Tillie Two

TILLIE’S PUNCTURED ROMANCE, continued.

Marie Dressler wrote in her memoirs that she chose then then-unknown Chaplin and Mabel Normand as her co-stars in her first feature film, a colossal porky pie! To many moviegoers, it was Dressler herself who was the unknown, though Mack Sennett was following a then-popular approach of casting “famous players in famous plays,” taking the preeminent comedienne of the New York stage and bundling her in a movie adapted from Tillie’s Nightmare, her most recent triumph. All this I glean from David Robinson’s magisterial Chaplin biography, acquired for a song on a recent trip to St Columba’s Bookshop, Stockbridge, pre-lockdown.

Robinson also notes that the feature-length comedy was three times longer than any comedy hitherto attempted on the screen, Mack Sennett was a gentleman of nerve.

As reel three begins, Tillie (Dressler) is delivered into the custody of her rich uncle (co-director Charles “Oh Mister Kane” Bennett) by a patient kop. The uncle has a palatial home with stone lions, liveried footmen, tiger skin rugs and suits of armour. Tillie, still tight, unsheathes a broadsword and playfully jabs the help, stoic in their periwigs, then dances a highland fling over the blade and its scabbard, the movie’s first bit of Scottish content, if you don’t count the drunk and disorderly rambunctiousness.

Tillie’s monocled uncle (her monuncle?) orders three footmen to subdue and eject his riotous niece: a chase and struggle ensue, but it’s not a full-on Keystone setpiece. Fairly muted rambunctiousness.

“Guilty creatures sitting at a play” — Charlie and Mabel go to a movie and their crime is brought home to them by the cinematograph. The film, according to the stand outside, is DOUBLE-CROSSED, but the title which appears superimposed, weaving about on the screen within, is A THIEF’S FATE: a Keystone release, seemingly fictional. The female star, interestingly, is Enid Markey, the original Jane in TARZAN OF THE APES, still four years in the future at this point. Which means that Chaplin “appeared with”, in the loosest sense, both the first Tarzan (little Gordon Griffith, who played the ape man as a lad and also appears as a newsboy in TPR) and the first Jane. Colour me Cheeta!

The other cast members in the film within a film include Morgan Wallace, who went on to work for Griffith and played James Fitchmueller in IT’S A GIFT (and WC Fields would appear in a remake of TPR; Minta Durfee (AKA Mrs. Roscoe Arbuckle); and Charles Murray, who had recently played Charlie’s director in THE MASQUERADER.

Chaplin’s repulsed reactions to the movie — Mabel immediately sees it as the story of their lives — put me strongly in mind of the late, great Rik Mayall. The sickly grin of acute discomfort! Seated next to Mabel and overacting furiously is the young but makeup-aged Charley Chase, barely recognizable, who I guess would have been billed as Charles Parrott if he were billed at all.

When the bad guys in the movie are arrested, Chaplin’s reactions in the audience are amazing: he’s half-inwardly protesting, very feebly, at the screen, really living it. TPR doesn’t have any good gags or situations but it does have a lot of spirited and imaginative playing.

Tillie gets a job as a waitress. Stumbling, Dressler turns to the camera and mouths “DAMN!” very clearly. No particular lip-reading skill is required. I wonder if offence was caused. One minute later she does it again. Did Keystone have a swear-box?

The movie keeps cutting to Tillie’s uncle’s mountain holiday, which seems like scenic padding. It’s unlikely to have been in the play. I presume he’s going to break a leg or something.

Sennett originally wanted an original story but nobody at Keystone could come up with a feature script idea (they’re hard to do) and with Dressler on salary at vast expense ($2,500 a week still seems a lot to me NOW) he opted to film her stage success under a different title for whatever reason.

Tillie is having the same kind of swing-door trouble Charlie always has, and would still be having as a waiter in MODERN TIMES twenty-two years later. Then Mabel and Charlie come to dine in her restaurant…

Suspense while projectionist fumbles with reels.

I like the fact that the original show’s librettist, Edgar Smith, wrote a show called Whoop-Dee-Doo. Maybe it suffers from the fact that that phrase is now only ever used, if it’s used at all, in a scathingly ironic way. But it sounds fabulously fatuous. I’d like to see it revived. I wouldn’t go and see it, but you could go and tell me what you think…

PART 4

Chaos ensues. Tillie faints, theatrically, upon seeing Charlie, and he tramples her prone form in his haste to flee the scene with Mabel. Tillie recovers and gives chase. Kops are called. Charlie & Mabel’s earlier cinematograph nightmare is being visited upon them in reality. They take shelter in — where else? — a park.

Charles Bennett, the film’s co-director, Tillie’s rich uncle, and the bloke who sings the song in CITIZEN KANE, falls off a mountain. I’ll bet you five he’s not alive…

“Oh no, I’ve accidentally fallen off a mountain!”

Two strenuous hams report/receive the news, then phone butler Edgar Kennedy who underplays his reaction about as much as you’d expect. A vigorous mime of the millionaire’s tumbling demise is performed. Kennedy isn’t bald yet so he doesn’t slap his pate in dismay, but he does just about everything else.

Tillie is going to inherit everything, which is just as well because waitressing really isn’t working out for her.

