4
In Pictures
Accounts of how Chaplin came to be discovered by the Keystone Film Company vary. Mack Sennett, who ran Keystone for Adam Kessel and Charles O. Baumann, owners of the parent company, New York Motion Pictures, claimed that he had spotted Chaplin while spending a week in New York with his leading lady and girlfriend, Mabel Normand, ‘late in 1912’. Chaplin was playing A Night in an English Music Hall at the American Theatre on 42nd Street and 8th Avenue.
‘Feller’s pretty funny,’ Mabel said.
‘Think he’d be good enough for pictures?’ I said.
‘He might be,’ Mabel said …
‘I don’t know,’ I said to Mabel. ‘He has all the tricks and routines and he can take a fall, and probably do a 108, but that limey make-up and costume – I don’t know.’1
By the time he came to write his autobiography, Chaplin was himself satisfied that Sennett’s version was true, though his letter of 1913 to Sydney indicates that any of the motion picture people might have seen him with the Karno company at the Empress Theatre, Los Angeles. Other accounts allege that it was Adam Kessel or his brother Charles who had seen Chaplin in New York, at Hammerstein’s Theatre. A more recent, and persuasive, version of events appears in a letter from T. K. (Kim) Peters to Kevin Brownlow. Peters had been interested in films since 1899 when he had shot some moving pictures in Paris and in 1913 he was in Hollywood. His letter, written in 1973, suggests it was another NYMP executive who discovered Chaplin:
Harry Aitken … gave Charlie Chaplin his first job in movies … I had been moonlighting by painting some murals for the Pantage Theatre. In one of the murals I painted a beautiful semi-nude woman, after the fashion of Mucha … The manager of Pantage called me up shortly after they opened and asked me to come down as he had had several criticisms on the lady, as her breasts were bare. I went down and painted a veil over her breasts, and had stepped out into the lobby to go home when a well-dressed man who was looking at the billing photos … asked me if I was connected with the show … He said that he had heard that the show was interesting … The show was Karno’s Night in an English Music Hall … He said that he was going to attend the matinee … He told me he was just in from New York …
I did not give it much thought, but he was Harry Aitken, owner of the major stock in the Keystone Comedies, and the actor was Charlie Chaplin. Harry hired Chaplin away from Karno … and it was my first meeting with Harry, which ripened into a life-long friendship.2
In any event, in the spring of 1913 Kessel and Baumann sent Alf Reeves a telegram which allegedly read (accounts of it vary in textual detail):
MAY 12, 1913
ALF REEVES MANAGER
KARNO LONDON COMEDIANS
NIXON THEATRE, PHILADELPHIA
IS THERE A MAN NAMED CHAFFIN IN YOUR COMPANY OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT IF SO WILL HE COMMUNICATE WITH KESSEL AND BAUMANN 14 LONGACRE BUILDING BROADWAY NEW YORK.3
It was in response to this that Chaplin returned to New York for a day. He supposed that Kessel and Baumann must be lawyers, like most of the tenants of Longacre Building, and he speculated that perhaps his great-aunt, Mrs Wiggins, had died in New York and left him a fortune. Instead he was asked if he would consider signing up with the Keystone Company. From his letter to Sydney it is clear that Chaplin was told that he was to replace Fred Mace, the heavyweight star of the earliest Keystone comedies. Mack Sennett, in his autobiography, claimed that his reason for asking Chaplin to join his company was the ever-growing demands of Keystone’s other male star, Ford Sterling, and his fears that Sterling might at any time give in his notice. Sennett’s version has been generally accepted by subsequent historians, but Chaplin’s original understanding of the circumstances seems more likely. Tact, on the part of Kessel and Baumann, of course, would have made it more likely for Chaplin to be told that he was to replace a departing star than that he was required to stand by in case of the defection of a current leading player. But the date of the telegram is significant: Mace left Keystone at the end of April 1913; it would seem most likely that the company would be urgently seeking a successor a couple of weeks later. Moreover, Ford Sterling was only just coming into his own as the company’s leading star with the removal of competition from Mace and he was in fact to remain at Keystone for a further nine months, until February 1914.
Chaplin, tired of touring, was ready for a change. By July a contract was drawn up to engage Charles Chaplin of the City, County and State of New York ‘as a moving picture actor to enact roles in the moving picture productions of the party of the first part in its companies, and such other companies as the party of the first part may hereafter form, for a period of one year commencing November 1st 1913 (unless sooner terminated by either party as hereinafter provided), for a salary of One Hundred and Fifty Dollars weekly.’ A remarkably uncomplicated, two-page document, the contract was signed in New York by Adam and Charles Kessel, as President and Secretary respectively of the Keystone Film Company, witnessed by a notary public and despatched to Chaplin on tour. Chaplin, however, evidently refused to sign and a new version was drawn up, omitting the parenthetical phrase ‘(unless sooner terminated by either party as hereinafter provided)’ and the associated provision that the contract was terminable by two weeks’ written notice by either party. Chaplin, at this stage of his career, was not prepared to throw up security with Karno to run the risk of unforeseen unemployment within the year. The commencing date of the contract was changed to 16 December 1913.4
The signatures of the two Kessels were witnessed on 15 September 1913, and the revised contract was sent to Chaplin, who signed it in Portland, Oregon, on 25 September. Curiously, the contract makes no mention of the arrangement to raise Chaplin’s weekly salary by $25 at the end of three months. Since Chaplin was equally certain in 1913 and in 1964 that these were the terms (and his memory was near faultless in matters of business) this must have been the subject of a separate verbal agreement.
The origins and history of the Keystone Film Company have been fogged by the chronic mythomania of its presiding genius, the Canadian-Irish Mack Sennett, whose highly-coloured recollections were published long after the events they related. Among the few certain facts are that Sennett was born Michael Sinnott to Irish parents in Richmond, Quebec, on 17 January 1880. While working in an iron foundry in Northampton, Connecticut, the stagestruck youth obtained from the local attorney – Calvin Coolidge – an introduction to the famous comedienne, Marie Dressler, who was appearing in town. Miss Dressler, in turn, sent him to David Belasco, the most prominent actor-manager of the day, who suggested burlesque as his proper métier. Sennett, however, did not at once abandon ambitions to exploit his powerful baritone voice, and divided his time between touring burlesque and the chorus of musical comedy.
In 1908, like many another disappointed actor, Sennett was reduced to seeking work in ‘the galloping tintypes’, as movies were disparagingly styled. He claimed that it was on his twenty-eighth birthday, in January 1908, that he joined the Biograph Company at 11 East 14th Street, New York. With Irish luck, Sennett had chanced upon a time and place that were to prove historic. David Wark Griffith had arrived at Biograph a few months before, and was already embarked upon the period of prodigal creation which, in barely five years, was to explore and reveal the whole expressive possibilities of motion pictures, and to turn them into an art form.
Sennett was inquisitive, ambitious, imitative and ingenious. He studied Griffith’s work and determined to be a director himself. Soon he began to augment his income by writing scenarios. He recognized his natural bent for comedy, and he took note of the success of the anarchic, knockabout comedy films imported from France, where they were produced by the Pathé and Gaumont companies. In 1909 he played the leading role in a comedy directed by Griffith, The Curtain Pole. Humour was not Griffith’s strong point, yet here too he applied his innate gift for discovering first principles. The farce was slight: Sennett played a tipsy Frenchman whose efforts to carry home a curtain pole wreak havoc in the streets of an unoffending township. However, Griffith brought to the service of comedy all his discoveries of editing, suspense and timing.
