Charlie Chaplin (1951)

Essanay — the transitional period 57 When Chaplin completed his year at Essanay he was unquestionably the top figure in the motion picture industry— after only two years on the screen! The Essanay Company cleared well over a million on the Chaplin series. The pictures have passed through many hands and have been duped, retitled, and revived, time after time. Original Essanay prints can be identified by a bordered opening title with two Indian-head trademarks and the name, "Essanay," in back-slanting letters, in between. The original interior subtitles are undecorated. Many Essanays, in a more or less mutilated state, are still in circulation in "sound" prints. In the version of "The Bank," now being shown, cuts in the cashier's part obscure the entire motivation. Similarly, in the "Tramp," Charlie seems merely to fall off the fence instead of being shot, and so on. An entire generation has been given a distorted view of Chaplin's early genius through the slipshod handling of these classics. Unfortunately the original negatives were not preserved. The Essanay films are unequal in quality and technique. Artificial lights were used in the Chicago film and occasionally, to boost the daylight, in Essanay 's Niles studio. The photography is uneven in some of the remaining pictures. In the Essanays, however, we have the beginnings of Chaplin's art. In virtually every one of the Essanays some bit or idea appears that was to come to fuller flowering in his later works. In this year at Essanay the immortal and world-famous character of the Tramp — the tragi-comic vagabond so perfectly symbolizing the universal underdog — came into being. It is possibly the most significant artistic archetype of this century.