Tillie's Punctured Romance

This film is very significant in cinema history.  It is the first full-length feature comedy (at 115 minutes), and it is the first film that features Charlie Chaplin, although in a co-starring role.  The film was clearly meant to feature Marie Dressler, who is a great comic, but Charlie stole the show in small ways, again and again, showing him to be the star he later would be.

Marie Dressler plays Tillie, a country girl from wealthy roots, but she remains naive.  Charlie plays the city con, who escapes from the city on the lam, finds Tillie and her wealthy father and decides to play at romance with the poor, homely, but strong, girl in order to get at her father's money.  With some help from a female accomplice (Mable Normand), he succeeds, only to find that there were bigger fish to fry in Tillie's family-- an uncle who is a millionaire.

Dressler is certainly a comic who deserved her celebrity status.  Especially in the scene where she plays drunk and all the binds of character are loosed, she is hilarious and unique.  But it is Normand who is the character actor here.  She is the only one who is believable, who refuses to mug for the camera and is actually interested in acting instead of playing a series of comic sketches.

But Chaplin is the star.  He is more funny than not, and his movements look fluid and spontaneous, a breath of fresh air in the midst of tired cliches.  Yes, I know it is 1914, but since the country/city comedy sketch gets played out again and again as does the naive v. con man.  They are classic tropes, initiated in the ancient world (Aesop used them, for instance), but you can see how tired some of the players are of doing this routine again.  Chaplin keeps it fresh and the fact that his now common stances and pratfalls are still interesting and funny is part of the reason he is one of the best performers of cinema to this day. It is nice to see him play a role outside of the Tramp character, and he does it well.

An additional benefit is the use of the Keystone Kops at the end of the film.  Again, their shtick is familiar, but fun to watch.

Overall, this is not only a historically significant film, it's a pretty funny one as well.  It is certainly worth watching for both reasons, and a good, short entertainment.

4/5

Mabel's Strange Predicament

Mabel's Strange Predicament (February,1914)

Here, the first time the Tramp was filmed, we have a complex short, in perfectly timed comedy, with Mabel Normand as the star.  Mabel Normand had a series of films that she starred in and sometimes directed.  The films are of mixed quality, but they were among a number of films directed and presented from a woman's perspective, along with films by Alice Guy-Blache and Lois Weber.

The Tramp is drinking himself silly in the lobby of a hotel, where he pays his rent for a chair which he keeps falling out of, driving other customers away with his presence (and we assume, his smell).  Mabel happily passes through with her dog and goes upstairs to play with her pet.  Soon, she is locked out of her room in her bedclothes with a lecherous Tramp after her and her boyfriend to visit and a couple across the hall to further her embarrassment.

I am disappointed to see the Tramp in such an unsympathetic light, but really the star is Mabel, whom I might watch more of because she is a perfect victim here.  Although Chaplin isn't the star, he is the cause that moves the "predicament" to such hilarious heights, and his perfect timing along with Normand, Harry McCoy and Alice Davenport really keeps it going.  In a modern film, we might see this comedy stretched to a half hour of a film, but it is perfect at just over ten minutes with many laughs.   

This is certainly the better introduction to the Tramp, between this and The Kid Races, but we see that the Tramp was first imagined as a completely unsympathetic character.  We were meant to feel superior to him, as well as of the people who blindly reject him with prejudice.  We are to see in him the people we are irritated by, the drunk or the person who insists being in the film.  That's a good start, but of course, I prefer the more sympathetic Tramp of later years.

Chaplin says that as he was on his way to dress the part for the film, "I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat. I wanted everything to be a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large. I was undecided whether to look old or young, but remembering Sennet had expected me to be a much older man, I added a small mustache, which I reasoned, would add age without hiding my expression."  Mark Sennet was the producer of the film.

Note: this is the funniest of these films from 1914 I've seen so far, as well as the best choreographed.  And it is the only one directed by a woman, for Mabel Normand directed it herself.

4/5 -- Check it out!  It's short and funny!