Charlie Chaplin (1951)

the classic Mutual comedies 71 auto drive off Charlie tries unsuccessfully to perk up by flipping his heels, then disconsolately leans against the wagon. Seated between the artist and her mother, the girl undergoes "the awakening of the real love," has the car turned back, flings her arms around Charlie, and pulls him into the automobile. This ending supplanted another in which the despairing Charlie, saved from a watery suicide by a homely farm woman (played by Phyllis Allen), plunges in again after one look at his rescuer. "One A.M.," which came next, was also an experimental departure from previous practice. Unlike "The Tramp" it provides no model for later films. In it, except for a brief passage with a taxi driver, Chaplin appears alone. "One A.M.," however, is a rare piece of virtuosity, a tour de force in which Chaplin successfully holds the screen with pantomime alone for two reels. Though some of the comic business, especially with the folding bed, is rather repetitious, most people find this picture very choice. Chaplin himself evidently did not think too highly of it. He never gave it the compliment of imitating it. And he is reported to have remarked, "One more film like that and it will be goodbye Charlie." Yet "One A.M." ranks with Chaplin's cleverest pictures. In full evening dress and high silk hat Charlie returns, after a night out, to a nightmarish home cluttered with stuffed animals and other horrors. Above the double staircase swings a huge pendulum. The walls are covered with a livid, striped wallpaper. The whole has an almost surrealist-— or delirium tremens — look. Charlie skids on rugs, shrinks from the stuffed animals, chases a drink around a revolving table, pours liquor into a bottomless decanter, is knocked down one staircase by the pendulum and is cascaded down the other, rolled inside the stair carpet, climbs a teetering rubber clothes