In 1910, Sennett was appointed Biograph’s principal director of comic productions, and between March 1911 and July 1912 directed upwards of eighty one-reel comedies. Meanwhile, Adam Kessel and Charles Baumann were looking for a man to run their new West Coast comedy studio. Former bookmakers, Kessel and Baumann had built up the prospering New York Motion Picture Company as the parent company of the West Coast studios, 101 Bison Films, producing Thomas Ince’s westerns and historical spectacles, and Reliance, specializing in dramas. Kessel and Baumann now wanted to establish a comedy arm and Mack Sennett was the ideal candidate to run the Keystone Studio, established in the summer of 1912. (In later years his own highly coloured version of events would be that he conned Kessel and Baumann into going into partnership with him as a means of settling a $100 gambling debt.) By early September Sennett had moved into the former Bison Studios at 1712 Allessandro Street, Edendale, California (the Edendale Studios). He brought with him Fred Balshofer as manager; Mabel Normand, Fred Mace and Ford Sterling as his stars; and Henry Lehrman, who was to direct Keystone’s second unit while Sennett directed the first. All had worked together at Biograph. The first Keystone releases were announced for 23 September 1912, and by February 1913 the studio was maintaining a steady production of eight reels a month.
As producer and director, Sennett shared many of Fred Karno’s characteristics. He was a rough, tough, intelligent, uneducated man. He had an instinctive feeling for physical comedy. Because he was easily bored himself, he could tell what would keep the audience’s attention happily engaged, and what would not. He could maintain discipline in his troupe of high-spirited and unruly clowns. At Biograph he had mastered film craft, and he passed on his lessons. The Keystone cameramen were dextrous in following the free flight of the clowns, and the dynamism of ‘Keystone editing’, adapted from Griffith’s innovatory montage methods, soon became a byword.
1913 – Chaplin’s first film contract: the first draft (above) which he did not sign, and the second version (below) with his signature.
Keystone films derived from vaudeville, circus, comic strips, and at the same time from the realities of early twentieth-century America. It was a world of wide, dusty streets with one-storey clapboard houses, grocery and hardware stores, dentists’ surgeries and saloon bars; kitchens and parlours; the lobbies of cheap hotels; bedrooms with iron beds and rickety washstands; railroad tracks and angular automobiles that were just overtaking the horse and buggy; men in bowler hats and heavy whiskers; ladies in feathered hats and harem skirts; spoiled children and stray dogs. The stuff of comedy was wild caricature of the ordinary joys and terrors of daily life. At all events, the guiding principle at Keystone was to keep things moving, to leave no pause for breath or critical reflection. No excess of make-up or mugging was too great. In time, the original group of comedians who had come west with Sennett was augmented by the recruitment of Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle, cross-eyed Ben Turpin, gangling Charley Chase, the walrus-whiskered Chester Conklin and Billy Bevan, giant Mack Swain, Tom and Edgar Kennedy, Slim Summerville, Louise Fazenda, Polly Moran, Alice Davenport and others who could contribute acrobatic skill or outrageous characterization to the troupe. These were Chaplin’s future colleagues.
Charlie reached Los Angeles in early December 1913 and took a modest room at the Great Northern Hotel on Bunker Hill, close to the Empress Theatre, where he had played with the Karno troupe. His first meeting with his new boss was accidental. On his first night in Los Angeles, feeling lonely, he went to the Empress. There he ran into Sennett with Mabel Normand. Chaplin sensed Sennett’s misgivings on seeing how young he appeared without stage make-up. Karno had had the same reaction and received the same reassuring reply: ‘I can make up as old as you like.’
The following day (according to his own recollections) Chaplin set out for the studio. Edendale was a district of shanty buildings and lumber yards and the studio itself was a strange-looking place. An area 150 feet square was surrounded by a green board fence. At the centre stood the stage, overhung with white linen to diffuse the sunlight. An old bungalow housed the offices and the women’s dressing rooms; some converted agricultural buildings served as dressing rooms for the men. Chaplin arrived at lunchtime, was intimidated by the sight of the high-spirited actors surging out of the bungalow in quest of food, and fled back to his hotel. The same thing happened the next day; and only an anxious telephone call from Sennett got him beyond the gates at the third attempt.
Sennett explained to Chaplin the Keystone method. There was no scenario; ‘we get an idea, then follow the natural sequence of events until it leads up to a chase, which is the essence of our comedy’. This did not entirely reassure Chaplin, accustomed to the months of polishing that perfected the team work of a Karno sketch. His first weeks at Keystone were far from happy: sometimes he began to think that he had made a mistake, and he was certain that Sennett felt the same. He came to films a complete novice and had to master the basic notions: cutting, the shooting of scenes in discontinuity, the actor’s problem of staying within the camera’s range, the importance of sight lines, so that the direction of the actor’s gaze in one shot will convincingly link with the object of that gaze in another shot. He felt that his own subtle and carefully paced comedy was going to be lost here, since the tempo of all the films seemed to be matched to the leaping and mugging of Ford Sterling’s comedy. He was irked by enforced idleness as Sennett – perhaps intending him to watch and learn the techniques of film-making – did not use him in a film until the beginning of January 1914.
By this time, however, Chaplin already knew enough to doubt the competence of the director assigned to his first film. Henry Lehrman was born in Vienna in 1886 and had emigrated to the United States at the age of nineteen. He was working as a tram conductor when he first presented himself to D. W. Griffith at the Biograph Studios, claiming to have been a director with the Pathé Company in France. Griffith, no doubt seeing through the fraud, nicknamed him ‘Pathé’ and passed him on to Sennett.
Sennett, as we have seen, thought well enough of him to make him his second unit director when he opened his own studios. ‘Pathé’ Lehrman was to continue directing films until the mid-1930s, but he remained a mediocre man-of-all-work. History remembers him only as Chaplin’s first director, and as the chief prosecution witness in the trial that ruined Roscoe Arbuckle seven years later.
Chaplin’s first film, Making a Living, was one of Keystone’s more elaborate productions. It had a comparatively well-developed story line, and was shot partly on the stage, partly in the gardens of a nearby house, and partly in the street, on Glendale Avenue. Chaplin’s costume, make-up and character resembled Archibald Binks in The Wow-Wows and A Night in a London Club, with no hint as yet of the Charlie figure to come. He wore a grey top hat, check waistcoat, stiff collar, spotted cravat and monocle. Most surprising was the long, drooping moustache of a rather dejected stage villain. At the start of the film he established the fraudulence of his elegant pretensions by touching a passing friend (played by Lehrman) for a loan. The first characteristically Chaplin gag is where he disdainfully rejects the proffered coin as too mean, but then hastily grabs it before the friend can change his mind. In return for this favour, the Dude decides to steal his benefactor’s girl and sets to flirting with both the girl (Virginia Kirtley) and her mother (Alice Davenport) in the garden.
Lehrman plays a reporter, and most of the action is concerned with the Dude’s attempts to muscle in on the job and scoop him. It all ends with a chase, a contretemps in a lady’s bedroom (an almost indispensable incidental to Keystone films) and a grand finale on the cow-catcher of a moving train. The American critic Walter Kerr has pointed out that one small but striking gag established a permanent and productive pattern of Chaplin’s screen personality, the characteristic of ‘adjusting the rest of the universe to his merely reflexive needs’.5 The Dude is explaining his own merits to the newspaper editor, emphasizing his argument by banging him on the knee. When the editor withdraws his knee, the Dude pulls it back again so that he can continue his pummelling.
Chaplin hated the film. He was outraged when he saw the finished thing and discovered that in the cutting Lehrman had excised or mangled good gags which he had introduced. He was certain that Lehrman had deliberately tried to destroy his work out of pique because Chaplin had been too free with suggestions for comic business during the shooting. In fact there was nothing to be ashamed of for a first film. It is a rough little effort, but so were most of the Keystone products. True, we can see in it very little of the Karno comedian of whom, three years before, one critic had written: ‘Chaplin has been described, by some critics, as a genius. To say the least he carries the hallmarks of genius …’6 Nor was there much as yet – except these one or two little gags – to hint at the character he would ultimately create. But he emerges as a defined and dominant figure, already with a more consistent character, in his bland and airy malefactions, than was common in Keystone films. The trade press picked him out at once: ‘The clever player who takes the part of a sharper … is a comedian of the first water.’ If there is any truth in the legends passed on ever since that Sennett and his Keystone colleagues were convinced that the film and the new comedian were destined to flop, it can only be assumed that they were either startlingly unperceptive or had pitched their expectations on some miracle.
