Chaplin At Keystone Review

• 10th Dec 2010

The box set, ‘Chaplin at Keystone’ is not for anyone searching for an introduction to Chaplin. For that I would recommend The Circus (1928), City Lights (1931) or Modern Times (1936). Instead this is an important document for any serious film historian or those with a specialist interest in either Chaplin or early silent cinema and indeed it demonstrates a breakthrough not only for Chaplin, but for the development of Hollywood and American cinema. What is presented on these four discs represents the first year of Chaplin’s Hollywood career from when he left the Fred Karno Company and his vaudeville/music hall roots, his very first appearance on the silver screen, through to his creation of his little tramp character and the first thirty-five films, at the Keystone Studios, thirty-four of which are presented here (the only film not shown is the still lost, ‘Her Friend the Bandit’). The release of this box set is the result of a long laboured project between Lobster Films in Paris, the BFI National Archive in London (who released the collection here in the UK) and Cineteca Bologna/L’immagine Ritrovata with the support of UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and is a must for anyone interested in the development of cinema. The restoration of all the films is good considering the age of the source material and involved many years of painstaking work, but it is interesting to see the difference in quality of many of them. Each short is preceded by a brief description of the painstaking work that went into their reconstruction with an accompanying booklet with an essay by Jeffrey Vance and a brief description of each titles facts and credits. Throughout the films there is virtually no dialogue intertitles, although where there are titles they are beautifully and lovingly restored.

Chaplin, born near present day Elephant and Castle in London was the son of a poor family who worked in the Victorian music hall. Eventually he joined the Fred Karno Company and went to America in 1910 with Karno’s touring company. Chaplin was headhunted by the studio after he was spotted on the stage by Mack Sennett, the pioneer of the Hollywood comedy – the man who would make for laughs car chases, pratfalls and custard pie fights. Keystone Studios were founded in 1912 at a time when Hollywood was behind its European rivals; indeed the first real screen comedy superstar was Max Linder in France. This dominance was ended with the First World War when Hollywood stepped out of the shadows. Keystone Studios would make several one and two reel comedies a week and the evidence of its prolific output is evident on these discs from Chaplin shooting his first short for the studio in January 1914 and his last in December of that year, including his first feature length film, Tillie’s Punctured Romance (included on the disc).

Among the extras on the disc there is a fragment of Chaplin’s first ever role committed to the screen as a Keystone Cop in the long thought missing ‘The Thief Catcher’, the 36th Keystone Cop feature we are reliably informed; only a fragment of this film survives with Chaplin as one of the Keystone Cops. In the first film on disc 1, ‘Making a Living’, some of those Chaplin expressions and idiosyncrasies we are so familiar with are much in evidence from his usual persona as the tramp, although here he is playing a rather caddish rich gentleman pursuing a lady suitor with just a few glimpses of Chaplin’s later genius, although the melodramatic nature of this short has not aged well. But it is clear how his music hall background and his clownish movements would morph into the little tramp character for which he is universally famous.

But it is in the second film, ‘Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal.’ where we see the emergence of the tramp character for the first time that Chaplin would make most famous. And what a piece of cinema history this is. There is the impression that Chaplin is merely trying out his new character. Little happens in the short as Charlie just gets in the way of the cameramen and officials film at the motor race taking place in the background on Venice Beach. This is followed by ‘Mabel’s Strange Predicament’ in which we are introduced to another of the Keystone Studios main stars, Mabel Normand who would also write and direct many of the Keystone/Mack Sennett comedies in which Charlie again appears as the tramp, albeit a rather uncharacteristically drunk one this time (he would later reject drunken behaviour from the character) to help an embarrassed Mabel who has been locked out of her hotel room in her pyjamas with her dog.

In two films: ‘The Film Johnnie’ and Tillie’s Punctured Romance, Charlie is seen at the cinema reacting to the films showing at a movie theatre and is reacting in a manner that cinemagoers may have reacted at the time, in that he is becoming immersed in the morals taking place on the screen with comic effect, while many these cinephiles would travel to Hollywood to pursue the dream of being famous. However, throughout all these films were don’t only see Chaplin as the little tramp, but in a variety of guises, yet the characteristics of this creation are ever present, such as in ‘The Masquerade’ in which he seems to appear as himself and, while being goaded by another Sennett big name, Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle, he transforms himself into his clownish tramp creation, as well as appearing as a woman.

The set also includes, as already mentioned Chaplin’s first feature, Tillie’s Punctured Romance, though this is not a vehicle for Chaplin; that is given over to the older actress, Marie Dressler who makes her cinema debut here and is often cited as the very first feature length comedy film. Here Charlie appears as a rather spivvy stranger after Dressler’s money, with yet again many of his tramp creations style intact. There is also less of the sentimentality that would emerge in Chaplin’s films throughout the twenties. What is apparent from many of these films is that there are very few close-ups of Chaplin in his later films (save for the iconic closing shot in City Lights), but are here in abundance.

There are also some both curious and interesting extras on the disc including the French animation, dating from 1916, entitled ‘Chaplin’s White Elephant’, as well as two all two short documentaries: ‘Inside the Keystone Project’, a nice and informative documentary about the studios until it disappeared for good in 1917 and the problems of preserving film from early cinema and how the preservation of old nitrate films took many years to take hold, too late to save a good majority of silent films. Another documentary of equal fascinations is ‘Silent Traces’, in which film historian, John Bengston traces the locations of many of these films, and how these locations have changed and in some cases, not changed since the filming. Some of these films have barely been seen since they were shown in 1914, giving a clear indication how important this release is. It has certainly re-invigorated my interest in early silent cinema, having seen many of the Mack Sennett comedies on TV when I was a kid.

Chris Hick