We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
29
as it already was by an almost inflexible conception of humour — that of slapstick farce, which Chaplin had already left a long way behind. She was also the first to see that when he did find his own line, he brought with him an entirely new form of imaginative comedy infinitely more subtle than anything yet known in comic films.
Mabel Normand's dressing room was the only one that possessed an oil stove. And there, for hours on end, the twenty-three year old Chaplin in his natty checked suit would discuss with her their work, their future, life and art and books and all those things his mind had been filled with through the years of his adolescence. The others listened and commented, but it was Mabel's mind that matched his own, and to her he was speaking. Those were some of the happiest hours of his life, and though his work with her was tinged with a faint feeling of rivalry — she was more experienced in film work, and had an excellent comedy technique of her own, and was in addition a beautiful and vivacious girl — he enjoyed it, and made an excellent foil for her.
But even Mabel's affection was sorely tried the day Sennett decided they should be filmed riding a motor-cycle, provided Charlie knew how to ride one.
"Of course I do!" Charlie asserted scornfully. "I used to cycle all over London. What are you worrying about?"
He mounted the motor-cycle, Mabel jumped on the pillion; and then the horrified onlookers saw the pair of them whizzing down a steep hill with the speed of an express train. It was perfectly clear that Charlie could not guide nor control nor stop the machine.
No one knows what Charlie thought about as he hurtled down to destruction. Behind him, Mabel clung on grimly, her eyes closed against the terror of whirling trees and hedges and the inevitable doom. It came.
Mabel was thrown headlong into a ditch; Charlie, battered and bruised, was discovered spreadeagled a few yards further along the the road. By a miracle, both escaped serious injury, and only the motor-cycle succumbed. Charlie's excuse, when he could speak, was that he hadn't realized there was any difference between a cycle and a motor-cycle.
t©w Fame and Fortune
MACK SENNETT'S CONTRIBUTION TO THE PIONEERING OF FILM
comedy was unique. He, more than any other in America, increasingly moved from the theatrical representation of vaudeville skit and slapstick farce towards the cinematic use of gesture, movement, and