Despite the appearance of chaos at the Keystone Studios, the films were made to a production-line formula. There were four main kinds of production. The simplest and probably the cheapest were the ‘park’ films, always shot in Westlake Park, and using park benches, promenades, a refreshment stand and (for the inevitable aquatic finale) Echo Lake as the setting for improvised mix-ups between courting couples. Another variety of production also used locations: Sennett would take advantage of some public occasion – a military parade, speedway event or horse-race meeting – and send a unit to film the comedians fooling and playing out some impromptu farce, with the crowd and the spectacle of the event as free background. More formal films were shot in sets which seem to have stood more or less permanently on the stage. The quintessential Keystone set, which Chaplin himself was to use and elaborate during the next few years, consisted of a hallway with a room on either side. This arrangement would variously represent a domestic setting, with parlour (always to the left) and kitchen (to the right); a hotel, with rooms facing each other across the corridor, ideally placed for nocturnal mix-ups; neighbouring offices; or perhaps a doctor’s or dentist’s surgery and waiting room, with the indispensable hall between. Special settings might portray a restaurant, bar, hotel lobby, cinema or boxing booth; or the studio buildings might provide off-the-cuff sets. The fourth category of film, like Making a Living, combined location and studio sets.
Whatever the plan of the film, the director would restrict himself to no more than ten camera set-ups – a moving camera was practically unknown at Keystone at this time. So far as possible, all the material required in each set-up was filmed together: the ingenuity of a Keystone film lay in making, with as little waste as possible, a collection of shots which would join neatly together in the cutting room to make a coherent narrative. The usual number of shots for a one-reel film (which ran for a maximum of around fifteen minutes) was between fifty and sixty. (Sennett did not recognize the principle of retakes – material once shot had to be used.)
It is too simple to dismiss these Sennett farces, machine-made at the rate of two a week, as crude and primitive, appealing to a naive audience to whom all novelty was wondrous. Walter Kerr, distanced from them by seventy years and his own high sophistication, speculated:
Perhaps we might have laughed too in 1914. At least we would have felt excitement.
I say ‘perhaps’ we might have laughed, because I’m not entirely sure – though I’m certain we’d have felt the excitement. There is very little in the Sennett films, for all their breakneck pace and bizarre manhandling of the universe, that one would care to call humour under analytic examination. Normally it is possible to understand a joke that has faded, to recapture the principle that once provoked laughter while being unable to capture the laughter itself … Not so with Sennett for the most part. The jokes, as jokes, are rarely there … and all the activity is so headlong that there is scarcely time to pause for the ‘constructed’ quality of a jest … The films are successful agitations, successful explorations of elaborate visual possibilities; if laughter once accompanied them, it has to have been the laughter of breathlessness.7
It is true that to our unaccustomed vision, a Keystone comedy at first presents only a blurred impression of breakneck speed, running, jumping and wild gesticulation. If we take the trouble to view these films patiently, more than once, and try to adjust to their pace, much more emerges. First, the apparently senseless gesturing resolves itself into a quite deliberate and precise system of mime, not unlike that of classical ballet, and at certain moments as formal. One of the most striking instances appears in Mabel’s Married Life, when Mabel Normand, with a shrug of her shoulders, a gesture of pointing with her right index finger to the ring on her left hand, a quick and brilliant impersonation of the Chaplin waddle and an appeal to the camera with her big expressive eyes, asks us, ‘Why ever did I marry that man?’
A notable demonstration of this all but lost language is the fourth film which Chaplin made at Keystone, Between Showers. Henry Lehrman directed, and by this time Chaplin had adopted his definitive costume and was on the way to perfecting a screen character. At first sight it is one of the fastest, wildest, and most incomprehensible Keystones; but with effort it can be interpreted. The story progresses like a comic strip, resembling even more a scenario from the repertoire of the commedia dell’arte. There are five main characters: Charlie and Ford Sterling, rival mashers; a pretty but faithless girl (Emma Clifton); a policeman (Chester Conklin) and the policeman’s lady friend (Sadie Lampe). While the policeman is making love to his lady friend, Ford ‘borrows’ her umbrella, since it is raining and his own is broken. After the shower is over, he hands the umbrella to Emma for safe-keeping, while he goes to find a plank of wood to help her cross a large puddle. By the time he has returned, Emma has already found a new suitor to help her across the puddle and now refuses to hand back the umbrella. Charlie arrives on the scene and defends Emma from Ford’s wrath. Emma flounces off, leaving Charlie in firm possession of the umbrella. Ford goes off in search of assistance and returns with a policeman. Unfortunately the policeman turns out to be Chester, who recognizes the stolen umbrella. Too late Ford attempts to disown the umbrella. Chester hauls Ford off to jail, leaving a happy Charlie to thumb his nose at both of them.
It is a neatly turned little anecdote, but a modern spectator requires two or three viewings and conscious study of the mime to grasp the story. We have no means of knowing whether the audience of the day, by familiarity and enthusiasm, had developed more acute perceptions of the form than we are able to apply now. Were they able to see, instantly and at first viewing, beyond the initial impression of aimless running, jumping, assault and mugging? Was this why they found the Keystone pictures funnier than Walter Kerr could half a century later, and followed them with such enthusiasm?
The enigma ceases to be relevant with the arrival of Chaplin. In a film like Between Showers Chaplin still conforms more or less to the Keystone style, although already there are irrepressible touches of a different kind of character comedy, like his childlike pride in the eventual possession of the disputed umbrella. The traditional historical view of Chaplin’s innovations at Keystone is that, despite the doubt and resistance of Sennett and the Keystone comedians, he succeeded in slowing down the helter-skelter pace, and introduced new subtlety to the gag comedy. This is true so far as it goes, but the difference lay deeper. Keystone comedy was created from without; anecdote and situations were explained in pantomime and gesture. Chaplin’s comedy was created from within. What the audience saw in him was the expression of thoughts and feelings, and the comedy lay in the relation of those thoughts and feelings to the things that happened around him. The crucial point of Chaplin’s comedy was not the comic occurrence itself, but Charlie’s relationship and attitude to it. In the Keystone style, it was enough to bump into a tree to be funny. When Chaplin bumped into a tree, however, it was not the collision that was funny, but the fact that he raised his hat to the tree in a reflex gesture of apology. The essential difference between the Keystone style and Chaplin’s comedy is that one depends on exposition, the other on expression. While the expository style may rely upon such codes and recognizable conventions as the Keystone mime, the expressive style is instantly and universally understood; that was the essential factor in Chaplin’s almost instant and worldwide fame.
In his second film, Chaplin created the costume and make-up which were to become universally recognized. For many years it has been accepted that that second film, and the first appearance of Chaplin’s tramp character, was Kid’s Auto Races. It now seems much more likely that the film was Mabel’s Strange Predicament. In order of release, Kid’s Auto Races was certainly the first of the two and was issued on 7 February 1914. Mabel’s Strange Predicament came out two days later. Yet Chaplin clearly remembered that it was in Mabel’s Strange Predicament that he first wore the costume, and his memory on such details rarely failed him. Hans Koenekamp, who was cameraman on Mabel’s Strange Predicament, also remembered this as being the first appearance of the costume. The most likely answer is that Mabel’s Strange Predicament was shot first. Kid’s Auto Races was one of Sennett’s location films, said to have been filmed in forty-five minutes during a soap-box car rally, and consisted of no more than twenty shots. It could have been shot, cut, printed and slipped into the release schedule while the more elaborate film, Mabel’s Strange Predicament, was being assembled.
