biggest moneymaker was his twenty-ninth film, Dough and Dynamite. Completed by early fall of 1914, it grossed $130,000 in rentals in its first year alone — a tidy sum, considering the fact that a typical Keystone two-reeler brought in $40,000. But even in June of 1914, Chaplin’s box-office drawing power had become so strong that a movie like The Knockout was advertised by Keystone’s publicity department as a Charlie Chaplin film. In reality it was a Roscoe Arbuckle two-reeler in which Charlie makes a two-minute cameo appearance to referee Fatty’s boxing match in a personally choreographed slapstick ballet sequence whose fancy footwork anticipates his great scene of comic pugilism in City Lights.
Film history was being made. Not only were consumers with established filmgoing habits asserting a preference for Chaplin films above all others, but “people who never went to the movies before were driven by the accounts of the new comedian,” reported Photoplay magazine.19 Chaplin was the movies. So much so that the Crystal Hall theater on Fourteenth Street would soon adopt the unprecedented policy of exhibiting Charlie Chaplin films exclusively. With the odd exception of four unaccounted days of alternative programming, it would successfully continue that booking practice until it burned down in 1923.
Though not yet aware of his burgeoning nationwide reputation and the astronomical earning power of his films — he was more than pleased to be earning two hundred dollars per week20 — Chaplin was becoming aware of local manifestations of his skyrocketing popularity at the time of that showdown with Sennett in March of 1914. In search of crucial feedback to calibrate his timing and fine-tune his acting, Chaplin was just starting to supplement his Edendale studio viewing of the daily rushes with occasional expeditions to first-run theaters in downtown Los Angeles, to study audiences firsthand in live settings. Those visits were field trips, not ego trips. He needed to understand audience reception in order to polish his performances. As he watched, he incidentally noticed the anticipatory ripples of “ooh” and “ah” that routinely greeted his Little Tramp’s first appearance in each new film, even before that character began doing his gags.
Chaplin had already mastered the art of funny business onscreen, but he was still studying how to connect intimately with his movie audiences without straining for effect. After Aldershot and Foresters, it was a relief never to face a live audience again. But he was determined to establish the same come-hither, absent-fourth-wall intimacy that Leno and Lloyd had achieved so effortlessly. In the years to come, his relentless pursuit of excellence would even extend to providing rent-free loft space in his film studio to a deaf painter, Granville Redmond, in exchange for the specialized feedback someone with a handicap like his was capable of providing. And he was constantly testing new material by regaling fellow partygoers in Hollywood and elsewhere with colorful bits, shticks, and improvisations.
In 1914, however, during this earliest phase of his filmmaking career, there was not much time for socializing. Laboring with the singleminded intensity he had always lavished on his work, from his days with the Lancashire Lads to his years with Karno, Charlie denied himself anything remotely resembling a well-rounded personal life. As Mack Sennett told Theodore Dreiser:
The average actor … is just an actor. When it’s quitting time he’s through. He’s thinking of something else — maybe even when he’s working! — and he wants to get away so he can attend to it.… personality people are different.… Chaplin used to fairly sweat if he thought he hadn’t done a thing as well as he should have … and when the time came that he could see the film of the day’s work, he was always there, whereas most of the others in the picture would never come around. And if anything in the run didn’t please him, he’d click his tongue or snap his fingers and twist and squirm. “Now why did I do that, that way?” he’d say. “What was the matter with me anyhow?”21
There were even times when Chaplin’s tendency to “fairly sweat” actually rendered him offensive (according to Minta Durfee, a Keystone comedienne who played in twelve films with him and remembered him as “plenty dirty”). What it probably amounted to was Charlie’s habit of becoming so fanatically absorbed in filming that he absentmindedly neglected his personal hygiene from time to time. Stan Laurel recalled similar lapses in his ex-roomate’s grooming habits at moments of intense absorption during their Karno days.
