Charlie Chaplin (1951)

$10,000 a week from Mutual 65 won a judgment in 1925, decreeing his costume and gait to be his private property. The imitations spread abroad. France had a ''Monsieur Jack" and Andre Sechan; Germany a Charlie Kaplin and Ernst Bosser. In fact, most of the comedians of the time copied Chaplin and borrowed his gags. By his own admission, Harold Lloyd imitated Chaplin in his Lonesome Duke character which he played, from 1915 to 1917, in hundreds of short comedies. Although costume and make-up were not an exact copy, rather the opposite, the pants being tight instead of floppy and the mustache turned up instead of down, the whole conception was Chaplinesque. It was not till 1917 that Lloyd put on his horn-rimmed glasses and became the typical small-town American youth. 1916-1917 were Chaplin's most fertile years, his most sustained creative period. With ripened art he now made twelve almost perfect comedies in eighteen months. All his early techniques were matured and performed with precision and dexterity. These comedies laid the foundation for his later period — several of the little Mutuals were prototypes of his features — and he was to borrow and build on them for the rest of his career. From a study of these comedies, still being revived and arousing hilarity, one can get the essence of Chaplin. The Mutuals have passed through many hands. When the company went bankrupt in 1919, the Chaplins were acquired by the Clark-Cornelius firm, which held them until 1922 when they were sold to a "Chaplin Classics" company. In 1925 they were obtained by the Export and Import Company which controlled the rights until 1932 when they were purchased by the R.K.O.-Van Beuren Corporation. This firm added music and sound effects under the supervision of Gene Rodemich, and there was some cutting and sub-title changes or deletions. Subtitles, in original Mutual prints, including the con