There are mistakes in the Keystone films, like when Chaplin kicks a harmless old guy for no reason in “The Property Man” or kicks a little boy in “The Fatal Mallet,” but these misjudgments were swiftly rectified. Chaplin understood as he went along that there needed to be a reason to kick someone, and he began to move away from the formlessness of the Keystone troupe and into his own brand of super-control, which could handle very complex nuances. In “Gentlemen of Nerve,” he surreptitiously sips from a straw in a girl’s drink, and when she catches him she feels sorry for him and gives him the drink. Stung, he then offers the drink to a girl behind him, who rejects it, at which point he sticks his nose in the air with his hand. In just a few seconds, Chaplin has outlined a little circular nightmare of need, rejection, and wounded pride, all the more powerful because it comes so fast and seemingly barely planned.
In the full-length comic feature, “Tillie’s Punctured Romance,” Chaplin does far too much mugging for comfort, but he does another little seconds-long drama here when a “nance” comic pinches his cheek and he almost kicks him in response but then thinks better of it and decides to smack an impassive and obliging servant instead, so that gay panic and class satire break out and resolve themselves as quick as caffeinated thought.
In 1915 at Essanay, Chaplin met and wooed the lovely and charming Edna Purviance, who would be his leading lady for many years (in his first films with Purviance, you can see them warming to each other in such a sexual way that it’s almost embarrassing to watch sometimes). Making his initial movies at Essanay, Chaplin began to slow down and add the touches of pathos that he would become famous, or notorious, for as the years went by. In “The Tramp,” his little fellow walks down the road of life alone, fastidiously tipping his hat to trees and even the air around him out of sheer genteel habit. At one point in “The Tramp” he is too shy to milk a cow and turns away from its udders before giving it an encouraging little pat! Hilarious stuff, and wholly different from anything he had tried on screen so far. And at the end of this movie, when he sees Edna with another man, he leaves her a misspelled, guilt-tripping note that sets the scene for the orgy of Tramp self-pity to come.
In the years after he made “The Tramp” and moved to Mutual Film Company and then First National and then into his own production studio, Chaplin refined his art at his own time and at great expense. By 1916, he was starting to move the camera a bit, but he would always prefer theatrical proscenium framing, so that even as late as “The Gold Rush” (1925) the scenes taking place in the snowbound cabin seem to have been shot from a seat in a music hall. The rather slovenly and threadbare set design of his early shorts would be improved as time went on, though the house set in his famous one-man “One A.M.” (1916), where he drunkenly comes home and tries to get upstairs to his bedroom, holds only the bare minimum of plausibility (what is up with that swinging clock in the middle of the landing?).
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