Charlie Chaplin (1951)

the Chaplin-Keystone films (1914) 37 raise a foot, miss the step and fall on his face; and a slippery floor and he would inevitably meet. Autos would knock him down; stairs would seem to fold under him. In "His Favorite Pastime," following a woman upstairs while drunk, he somersaults over the banister and lands upright on a sofa where he continues to puff on his cigarette as if nothing had happened. Even the Keystone pie sometimes appeared on the Chaplin menu. Although considered today a staple of the era, pie throwing appears in only a couple of the Chaplin-Keystones. Pies spatter faces in the finish of "Caught in a Cabaret." In "Dough and Dynamite," wads of dough and flour bags fly through the air. In this film, we get what is to become a classic situation — Chaplin ducking and the boss' face receiving the missile instead. Slapstick and violence marked many of the others. In "The Rounders," Chaplin and Arbuckle seek sleep in a restaurant, using as a cover a tablecloth that happens to be loaded with dishes. In "His Trysting Place," Mabel Normand, as Chaplin's wife, breaks an ironing board over his head. In the earlier "Mabel at the Wheel," she falls off the rear of Charlie's motorcycle into the mud. In a fall in "Laughing Gas," Charlie pulls a lady's skirt off, revealing her stylish bloomers. And in "The Property Man" Charlie makes an old prop man carry a heavy trunk, kicks the man in the face, sits on the trunk when the oldster collapses under it. All these incidents were sure-fire laugh-getters at that time. Chases were not as frequent in the Chaplin films as in other Keystones, but there is a good example in his first film, "Making a Living," where he appears as a "sharper." After stealing a camera from his benefactorrival, Charlie tries to escape through traffic. He is pursued upstairs, into a lady's bedroom, where the rival, wrestling under covers with the woman whom he be