Charlie Chaplin (1951)

I X the classic Mutual comedies The idea for his first Mutual comedy came to Chaplin while visiting a New York department store. Going up an escalator, he saw a nervous man slip, and at once grasped the comic possibilities of the moving staircase. On his return to Hollywood he ordered a department-store set built and wrote a comedy around it — "The Floorwalker," released May 15, 1916. Except for some clever gags and more elaborate properties, this first Mutual comedy stays in the slapstick tradition. Charlie enters, picks up an artificial limb (which he is told is not for sale), knocks over boxes with his cane, mismanages the drinking fountain from which he emerges, his face adrip, and is worsted in his first bout with the moving staircase. About to kick a clerk he changes his mind when a store detective appears, and stoops to brush off his pants. Upstairs the floorwalker double-crosses the manager with whom he was to abscond with the store receipts, hits him over the head, and goes off with all the loot. In the anteroom he encounters Charlie who is almost his double in appearance. Imagining they are looking in a mirror, their hands touch, they scratch their heads together and raise and lower their arms in unison (ancestor of the similar stunt in the Marx Brothers' "Duck Soup," years later).