But it was none other than salty Marie Dressler who confronted the problem openly by stalking off the set of Tillie’s Punctured Romance and taking Sennett aside to complain bitterly about the same rancid piece of banana that had remained on Chaplin’s celluloid collar for sixteen consecutive days of shooting that July. “As a matter of fact, Mr. Mack Sennett, if the banana is not removed, I shall enact you the goddammedest vomiting scene in the annals of the drammer,” Marie declared.22 Dressler’s remarks referred to Chaplin’s character costume, not his personal wardrobe. But according to a former assistant, Jim Tully, Chaplin was less than fastidious in his personal dress as well during this time. Rather than launder shirts, Chaplin saved time and money by buying one shirt, wearing it until he could wear it no more, and throwing it away. Chaplin’s cameraman Rollie Totheroh recalled his surprise over the fact that this extraordinarily well paid actor traveled so light that he had nothing but a toothbrush and torn pair of socks when he first unpacked his valise at Essanay’s studio in Niles, California.
More interested in slipping on bananas than removing their traces from his character costume, the comedian simply lived and dreamed cinema. Of the remaining twenty-two Keystones in which he appeared after Caught in the Rain, Chaplin wrote and directed sixteen. Many contain fresh gems of comic invention, some successful, some less so. Each taught him valuable lessons: how long to let a scene run, where to place the camera, how best to edit sequences in order to showcase his own unique brand of humor.
Achieving a personal cinematic style as an actor and a director had meant breaking with Keystone’s exaggerated emphasis on speed. “The plant must come as close as possible to the gag” was Roscoe Arbuckle’s way of summing up Sennett’s credo that both beats of a gag must be completed within twenty feet of film.23 That narrow fifteen-to-twenty-second time frame denied comedians the opportunity to enrich their gags with suspenseful pauses or subtle twists of exposition. It also failed to permit sufficient time for a series of thematically related gags to grow naturally out of a situation and to be contained within a character’s psychology. Fun flew furiously in a Mack Sennett comedy. Time passed at a snail’s pace in a Chaplin film.
By the time of his nineteenth Keystone, Mabel’s Married Life, Chaplin the director was beginning to experiment with the camera by recording Chaplin the actor for what seems like an eternity by Sennett standards. Playing a married souse who returns home after a night on the town to discover a fully clothed and very human-looking boxing dummy in his living room, which he mistakenly identifies as an archrival who has invaded his home, an incensed Charlie gets into a shoving match with this creature. In addition to turning a deaf ear to Charlie’s demands that he leave at once, the flexibly rigged “rival” returns each blow measure for measure. Astounded by the intruder’s audacity, and scenting foul play — which we immediately recognize as the residual aroma of the conciliatory bouquet of scallions he has brought home to placate his wife — a very tipsy Charlie wrinkles his nose and tilts forward precariously to sniff his opponent’s breath to see if he has been drinking, before resuming their shoving contest.
The scene runs long enough for Chaplin the actor to showcase his inimitable talent for bringing inanimate objects to life by reacting to them with complex and intimate emotions usually reserved for interactions with human beings. But if capturing the funny business of character and situation meant training the camera on himself and letting it run, Chaplin also had to learn to restrain himself (and others) in the cutting room in order maintain the continuity of his comedy scenes. In his very next Keystone, Laughing Gas, Chaplin mutilates the Tramp’s best take — a long “love” scene in which our horny hero attempts to seduce a maiden in distress.
Playing a lowly dental assistant who takes advantage of his boss’s temporary absence to impersonate him, Chaplin treats us to a clever parody of the diabolical profession of dentistry as licensed sadism and seduction which, in a properly edited version, would have easily rivaled or surpassed W. C. Fields’s hilarious treatment of that subject eighteen years later in The Dentist. Mustering his most masterful manner, Charlie enters the waiting room and selects a pretty young woman as his victim. While diplomatically devoting his full attention to the complaints of a homely dowager with a painfully swollen, heavily bandaged jaw as she angrily protests her need to be seen first, Charlie suavely ushers the maid of his choice into the operating room suite with the latest and gentlest of his seemingly endless repertoire of idiosyncratic back-kicks.
Having dispatched the old biddy, he turns to the young woman. Seating her in the dental chair and tilting it back with aplomb, Charlie experiences a momentary reversion to his inferior social status as he mistakes the chair for a shoeshine stand and, transforming a dental napkin into a polishing rag, starts shining his patient’s shoes. When she reminds him of her problem, he dismisses his lapse lightheartedly as an intentional jest. Charlie interprets her slightly nervous giggle as assent to his playful overture and proceeds to sling his leg over her lap and press his usual all-out amorous assault. Employing every trick in the book, he takes her for a spin in the chair and ingeniously uses a pair of dental forceps to extract a kiss by gently grasping her upturned nose to correctly reposition her mouth.
