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America as the music-hall in England, attempted to "refine" itself at about this time). The roaring Keystone comedies put an end to that. And with an excellent feeling for contrast, Mack Sennett injected into these pictures of violence a whole series of bathing beauties who eventually became almost as famous as the comedians themselves.
The Keystone Comedies had, of course, nothing to do with the comedy of the theatre. There was no text, there was no plot. They were "shot on the cuff," that is to say, a director, a cameraman, and a group of actors went out with a few properties — perhaps a step-ladder, some painters' supplies, and a wheel-barrow; they proceeded to a street or a park or a lake, and with nothing more than a general idea of an action in their minds, created their picture. To this day when a director finds himself without a good dramatic ending for his story, he asks for a "Keystone finish" — that is something spectacular and preferably violent to startle the spectators.
The Keystone comedians were the descendants of all the true comics of the theatre. You can trace them back to Harlequin and Pantaloon and, farther than that, you will find them in the comedies of Terence and of Aristophanes. They used the same material — misunderstandings, disguises, violent anger over imaginary offences — and everything led to physical action whether it was a blow or a kiss. They destroyed the whole solemn framework in which the everyday man had his existence. Of them it might be reasonable to say that they satisfied our desire to escape from the habits and rules of our life and from the logic by which we had to live.
And yet Keystone Comedies were only inventive. One further step had to be taken — to become imaginative and creative — and this step was taken by a man who began with the Keystone Comedies and went far beyond them, but never forgot what they taught him — Charlie Chaplin.
About Chaplin everything has been written, everything true and false, everything silly and wise, everything romantic and critical, and the same things will continue to be written for a long time to come. He was destined by his genius to be the one universal man of modern times, and everything from the political and economic chaos in which we live to the minor change from silent to talking moving pictures itself, conspired to make his uniqueness more certain and more striking. His
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