The tramp costume, which was to be little modified in its twenty-two-year career, was apparently created almost spontaneously, without fore-thought. The legend is that it was concocted one rainy afternoon in the communal male dressing room at Keystone, where Chaplin borrowed Fatty Arbuckle’s voluminous trousers, tiny Charles Avery’s jacket, Ford Sterling’s size fourteen shoes, worn on the wrong feet to keep them from falling off, a too-small derby (bowler) belonging to Arbuckle’s father-in-law, and a moustache intended for Mack Swain’s use, which Chaplin trimmed to toothbrush size. This neat and colourful version of the genesis of the tramp seems to have originated in the Keystone Studio, and was certainly never endorsed by Chaplin. In his autobiography, he states that he decided on the style of the costume ‘on the way to the wardrobe’. His idea was to create an ensemble of contrasts – tiny hat and huge shoes, baggy pants and pinched jacket.
It is easy enough to find precedents for the costume in the English music halls. Grotesquely ill-fitting clothes, tiny hats, distasteful moustaches and wigger-wagger canes were the necessary impedimenta of the comedian. Some of Dan Leno’s stage costumes hint at Chaplin’s; and Chaplin’s old Karno colleague, Fred Kitchen, used to complain gently that it was he who had first originated the costume and the splay-footed walk. Elements of the character had been predicted in Chaplin’s own stage career. His make-up in the single surviving photograph of Wal Pink’s sketch Repairs is recognizable; and there is said to have been much of the costume in his get-up as a rag-and-bone man in Karno’s London Suburbia.
Whatever its origins, the costume and make-up created that day in January 1914 were inspired. Chaplin recalled how the costume induced the character, so that ‘by the time I walked on to the stage he was fully born’.8 We know from the films that this was not strictly true; the character was to take a year or more to develop to its full dimensions and even then – this was its particular strength – it would continue to evolve during the rest of its career. It is a fair guess that the symbolic interpretations that Chaplin and his publicity staff gave to the individual elements of the tramp’s ensemble were the fruits of the hindsight of later years. From the first, though, certain traits were obvious: the derby, the cane, the bow-tie and close-trimmed moustache indicated brave but ineffectual pretensions to the dignity of the petit bourgeois.
The characteristic motions of the character had other origins. In 1916 Chaplin told an interviewer from McClure’s magazine that he had based his characteristic shuffling walk on that of an old man called ‘Rummy’ Binks, who used to hold the horses for coachmen outside Uncle Spencer Chaplin’s pub, the Queen’s Head, at the corner of Broad Street and Vauxhall Walk, Lambeth:
There was a cab stand near by and an old character they called ‘Rummy’ Binks was one of the landmarks. He had a bulbous nose, a crippled, rheumatic body, a swollen and distorted pair of feet, and the most extraordinary trousers I ever saw. He must have got them from a giant, and he was a little man.
When I saw Rummy shuffle his way across the pavement to hold a cabman’s horse for a penny tip, I was fascinated. The walk was so funny to me that I imitated it. When I showed my mother how Rummy walked, she begged me to stop because it was cruel to imitate a misfortune like that. But she pleaded while she had her apron stuffed into her mouth. Then she went into the pantry and giggled for ten minutes.
Day after day I cultivated that walk. It became an obsession. Whenever I pulled it, I was sure of a laugh. Now, no matter what else I may do that is amusing, I can never get away from the walk.
We have already seen that Will Murray took credit for Chaplin’s distinctive technique of rounding corners pivoting on one leg, with the other leg stuck out horizontally and revolving into the new direction of the run. According to Murray it had been developed for the grand chase in Dick Turpin. Billy Danvers, a fellow member of the Karno company, however, recalled that this mode of turning was in fairly general use in the company as an effective and laughable means of coping with the limited run permitted by small out-of-town stages.
Sennett took a hand in the direction of Mabel’s Strange Predicament, no doubt because it starred his girlfriend, Mabel Normand. Mabel was born Mabel Ethelreid Normand in Providence, Rhode Island, the youngest of the three surviving children of Claude G. Normand, a Frenchman who played the piano in pit orchestras in small theatres, and his Irish Catholic wife, Mary Drury. Accounts of her birth-date vary, but her family state that she was born on 9 November 1892. Her family, according to Sennett, ‘was temperamental, improvident, and often in transit’. He also recalled that though she had had little formal education, Mabel was a great reader and had acquired a particular aptitude for geography. She was also an athlete, a fine swimmer and had been taught by her father to play the piano.
In her early teens she took a job in the pattern-making department of the Butterick Company in Manhattan, but was soon finding regular work as a model for illustrators. Among the popular magazine artists of the time for whom she is said to have sat were Carl F. Kleinschmidt, Henry Hutt, Penrhyn Stanlaws, Charles Dana Gibson and James Montgomery Flagg. In 1910 another model, Alice Joyce, encouraged her to try her luck in the movies, and Mabel began to get small roles in Vitagraph pictures. Soon afterwards she was recruited by Biograph, where she met the aspiring young director Mack Sennett. When Sennett opened up the Keystone Studios he naturally chose her as his star.
Mabel was petite, beautiful, infectiously vivacious and exquisitely funny. Like Chaplin she was one of the rare artists who could establish a direct rapport between screen and spectator: more than half a century after her death her screen presence retains its immediacy and vitality. After Chaplin achieved fame, she became known as ‘the female Chaplin’, which underestimates the individuality of her own comedy style. Certainly in this year at Keystone Mabel was to provide Chaplin with a very worthy foil and partner. Although, after difficult beginnings, they were to become good friends, the partnership was confined to work. Mabel had exceptional charms, but at this time in her life they were exclusively reserved for Mack Sennett.
In 1984 there still survived a witness to Chaplin’s first scene in his tramp costume and character – perhaps, indeed, the most significant witness, since he was the cameraman who actually filmed it. Hans Koenekamp had arrived at Keystone in 1913 and stayed until 1918 or 1919; he retained the happiest memories of his days at the studio. He remembered Sennett as ‘the mastermind’ and Mabel as ‘the nicest person I ever met. She was great.’ He also recalled how the units would load all their equipment on to public streetcars to go on location in Westlake Park or elsewhere. ‘Finally we got transportation of our own.’ Half a dozen cameramen worked between the same number of units, turning out as many as three films a week. ‘Sometimes we’d go out into a park and shoot and by the end of the day we came back, we had the film.’ Working like this, it was often difficult to remember what films a cameraman had worked on and with whom. Even so, though he had forgotten the title, Hans Koenekamp remembered the film very clearly: ‘Can’t think of the title. Tried to remember it. I can still see the scene he’s in though. It was a hotel lobby, and he acted like a half drunk with that cockiness with his foot and the hat and the cane. I shot him.’9
Before shooting the scene Koenekamp had watched Chaplin come on the set:
I can still see the little shack where he came out the dressing room. He’d come out and he’d kind of rehearse himself – that walk, the cane, the hat and things like that, you know.
I can still see him when he came onto the set. He was supposed to be half drunk or something like that. He came into the lobby and tried to make eyes at women, and women ignored him and all that kind of stuff … I can remember that. Never forget that. So I really photographed the first scene he played in …
Did it look funny there and then? Yes, it did. Well it was, because it was fresh … And his movements too. Wiggle the mouth and that moustache would kinda work. And the cane flapping around, swinging on his arm … and going around on one leg like he was shaking.10
Mabel’s Strange Predicament revolved around a standard Keystone theme – bedroom mix-ups in a small hotel. Sennett introduced Chaplin in a sequence in the hotel lobby. He enters, mildly inebriated, becomes entangled with the leash of Mabel’s dog, takes some falls with a cuspidor (spittoon), and evinces a flirtatious interest in every passing female. The humour lies in the air of precarious dignity with which he carries off both his tipsiness and the evident imposture of his presence in the hotel, down-at-heel as he is. Chaplin recalled with satisfaction how the rest of the Keystone players and technicians gathered around to watch rehearsals for the scene, and reassured him with their laughter. In subsequent sequences Charlie encounters Mabel, who has locked herself out of her room, wearing only her nightgown, and gives lecherous chase through the hotel corridors. When, ultimately and inevitably, there is a confrontation between Mabel, her admirer, the gentleman under whose bed Mabel has somehow found herself and the man’s jealous wife, the bemused Charlie gets in the way of most of the blows. With this film, Chaplin achieved his first major triumph at Keystone. Sennett was so impressed with Chaplin’s business in the lobby scene, and the favourable reactions of the bystanders, that he overrode Lehrman’s objections and let it run on for the full minute of the take, without the usual busy Keystone-after-Griffith intercutting.
