Charlie Chaplin (1951)

V I the Chaplin-Keystone films (1914) In his year at Keystone Chaplin made thirtyfive films — a rate of one a week, except for a feature, which took fourteen weeks. They were improvised on the spot and filled with slapstick and knockabout action. They do not compare with Chaplin's later and more polished works, but they have spontaneous charm and are interesting for the first appearance of the characteristic Chaplin traits. They also merit a place in history for introducing him to the world and for teaching him the rudiments of motion-picture technique. In these Keystones Chaplin's costume became fixed and his style almost perfected but the wonderful sympathetic "Charlie" had not yet emerged. Instead he appears as a basically unsympathetic, though engaging, character — a sharper, a heel, an annoying blunderer, a thief, an obnoxious drunk, who is cruel, sometimes to the point of sadism. Not until the next year at Essanay does the real "Charlie" appear. The Keystone plots — if you could call them that — were no more than a hook on which to hang a succession of comic incidents. Sometimes the hook would be a locale — a park, a restaurant, a bakery, a dentist's office, the backstage of a theatre, a race track; sometimes a trade — janitor, piano mover, waiter, property man, boxing referee, etc. Each would suggest comic bits of business. In that way the film would take shape. When the action