Charlie Chaplin (1951)

cc 54 Charlie to "go straight." Charlie, suspicious of "do-gooders," keeps an eye on his pockets. When the police arrive, the girl protects the chivalrous Charlie by pretending that he is her husband. Then she gives him a dollar and sends him on his way. Charlie wanders in blissful redemption down the road until the inevitable cop appears and the old chase resumes. In its original form, "Police" would compare with the best of his two-reelers. Its comments on life and society are bitingly perceptive. But, like "Carmen," it was tampered with after Chaplin left Essanay. One whole sequence was removed to help "pad" another film. Chaplin made only fourteen films for Essanay, but a fifteenth, "Triple Trouble," was released by the company in August 1918, as "a new Chaplin comedy," held back by them. Actually it was patched together from bits extracted from "Police," "Work," and an unfinished feature titled "Life" (which Chaplin abandoned because of the demand for short comedies) and non-Chaplin scenes directed by Leo White, in 1918. The patchwork was pulled into some unity by ingenious cutting, the use of doubles, and subtitles to give it a 1918 flavor. The plot concerns a janitor who works in the house of an inventor from whom German diplomats are trying to obtain a formula. It ends in a melee at the inventor's house, with Charlie and everyone else vaporized in an explosion. The film is a study in movie "magic." Edna Purviance, in 1915, throws a wet rag out a door; it hits Leo White in 1918, and he tosses it back to the cook in 1915! In several scenes the cook, the butler, and the thief change faces as doubles step in, and at one point hands purporting to be Chaplin's dump a garbage can over a fence. The exteriors are plainly Chicago in wintertime. In the flophouse Charlie assumes an odd sleeping posture. He has his head at the foot of the bed, and his