Mabel’s Strange Predicament was one of the company’s more elaborate productions. Kid’s Auto Races was the most elementary type of impromptu, shot in the course of a public event. The Kid Auto Races were held on a specially made track at the seaside resort of Venice. The competitors were boys in soap-box cars, which were laboriously pushed by the drivers and their team up a steep ramp erected at the beginning of the course. The run down this incline provided the momentum for the race. The film which Henry Lehrman shot against the background of the race and the crowds had only one joke: Lehrman is a film director; Chaplin is a nuisance who wants to get in the picture and constantly spoils the cameraman’s shots. Chaplin later said that it was his idea, and had been suggested by an incident he had witnessed when he was touring with the Karno Company in Jersey. During the filming of the carnival procession there a fussy local official kept pushing himself into the picture.
The well-known mannerisms of his persona are already recognizable. Twirling his cane, he knocks off his own hat or injures his ankle. He pertly tips his hat to an official he has annoyed. The principal quality of the character Chaplin creates here is infantilism. He is a mischievous child, grimacing at a car that almost runs him down and sticking out his tongue at Lehrman. A long-shot shows him running, leaping and skipping down the track in crazed abandon. The final shot of the film is a huge close-up of a frightful grimace. Yet, as Walter Kerr wrote with admirable perception:
He is elbowing his way into immortality, both as a ‘character’ in the film and as a professional comedian to be remembered. And he is doing it by calling attention to the camera as camera.
He would do this throughout his career, using the instrument as a means of establishing a direct and openly acknowledged relationship between himself and his audience. In fact he is, with this film, establishing himself as one among the audience, one among those who are astonished by this new mechanical marvel, one among those who would like to be photographed by it, and – he would make the most of the implication later – one among those who are invariably chased away. He looked at the camera and went through it, joining the rest of us. The seeds of his subsequent hold upon the public, the mysterious and almost inexplicable bond between the performer and everyman, were there.11
The film offers another extraordinary phenomenon. At the time it was shot, the Chaplin persona had still not appeared on the screen. The spectators at the races were therefore the first people anywhere to glimpse the figure that was to become universally famous. We can observe this first audience, as they progress from initial bewilderment and embarrassment at the antics of this obstreperous little vagabond to uninhibited laughter as they realize he is an entertainer. Kid’s Auto Races is thus incidentally a documentary record of the world’s first encounter with its greatest clown.
The skirmishes of the film director and the persistent camera hog were a comic echo of the behind-the-screen relationship of Lehrman and Chaplin. After one more film, Between Showers, Sennett recognized that the partnership was unprofitable and assigned Chaplin to another director, George Nichols, a veteran from the pioneering days, now approaching sixty. Chaplin seems to have got on no better with him: Nichols repulsed all the comedian’s suggestions with the cry ‘No time, no time!’ and complained to Sennett when Chaplin talked back. Sennett responded by supervising the films more closely himself. A Film Johnnie was an elementary affair, shot around the studio but, like Chaplin’s later films The Masquerader, His New Job and Behind the Screen, gives us evocative glimpses of life in the early Californian studios. Charlie goes to the cinema and falls for the star of the film. He therefore pursues her to the Keystone Studios, where he causes havoc among the productions. Fire breaks out and he is squirted by the fire brigade. In a crazy, funny little gag, he twists his ears and thereby gives the fireman a retaliatory squirt.
In His Favorite Pastime Chaplin plays the drunk again. He gets into a fight in a bar, follows a pretty young woman home, pays court to her black maid and ends up in a fracas with a jealous husband. Chaplin was able to introduce some virtuoso gags: the first of many contretemps with a swing door; and a memorable feat in which he somersaults from a balcony to land in a sitting position on a sofa, his cigar still lit. The film had a special significance in Chaplin’s personal life at the time. The girl is eighteen-year-old Peggy Pearce, Chaplin’s first recorded Hollywood love. Peggy was an impregnably virtuous girl and lived with her parents. Chaplin felt that he was not yet ready to contemplate marriage and the affair was not of long duration. There is a touching, tangible memento of it, though: more than sixty years later Carole Matthau found in a Hollywood antique shop a plated cup won by Chaplin and Peggy in a dance contest.
Cruel, Cruel Love gave Chaplin the opportunity for parody melodrama: as a spurned aristocratic suitor he swallows a glass of water under the impression that it is poison and in his supposed death throes has hallucinations of hell. The Star Boarder, the most charming of this group of films supervised by Sennett, was partly shot in gardens and orchards, and has the verve and simplicity of a comic strip. Charlie is the pet of the landlady (Minta Durfee), carrying on a flirtation under the nose of her husband (Edgar Kennedy), who has his own extra-marital interests. All this is enthusiastically recorded by their mischievous son, who possesses – just like the boy Chaplin in his Sherlock Holmes days – a box camera.
These four films occupied Chaplin throughout March and the beginning of April. During the same period Sennett took his male stars – Chaplin, Arbuckle, Sterling and Conklin – to a dance hall, where they improvised a knockabout film, Tango Tangles, on the theme of the rivalry of the first three over the hat-check girl (Minta Durfee). Except for Conklin, who put on Keystone Kop uniform, they are in their natty everyday clothes and without make-up. Sterling is the band leader, Arbuckle one of his musicians, and the handsome Chaplin a tipsy and smooth-shaven lounge lizard. The real patrons look on with unfeigned amusement and, to set the scene, the film opens with real demonstration dancers. Chaplin does an eccentric tango and in the fight scenes, menacingly twitching his protruded bottom, he looks forward to the pugilistic efforts of The Knockout, The Champion and City Lights.
Recognizing that Chaplin was getting on no better with Nichols than with Lehrman, and seeing that Chaplin and Mabel had struck up an amiable relationship, Sennett now made the mistake of assigning Mabel to direct the next film in which she and Chaplin were to co-star, Mabel at the Wheel. Chaplin from the start was not happy about taking direction from a girl several years younger than himself and with none of his stage experience. The happy working relationship evaporated rapidly as Mabel swept aside Chaplin’s suggestions just as Lehrman and Nichols had done.
During the previous few months Pearl White had established herself as the heroine of dramatic adventure films, and the week before Mabel at the Wheel was begun had appeared on American screens in the first episode of the most famous of all serial thrillers, The Perils of Pauline. Mabel at the Wheel was a take-off of the Pearl White style, with Mabel as a racing driver’s girlfriend who takes over her boyfriend’s car and wins the race when he is kidnapped by the villain. The villain, uncharacteristically, is Chaplin, dressed in a grey frock coat and silk hat, and with tufts of whisker on his chin in the style of Ford Sterling. He also has a magnificent new prop in the shape of a motorcycle; in the first scene of the film he uses it to compete with Harry McCoy, as the racing driver, for Mabel’s affections. Mabel unfortunately falls off the pillion into a puddle and there is a fine comic moment when Charlie feels behind him and finds her gone.
When Mabel, affronted by the incident with the puddle, abandons Charlie for Harry, Charlie and a couple of shady confederates kidnap Harry and lock him in a hut. They then attempt to sabotage Mabel, who has taken the car out herself. In one scene Charlie and his friends throw water on the track in front of Mabel’s car. The trouble between the co-stars came to a head when they were shooting this scene. Chaplin suggested a bit of business* to liven it up: he would step on the hose, peer into it to see why it had stopped, and then release his foot and soak himself. Perhaps Mabel was aware that this was, in historic fact, the oldest joke in the cinema: it was used by the Lumière Brothers (who had got it from a comic strip) in L’Arroseur Arrosé, which was included in their original 1896 programme. When Mabel brushed the suggestion aside, Chaplin refused to work and sat down on the roadside. Mabel, the pet of the studio, was bewildered by such antagonism and the men in the crew were ready to beat up Charlie for upsetting her. Chaplin himself had grown attached to Mabel but, as he recalled in a significant phrase, ‘this was my work’. Nothing in his life was ever to take prior place to that.