While Chaplin the comedian’s dental antics were sufficiently sidesplitting to satisfy the audiences of 1914, whose level of cinematic sophistication was the same as his, Chaplin the director’s clumsy editing of this cleverly conceived sequence detracts from the full brilliance of his highly original material. Dividing that one long take of his operating room seduction scene into bits and pieces by repeatedly intercutting it with frenzied shots of the departed dentist, who eventually returns to discover his employee’s malfeasance, Chaplin the fledgling filmmaker sacrifices wit for suspense in his only partially successful attempt to master the Griffith-like technique of using parallel editing to keep an audience on tenterhooks until a last-minute comic climax.
Each of the remaining fourteen Keystones that Chaplin wrote and directed after Laughing Gas taught him lessons in modern filmmaking technique as it was rapidly evolving during that remarkable turning-point year in the film industry. Tearing a page out of Griffith’s book, he even experimented with adapting a poem into a one-reeler — “The Face on the Barroom Floor,” by Hugh Antoine d’Arcy. While the clumsily overtitled film of the same name is one of Chaplin’s least interesting and inventive Keystones, creating it was an instructive exercise in narrative technique, since the original tale employed psychological flash-backs that required proficiency with time dissolves, irises, and fades — all useful storytelling devices to add to his cinematic bag of tricks.
By the time of his final Keystone, His Prehistoric Past, we find Chaplin the storyteller beginning to experiment with greater structural complexity as his narrative depicts the Little Tramp’s first dream. Alone on a park bench, the Little Fellow falls asleep and enters a prehistoric kingdom. Hungering for libidinal adventure, he thoroughly enjoys his reverie of deposing the monarch of a polygamous society and stealing his wives until a tough cop bops him over the head with his nightstick and tosses him out of the park.
Later, Chaplin would depict dream scenes and rude awakenings with greater nuance and sophistication in The Bank (1915), Shoulder Arms (1918), Sunnyside (1919), The Kid (1921), The Idle Class (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), Modern Times (1936), and Lime-light (1952). But even as early as November 1914, when he finished his final Keystone, Chaplin felt confident in his ability to write, cast, direct, and edit commercially successful films and adamant in his determination to make movies on a more personally lucrative basis at a less hectic pace — even if it meant leaving Keystone.
He had made thirty-five films (forty-five and a half reels) in ten months of continuous shooting at Sennett’s Edendale factory. He now needed a more leisurely production schedule that would allow him time to become more intimately acquainted with his screen character’s psychology and to concentrate on improving the quality of each individual picture. He also needed breathing space between films to get off the treadmill, take his bearings, and begin to experience some semblance of a personal life.
As his Keystone contract drew to a close, the bids rolled in. Chaplin began to get feelers, nibbles, straightforward salary offers, and creative business propositions from reputable film executives with plenty of production experience and distribution know-how. Would Charlie be interested in forming a fifty-fifty profit-sharing production company with no salary? asked Marcus Loew. How about a flat rate of twelve cents a foot of film shot with all production costs born by Universal? asked Carl Laemmle. When Keystone management low balled him with a comparatively modest salary offer, Chaplin told Sennett to tell New York no — “All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman, and a pretty girl.”24 The most generous feeler came from Essanay Films in Chicago. Charlie liked Mack and genuinely regretted parting ways, but “business is business,” he wrote Syd.25
As Sydney Chaplin well knew, there was one concern that beset his kid brother as his incredibly successful first year in films at Keystone drew to a close. The moviegoing public was fickle, and Charlie was keenly aware of the capriciousness of fame and the impermanence of fortune. Sydney and he had seen Charlie Sr.’s swift descent not so many years ago, and Charlie was determined to make hay while the studio lights still shone bright on his Little Tramp:
At the end of my Sennett contract, I wanted a thousand dollars a week for my services. They thought I was crazy, but I thought, “Well, I have made a name for myself — it’s now or never!” So I told them I’d go out and get it.26
As Mack pointed out, he did not receive anything remotely near that sum in his own weekly paycheck. But as Charlie reminded Mack, he was not the funniest man in America.