Reviews and notes

TILLIE'S PUNCTURED ROMANCE (USA 1914)

Director: Mack Sennett
Producer: Mack Sennett for Keystone
Screenplay: Hampton Del Roth,
  from the play Tillie's Nightmare
  by Edgar Smith
Cinematography: Hans F. Koenekamp, Frank D. Williams

Cast:
Marie Dressler (Tillie Banks, Country Girl)
Charles Chaplin (Charlie, City Slicker)
Mabel Normand (Mabel, Charlie's Girl Friend)
Mack Swain (John Banks - Tillie's Father)
Charles Bennett (Douglas Banks - Tillie's Uncle)
Chester Conklin (Guest)

Tillies's Punctured Romance is still vital comedy, perhaps too vital. It is funny although much of its basic appeal may be to folks who enjoy cockfights and mud-wrestling. It is arse-kicking brought to apotheosis, and Marie Dressler's stock in trade seems to be falling down, which she does unceasingly and with little provocation throughout. She is barely up before she is down again, flailing wildly about. One gets the idea she enjoys falling down.

Described in print, this may all seem like farcical overkill, but in the viewing, Tillie's Punctured Romance does hold up, for two reasons. First, Miss Dressler's abounding energy and volcanic mugging take one along with them. She is too energetic and changeable to get tired of: she will not let you ignore her. Then there is as always Chaplin's urbane dexterity, amusing and baffling in equal measure. One wonders how any human can so smoothly and so quickly become someone so smooth and quick.

The rude charm of Tillie's Punctured Romance can serve as an extended epigraph for Chaplin's work for Keystone. The film's strenuous and cheery physicality was Sennett. At Keystone, Chaplin was manifestly much better than his material, yet he never stepped beyond its framework, fittingly. He proved to himself that he could hold his own with any comedian or comic situation and that he could play en ensemble...

As to his great comedy creation, Charlie the tramp, the Keystone Charlie was frenetic of personality, at times charming but often downright nasty, and rarely in repose. Since strife in one form or another is farce's framework, Charlie's basic situation in these films is the getting is and out of trouble. Much trouble. The gentleman tramp, Charlie's permanent screen character - the suave, compassionate, wry savager of pretentiousness - was not yet born. But he had been conceived.
- John McCabe, Charlie Chaplin, Doubleday & Company, New York, 1978



THE TRAMP (USA 1915)

Director: Charles Chaplin
Producer: Jess Robbins for Essanay
Screenplay: Charles Chaplin
Cinematography: Roland Totheroh, Harry Ensign

Cast:
Charles Chaplin (Tramp)
Edna Purviance (Farmer's Daughter)
Ernest Van Pelt (Farmer)
Paddy McGuire (Farmhand)
Lloyd Bacon (Edna's Fiancé)
Leo White (First Thief)


Chaplin came into his own in The Tramp, his first masterpiece, the film in which the quintessential gentleman tramp - the character Chaplin frequently called The Little Fellow - emerged... In all his other films his character had a variety of gainful occupations or was at least solvent. It should be noted that in Chaplin's native land a tramp is not so disdainfully regarded as in the United States, which may be a factor in the sympathy quotient Chaplin extends to his character. In the United States the word "tramp" connotes a seedy vagrant, unwashed, eternally on the beg. Not so much in England where the name derives from the English phrase, "on the tramp." A tramp the Oxford English Dictionary identifies as "one who travels from place to place on foot, in search of employment, or as a vagrant; also, one who follows an itinerant business."

In The Tramp, Charlie saves Edna from a gang of crooks, shooing them into a lake, and is rewarded with a job on her father's farm. As a hired hand, he is a resounding failure, accidentally dropping a sack of flour on the farmer, puncturing another worker with a pitchfork, and trying to milk a cow by pumping her tail. The crooks assault the farmhouse, mounting a ladder to a window where appears Charlie with a club and the farmer with a shotgun. Charlie pursues them, is wounded in the leg, and is celebrated as a local hero. Edna admires him but when her fiance appears it is clear Charlie can do only one thing - walk away gallantly, and - because he is the new Charlie - with at least a show of gaiety tingeing the melancholy. So comes into existence the archetypal Chaplin exit.

His few possessions are in a bandanna, his shoulders droop in despair - when suddenly he whips his cane elegantly, gives a joyous little hop as he walks down the street to what he - and we - feel must be a better tomorrow. That syrupy statement becomes so only perhaps in retrospect. It is precisely the emotion Chaplin wants us to feel, and in 1915 that emotion prevailed. It still does for most of us.
- John McCabe, Charlie Chaplin, Doubleday & Company, New York, 1978



THE ADVENTURER (USA 1917)

Director: Charles Chaplin
Producer: Charles Chaplin for Mutual
Screenplay: Charles Chaplin
Cinematography: Roland Totheroh, William C Foster
Editor: Charles Chaplin

Cast:
Charles Chaplin (The Convict)
Edna Purviance (The Girl)
Eric Campbell (The Suitor)
Henry Bergman (The Father)
Albert Austin (The Butler)


The Adventurer, Chaplin's last film for Mutual, is a very high-class Sennett film, if one can imagine such a thing. And Sennett turned inside out somewhat because it begins with a chase. Filmed in the wild and beautiful Los Flores Canyon in the Santa Monica hills, the chase is an exuberance of escaped convict Charlie outwitting some admittedly not very full-witted guards, swimming out to sea where he rescues two ladies from drowning, inevitably Edna and her mother. Under the impression he is wealthy (he is wearing a yachtsman's stolen swimming suit), they invite him to their posh home to recuperate.

Waking the next morning, Charlie finds himself in striped pajamas and for a horrified moment thinks he is back in prison. The brass bars of his bed seem to confirm this but the entrance of an obsequious servant recalls him to his pleasant new situation. That evening at an elaborate dinner Edna's truculent suitor - who could it be but Eric Campbell? - is much distressed at the favor Charlie is finding in Edna's eyes. In a stroke of luck Eric finds a newspaper containing Charlie's photograph in convict suit under the legend "WANTED." Eric tells Edna's father, and Charlie, seeing the newspaper meanwhile, deftly alters the photograph by penciling in Eric's heavily hirsute features.

Edna's father has called the prison guards, who chase Charlie in and through the house, up and down stairs, until the great moment - the finest moment in the film - when the guards quickly scuttle by Charlie after he has placed a lampshade on his head and stands rigidly as a piece of furniture impervious to their gaze. Eric is in the chase too until he gets his neck securely caught between sliding doors by Charlie. Charlie jumps over a balcony to escape but he cannot resist kissing Edna's hand and apologizing. A guard seizes him and Charlie quick-wittedly introduces the man formally to Edna. Who could resist shaking the hand of this lovely lady? As the guard does, he lets his grip on Charlie falter. Charlie leaps away and off, down toward his freedom road.
- John McCabe, Charlie Chaplin, Doubleday & Company, New York, 1978

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