They packed up for the day (it was already after five) and returned to the studio. Sennett, acutely sensitive to any hurt to Mabel, with whom he was involved in a turbulent but enduring love affair, was furious. It was assumed on both sides that Chaplin’s days at Keystone were finished, contract or no contract. Chaplin was therefore surprised the following day to find both Sennett and Mabel conciliatory; later he discovered that Sennett had had orders from the east for more Chaplin films, since sales of the first were already booming. Chaplin agreed to finish Mabel at the Wheel under Sennett’s supervision, and took the opportunity to announce to Sennett that he was now ready and anxious to direct his own pictures. According to Chaplin Sennett was dubious, but accepted Chaplin’s guarantee of $1500 – the money he had saved since his arrival in California – in case the film proved unshowable.
There is some doubt which film should be regarded as Chaplin’s directorial debut. In his 1964 autobiography Chaplin said that it was Caught in the Rain. On 9 August 1914, however, he sent Sydney a list of the films in which he had appeared during his seven months at Keystone. On it he very deliberately marked as ‘My Own’ six films which he had already directed; these, in order of release, were Twenty Minutes of Love (released 20 April), Caught in the Rain (4 May), Mabel’s Married Life (20 June), Laughing Gas (9 July), The Property Man (1 August) and The Face on the Bar Room Floor (released 10 August – the day after he sent the list to Sydney).
From this time to the end of his year at Keystone, Chaplin directed all the films in which he appeared except the feature Tillie’s Punctured Romance, directed by Mack Sennett. It is notable that Chaplin does not include in the list of his own films three which existing filmographies record as collaborations with Mabel Normand: Caught in a Cabaret (27 April), Her Friend the Bandit (4 June) and Mabel’s Busy Day (13 June). On the other hand he does include the fourth of these supposed collaborations, Mabel’s Married Life (20 June). Her Friend the Bandit remains something of a mystery. No surviving print is known, and Chaplin does not include it in this first filmography.
Chaplin might understandably have forgotten fifty years later that he directed Twenty Minutes of Love, or have simply written it off as apprentice practice, since it is the first and one of the slightest of the ‘park’ films. Nevertheless there are developing traits of the later Charlie character. There is a sweetness about his mischief and flirtations, and a touch of the romantic.
There was no danger of Chaplin’s having to pay up the guarantee against the failure of Caught in the Rain. It proved one of the best and most successful Keystones up to that time. The film shows all the care of an apprentice’s demonstration piece. Chaplin had made good use of his months at Keystone. In particular he had studied the work of the cutting room and the jigsaw method of film construction that Sennett had inherited from Griffith. In addition, of course, he brought from Karno a highly developed skill in stagecraft. Already in his first film, the mise-en-scène of each shot excels, or at least equals, the best work of the Keystone directors. He appears particularly conscious of the shot-by-shot method of narrative and assembly. The one reel contains far more shots than the average Keystone production, and though Chaplin would never again revert to this Griffith style of rapid montage, the logic and fluidity of the narrative are admirable.
1914 – Chaplin’s first filmography, written by himself in August 1914.
The anecdote is absurd, but the telling is exemplary, and this remains one of the most accomplished films of Chaplin’s year at Keystone. The film has clarity, verve, a musical or balletic rhythm in the rapid cutting; it is still entertaining and amusing even today. Chaplin follows the ground rules of the studio, but he already displays a special mastery in telling a story through images. Titles are used only for extra laughs and as the action speeds up they are abandoned altogether. As his own director, he is able to place and pace his gags as he wants and to introduce virtuoso comedy turns. He had chosen excellent supporting comedians in Mack Swain, who after this first partnership was to remain a favourite foil for more than a decade, and Alice Davenport.
Chaplin’s next release, A Busy Day, has long been assumed to have been directed by him though he did not include it in the list of his films which he sent to Sydney in August 1914. Since it had been made only three months before, he clearly did not rate it very highly. Certainly it is one of Sennett’s throwaways – it is only half a reel in length – but it is a curiosity for all that. It is one of the films in which Sennett has taken advantage of a local event – in this case a military parade – to provide a spectacular background, and the comic action takes place around a bandstand and grandstand.
Chaplin, for the first of three times in his film career, is dressed as a woman. In The Masquerader and A Woman the plots would call for him to disguise himself as a seductive and fashionable lady. Here he goes through the whole film as an angry little working-class termagant – almost a pantomime dame as she lays about her with her brolly, blows her nose very rudely on her skirt, and gives a preparatory hitch of her clothing and a wild leap in the air before setting off in pursuit of some victim. She and her husband Mack are spectators at the parade. Mack wanders off in the train of a prettier woman. The wife gives chase, on the way battling with several policemen, and getting in the way of a film cameraman, much as Charlie did in Kid’s Auto Races. After various skirmishes, Mack very sensibly shoves the creature into the harbour, where she sinks in a flurry of bubbles. Apart from Chaplin’s unwonted disguise, the film is curious for its technique. Whether Chaplin himself directed it or not, it has the look of a study exercise in shot continuity. Again and again the same effect of someone being thrown out of one shot and landing in another shot is repeated, as for example:
8 Director throws wife off screen left.
9 Rear of bandstand. Wife is thrown into screen from right, and knocks over a policeman. The policeman throws her back off screen right.
10 As 8. Wife is thrown in from screen left. She picks herself up and starts to pose in front of movie camera. The director again throws her off screen left.
11 Rear of bandstand. Wife is thrown in, screen right, and lands on bandstand.
Fifty years later Chaplin regarded it as a serious shortcoming in old George Nichols that the only movie trick he knew was this one of throwing people out of one shot and into another. Still, for a comedy director, the effects that could be produced by the artful juxtaposition of shots were a useful lesson to learn. In The Knockout, directed by Charles Avery, Chaplin played a two-minute supporting role as referee to a boxing bout between Roscoe Arbuckle and Edgar Kennedy. It is a lively little performance that anticipates The Champion and City Lights. Chaplin’s refereeing is balletic, and introduces gags of a sophistication alien to the rest of the film. Worse hit than the pugilists, he lies down and drags himself around the ring by the ropes; then counts the loser out from a sitting position.
Chaplin’s name was by this time already a sufficient draw for Keystone to advertise The Knockout as a Chaplin film. It is no longer clear whether he was deliberately added to the cast for his box-office value, or whether it was just part of the Keystone method of using any talent available at any time. More than fifty years later Chaplin told an interviewer that he had actually played bit roles as a Kop in Keystone films, though so far none of these appearances has been identified.
If we accept Chaplin’s listing of his films in the letter to Sydney, we can discount Mabel’s Busy Day, a rough and rowdy little piece that matches material shot at a racetrack with studio shots, and which has generally been credited as a collaboration between Chaplin and Mabel. The film provides evidence of the growth of Chaplin’s popularity. In Kid’s Auto Races the ordinary public at the sporting event show comparatively mild interest in the proceedings of the film unit. In Mabel’s Busy Day the crowds in the background are huge, and have to be roped off from the performers. Clearly with Chaplin on hand the Sennett unit did not need to borrow the audience assembled for the sports event. Chaplin’s very presence attracted all the voluntary extras required to provide a spectacular background.
In the succeeding six months Chaplin directed sixteen films, four of them two-reelers, each running for half an hour. They are uneven; some are throwaways, some are sketches of ideas he will later elaborate and refine; but the speed with which he masters his craft is astounding.
Mabel’s Married Life is as expert as Caught in the Rain, but with less tension in the cutting and more leisure for gags and character touches. Partly filmed in a park and partly on sets, the picture is concerned with the irritation inflicted by Mack, a hefty Don Juan, who taunts Charlie and pursues Charlie’s wife Mabel. Mabel buys a punch-dummy to get Charlie into condition. Returning home drunk, Charlie takes it for his rival and fights it. The film contains much character comedy: Charlie’s look of ineffable disapproval rudely cut short when the spring doors of the saloon knock him down; the expertise with which he sizes up Mack’s ample bottom before belabouring it with boot and cane; his panic when faced with an unexplained odour.
His next three films harked back in different ways to vaudeville. Dentists were a rich source for music hall jokes, and Laughing Gas explores the comic possibilities when the dentist’s assistant takes the place of his absent boss. In The Property Man he is a props man in a vaudeville theatre peopled by grotesque and unreasonably temperamental artists. Contemporary critics were shocked by the cruelty of the props man’s treatment of his aged and decrepit assistant, and shocked by the nursery rudeness of a scene in which, having concealed a glass of beer down the front of his trousers, he inadvisedly bends over. With a quick appeal with his eyes for the audience’s understanding, he gingerly shakes the water down his leg. The Face on the Bar Room Floor is a parody in the Casey’s Circus vein, and technically the least interesting of Chaplin’s films – for the most part simply alternating lengthy titles with tableaux in comic illustration of a then popular ballad of love betrayed, penned by a certain Hugh Antoine d’Arcy. This and the two films that followed look like marking time. Recreation is a fast-improvised ‘park’ film. The Masquerader is simple knockabout set in a film studio, mainly notable for its behind-the-screen glimpses of the Keystone lot and for Chaplin’s second female impersonation.
In his last three months at Keystone, Chaplin directed ten films which alternated improvisations of this sort (His New Profession, Those Love Pangs, Gentlemen of Nerve, Getting Acquainted) with more elaborately staged films which look like sketches for films to come. The Rounders, in which he is teamed with Roscoe Arbuckle, looks back over Chaplin’s whole gallery of inebriates from Karno to Keystone, and forward to A Night Out and ultimately to the tramp’s nights on the town with the millionaire in City Lights. The New Janitor is the prototype for The Bank. Only seventeen days separated the releases of The Rounders and The New Janitor, yet in that short space of time, Chaplin’s art seemed to take a massive leap forward both in approach to film narrative and in appreciation of the character that was developing within the tramp make-up and costume. The film conforms to the basic Keystone rules, using only eight static camera set-ups, yet out of his material Chaplin fashions a brilliant little narrative – clear, precise, with drama, suspense and an element of sentiment that goes deeper than the flirtations of Westlake Park. The animated strip cartoon of Caught in the Rain has developed into comic drama. The editing creates a real dynamism in the Griffith manner rather than simply providing a step-by-step progression of narrative incidents. Gags and character touches are developed without the Keystone rush, and integrated into the story. Chaplin reveals his gift for observing behaviour: the secretary’s brief, loving look at the manager’s straw boater hanging in the hall intimates a whole past relationship (see Appendix V)
Chaplin’s ambition led him to overspend his $1000 budget for Dough and Dynamite. A worried Sennett withheld the $25 due to Chaplin as his director’s fee and decided that the only way to retrieve the loss was to release the film as a two-reeler. His anxiety was unfounded: it proved one of the most profitable of all Keystone pictures. The story is simple: Charlie and Chester are waiters in a teashop who take over the bakery when the bakers go on strike. The dastardly strikers secrete dynamite in a loaf before it goes into the oven, thus blowing up the place. The story is mostly an excuse for variations on the fun to be had from sticky dough and clouds of flour, but the film shows Chaplin developing new sophistication in his deployment of studio sets and restricted camera set-ups.
Chaplin at this time had not committed himself to a fixed method of film-making. His technique in His Musical Career, an attractive film which provided the model for Laurel and Hardy’s The Music Box sixteen years later, is in marked stylistic contrast to Dough and Dynamite. The single reel consists of a mere twenty-seven shots; sometimes Chaplin and other Keystone directors might use as many as ninety shots in a film of the same length. Here, as Buster Keaton was later to do, Chaplin bypassed the current fashion in editing, recognizing that each shot needed to be a stage for his own extended comedy routines. He implicitly declared that cutting was not an obligation but a convenience.
The last film which Chaplin directed and played in at Keystone was His Prehistoric Past, released on 7 December 1914. The discovery of the so-called Piltdown Man in 1912 and some Neanderthal bits and pieces around the same time had aroused intense popular interest in mankind’s ancient ancestors, and the subject was taken up by every popular cartoonist and not a few film comedians. Chaplin’s film, recalling Jimmy the Fearless, is cast in the form of a dream. Charlie falls asleep on a park bench and dreams that he is Weakchin, a caveman. Weakchin runs into trouble when he starts up a flirtation with the favourite of the harem of King Lowbrow (Mack Swain). When the king finally catches up with him, he is forcibly struck on the head with a large rock – and wakes up again on the park bench where a policeman is roughly shaking him.
Tillie’s Punctured Romance, which was released a week later, was the last film in which Chaplin would appear under the direction of anyone else (if we exclude two or three brief guest appearances in the 1920s). It was also the first and only time in his film career that he played a supporting role to another star. Perhaps these factors explain his laconic dismissal of the film in his autobiography, even though it was his first feature picture and a landmark in establishing him with the public. ‘It was pleasant working with Marie [Dressler] but I do not think the picture had much merit. I was more than happy to get back to directing myself.’
The film was the first feature-length comedy. Before it no comic film made anywhere in the world had exceeded one third of its length of six reels (ninety minutes’ running time). Sennett may have been stirred to this ambitious venture by a spirit of rivalry: his partner in Triangle Film Corporation, D. W. Griffith, was at the time embarking on his epic The Birth of a Nation. Sennett’s project was also undertaken under the influence of the current ‘famous players in famous plays’ policy of bringing stars and properties from the New York stage. It was natural enough that in looking for a theatrical success to film, Sennett should turn to Tillie’s Nightmare. Written in 1910, the comedy had a long and triumphant run on Broadway and confirmed its star, Marie Dressler, as America’s greatest comic personality in the days before the First World War. Moreover, Sennett may have felt a personal attachment to Dressler, remembering her counsel, discouraging though it may have been, in his own early days.
In fact, Sennett may originally have intended to devise a new vehicle for Miss Dressler. His unreliable memoirs mention that his writers spent some weeks struggling with a scenario, with Marie on the payroll at $2500 a week, before they decided to go ahead and film Tillie’s Nightmare with a new title. After this, he recalled, the work went swiftly, although the fourteen-week production period was unprecedented at the studio.
It was natural enough, as box-office insurance, to use the studio’s two top stars, Chaplin and Mabel, to support Marie Dressler. Already there was a vast, international film audience quite unfamiliar with even the greatest luminaries of Broadway. Marie offered a rather different (and patently mistaken) view of things in her own memoirs: ‘I went up on the lot and looked around until I found Charlie Chaplin, who was then unknown. I picked him out and also Mabel Normand … I think the public will agree that I am a good picker for it was the first real chance Charlie Chaplin ever had.’ Marie was clearly not a film-goer. Even so, the enormous success of the picture did make it a landmark in Chaplin’s career. It was released on 14 December 1914 to a favourable press and ecstatic public acclaim. It was constantly revived and still turns up from time to time in cinemas in truncated, doctored and sound-synchronized versions.
Parts of the film betray its stage origin – the characters mouth conversations and soliloquies – but when the story gets underway, and particularly in the final chase, Sennett’s direction exploits the vulgar, earthy knockabout with assurance. From the stage text, too, the film acquires some narrative and character strength: behind the slapstick and extravagant farce, there is a realistic and quite affecting theme of a stupid, good-natured country girl duped by a ne’er-do-well sharper. Dressler’s warm personality wins through even though Chaplin’s and Normand’s screen experience gives them an undoubted advantage. At moments Chaplin’s characterization of the deft, funny, heartless adventurer anticipates Monsieur Verdoux – even though the suave Verdoux could never insult the footmen and an effeminate guest at a party as does the character in Tillie’s Punctured Romance.
From the time he began to direct until his departure from Keystone, there is practically no record of Chaplin’s private life. The reason is that he had virtually no life outside his work. He was fascinated by the new medium and absorbed in the task of mastering it. ‘This was my work’ indeed. Throughout his career the pattern was to be repeated: committed to a job of work, a film, the private Charlie all but disappeared.
A modest private life was not entirely strange in Hollywood at that time. Publicists were already helping to promote, for the delight of avid fans, stories of the gaiety and high living of the movie world, but life in Hollywood must, a lot of the time, have been more sedate than the legend. At Keystone, as at every other successful studio, the film people worked long hours and six days a week: time for play was limited. We know of Chaplin’s Sunday calls on Peggy Pearce. Once, he remembered, when he and Mabel were on their way to a charity appearance, he kissed her, but nothing came of it: Mabel told him they were not each other’s type. In any case, both had their loyalties to Sennett. Chaplin and Sennett undoubtedly grew fond of each other. Chaplin recalled that Sennett practically adopted him and that they ate together every night.
Certainly during his first months at Keystone Chaplin’s growing gregariousness surprised even himself. It would indeed have been hard to resist the evident high spirits and good nature of the Keystone people. Hans Koenekamp remembers how ‘whole bunch of ’em, actors as well, would pitch in if they had to build the set or something’. Chaplin shared the general habit of dropping into the Alexandria Bar on the way back to his hotel and enjoyed going with the rest to see fights.
Later in the year, though, concentration on the work must have taken over. As in the Karno Company, some of his colleagues saw his abstractedness as a sign that he was unsociable and standoffish. Even Hans Koenekamp felt that towards the end of his Keystone time ‘he got to be a big shot. And he was a bit off-colour in politics.’ Suspicion of Chaplin’s libertarian instincts began this early, it seems.
Chaplin continued to live in a hotel and his thrift was marked. His only notable expenditure was when he signed an agreement on 10 February with the English Motor Car Company for the hire, for five months, of a 1912 Kissell Kar Roadster. This cost him $300 down and $100 per month.
Neither Sennett, nor the Keystone executives, nor Chaplin himself can have anticipated the effect of the first releases upon the public. We can only look back at the first few Keystone films and see a crude, unfinished form, and the earliest tentative search for a screen character. To the audiences of the time they were new and astonishing. From the very start, Chaplin had created a new relationship with the audience, provoking a response that no one had elicited before in films or in any other medium.
In Britain, the first Chaplin films were released in June 1914. Having already observed the phenomenon in America, the Keystone Company advertised:
ARE YOU PREPARED FOR THE CHAPLIN BOOM?
There has never been so instantaneous a hit as that of Chas Chaplin, the famous Karno comedian in Keystone Comedies. Most first-rank exhibitors have booked every film in which he appears, and after the first releases there is certain to be a big rush for copies.
The first seven films were shown to the trade press and on 25 June Keystone proudly reprinted their reviews. Kine Weekly reported:
We have seen seven Chaplin releases, and every one has been a triumph for the one-time hero of ‘Mumming Birds’ who has leapt into the front rank of film comedians at a bound.
The Cinema’s opinion was just as favourable:
Kid’s Auto Races struck us as about the funniest film we have seen. When we subsequently saw Chaplin in more ambitious subjects our opinion that the Keystone Company has made the capture of their career was strengthened. Chaplin is a born screen comedian; he does things we have never seen done on the screen before.
Both Sennett and Chaplin were aware of Chaplin’s fast-growing value. Chaplin recalled that it was around the time of the outbreak of war in Europe that he and Sennett discussed the renewal of their contract. Chaplin announced that he would require $1000 a week for a further year, at which Sennett protested that that was more than he earned himself. Chaplin reminded him that it was not for Sennett’s name that the public lined up outside cinemas, but for his. Sennett countered by pointing out that Ford Sterling was already regretting his decision to leave Keystone, to which Chaplin in turn replied that all he needed to make a comedy was a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.
Sennett apparently sought the advice of Kessel and Baumann, and came back with a counter-offer to Chaplin’s demand for $1000 a week. He offered a three-year contract, at $500 a week for the first year, $750 for the second and $1500 for the third, the contract to become operative immediately. Chaplin said that he would agree if the terms were reversed – $1500 for the first year, $750 for the second and $500 for the third. Evidently baffled by Chaplin’s economics, Sennett let the matter drop.
It was clear to Chaplin that the time had come to move on. On Sunday, 9 August 1914 – five days after the outbreak of the First World War in Europe and presumably immediately after his conversation with Sennett – he sat down to write one of his very rare letters to Sydney in London:
Los Angeles Athletic Club,
Los Angeles, Calif.
Sunday Aug 9thMy Dear Sid,
You are doubtless realising who is addressing you. Yes. It really is your brother Chas. after all these years, but you must forgive me. The whole of my time is taken up with the movies. I write, direct, and play in them and believe me it keeps you busy. Well, Sid, I have made good. All the theatres feature my name in big letters i.e. ‘Chas Chaplin hear today’. I tell you in this country I am a big box office attraction. All the managers tell me that I have 50 letters a week from men and women from all parts of the world. It is wonderfull how popular I am in such a short time and next year I hope to make a bunch of dough. I have had all kinds of offers at 500 a week with 40% stock which would mean a salary of or about 1000 a week. Mr Marcus Lowe [sic],12 the big theatre man over hear, has made me a proposition which is a certainty and wants me to form a comedy company and give me either a salary per week or 50% stock. This is a sure thing, any way, the whole matter is in the hands of my Lawyers, of course I shall finish out my contract with the Keyst. people, and if they come through with something better I shall stay where I am. This Marcus Lowe business is a sure I have a guarantee sale at all his theaters and then sell to the outside people. Anyway, I will let you know all about it in my next letter. He will finance the whole thing if it comes through it means thoullions to us. Mr Sennett is in New York. He said he would write to you and make you an offer. I told him you would do great for pictures of course he has not seen you and he is only going by what I say. He said he would give you 150 to start with. I told him you are getting that now and would not think of coming over hear for that amount. If you do consider it, don’t sign for any length of time, because I will want you with me when I start. I could get you 250 as easy as anything but of course you would have to sign a contract. It will be nice for you to come over for three months with the Keystone and then start for ourselves. You will hear from Sennet [sic] but don’t come for less than 175 understand? You will like it out hear it is a beautiful country and the fresh air is doing me the world of good. I have made a heap of good friends hear and go to all the partys ect. I stay at the best Club in the city where all the millionairs belong in fact I have a good sane, wholsome time. I am living well. I have my own valet, some class to me eh what? I am still saving my money and since I have been hear I have 4000 dollars in one bank, 1200 in another, 1500 in London not so bad 25 and still going strong thank God. Sid, we will be millionaires before long. My health is better than it ever was and I am getting fatter. Well you must tell me how Mother is and don’t forget to write me before you sign any contract because there is another firm who will pay you 250. They wanted me and I told them about you, as I could not break my contract of course. Mr Sennett is a lovely man and we are great pals but business is business. Of course he does not know I am leaving or that I have had these offeres, so don’t say anything in case it gets back hear, you never know. I would not like to heart Sennet feelings he thinks the world of me. Now about that money for mother do you think it is safe for me to send you it while the war is on, or do you think it better for you to pay my share and then we will arrainge things later on. So long as I know the money will get there I will send it. Anyway tell me in your next letter what to do. I hope they don’t make you fight over there. This war is terrible. Well that about all the important news. I have just finished a six real picture with Marie Dressler the American star and myself. It cost 50,000 to put [?] and I have hog the whole picture. It is the best thing I ever did. I must draw to a close now as I am getting hungry. Just this second my valet tells me I have friends to take me out Automobiling so am going to the beach to dine. Good night Sid, Love to Minnie
Your loving brother
Charlie13