In the park, Charlie is accosted by a little newsboy — Milton Berle always claimed this was him, but it’s not, it’s young Tarzan, Gordon Griffith. I can’t imagine that Milty was this cherubic as a child. Nor could he swing through the trees on convenient lianas, I bet. Mind you, from the way Charlie smacks the little bastard, I almost wish it had been Berle. I wonder if this moment inspired noted Chaplin fan Roman Polanski’s child-slapping park scene in THE TENANT, which is otherwise a very odd moment if it’s not a homage to something. But then, that’s an odd film.

(Sidebar: Chaplin in THE GOLD RUSH is cited in REPULSION by Helen Fraser to cheer up Catherine Denueve; Walter Matthau and Cris Campion are compelled to eat a rat in PIRATES, a skit derived closely from the shoe-eating incident also in THE GOLD RUSH. I think there are more tributes than that, and Polanski’s wordless shorts certainly owe something to Chaplin too.)

Learning of Tillie’s inheritance before she does, Charlie ditches Mabel and skids up to Tillie’s place of employment — the Tramp one-footed skid has been carried over to this unrelated character because it’s a good bit of business. He barges in, out of breath — a good excuse for pantomime. Tillie isn’t in sight, so he describes her, waving his arms in a broad square shape. Basically, “I’m looking for a woman the size of a house.” Tillie is mopping up in the kitchen so Charlie gets to slip, fall, get up, slip, recover, slip again, fall again… He’s pretty amazing here. He didn’t think much of this film but if the whole Tramp thing hadn’t taken off (it already had) he’d be using this stuff on his showreel…

Charlie and Tillie are married by “the Rev. D, Simpson” who looks something like a reanimated cadaver. The pancake disguise is necessary since Frank Opperman also plays three other roles. I’m impressed by this plot turn — since it seems inconceivable they’ll still be married at the film’s end, I’m genuinely curious to see what solution Mr. Whoop-Dee-Doo is going to come up with for his plot.

Tillie learns of unc’s death-fall — good fainting action. Then she immediately gets suspicious of Charlie’s rush to wed her — the first sign of brains Tillie has shown. Not unwelcome. But Charlie persuades her he really loves her with a display of ACTING. There was loose talk about Chaplin playing Hamlet but Richard III would have been a better fit.

Mabel, however, is now on his trail…

END OF PART 4

The Sunday Intertitle: Charlie as Chaplin or Chaplin as Charlie?

A weird one…

I wrote about RECREATION already — this Keystone park film didn’t seem much different from a half-dozen others, and it survives in a form most uneven and considerably more ragged than most. As so often at Keystone, Chaplin makes valuable discoveries in one short (THE FACE ON THE BARROOM FLOOR) only to discard them — for now — in the next.

But to follow it, Chaplin made a peculiar meta-comedy, THE MASQUERADER, co-starring Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.

Chaplin, sans felt moustache and costume, hair slicked down, arrives at the studio. (This is to be another behind-the-scenes affair,) A burly ruffian grabs him by the ear and propels him inside. (Time has created a Godardian jump — the rough grabs his ear, and in a trice, both are transported to a new shot, depicting the side-entrance, Charlie is rubbing his injured lobe.) Entering the dressing room, he starts getting made up, but is distracted by the possibility of stealing Fatty’s booze. A long-held take observes the tit-for-tat byplay. Charlie’s hair is now free and curly, as we’re used to seeing it — so in this parallel universe, plainclothes Charlie has straight hair, and the curls are part of a make-up.

Then, after a brief cutaway to the set, we discover Charlie — Chaplin has changed into the Tramp costume and, it seems, into the Tramp character. Rounding a corner at speed, he goes into his one-footed skid, an archetypal trope now but had he used it previously?

Charlie goes on set, nervously popping a breath mint before playing a scene with his leading lady. The director critically inspects his glued-on ‘tache. Prior to getting costumed, Chaplin has been playing the part quite supercilious, but now he seems himself — which is to say, still quite supercilious but the trait is rendered ironic by his costume. But this time it really IS a costume, so should we see him as an underdog, or just an arrogant thesp?

The director calls action, but Charlie misses his cue because he’s flirting with… Chaplin groupies? The actor who’s supposed to be interrupted in the act of stabbing a child with a dagger gets a stiff arm from waiting. Charlie’s attempt at being an action hero is not well-received: he attempts to save the child from the villain by clobbering the villain with the child, who, fortunately, is a dummy. But still, it’s not a good look.

Chester Conklin is immediately hired to replace Charlie, but Charlie duffs him up and goes on in his place.

(My Chaplin Encyclopedia states that Conklin, Chaplin’s exact contemporary, was born Jules Cowles, which is disappointing, but Wikipedia makes no mention of this. I prefer to think of him as a Conklin born. He also has acquired a tragic backstory — his mother was burned to death, at first ruled suicide, then his devoutly religious father was charged with her murder, but acquitted.)

The second bit of melodrama is no less farcical than the first, and Charlie gets the sack. This allows him to do some actual bits of melodrama as he pleads for another chance — but at this stage, Chaplin is still using pathos just as a thing to make fun of. The “don’t fire me” plea pantomime also gets an outing in HIS NEW JOB and, in its most developed form, THE PAWNSHOP.

Charley Chase is back, and this time he’s visible, albeit in the distant background (above). The burly director is Charles Murray, who’d had bits in a couple of previous Chaplins, including the missing HER FRIEND THE BANDIT.

Not to be thwarted, Chaplin returns to Keystone, this time in drag. So the Charlie character really was just a role he was playing. But the costume by now is exerting some kind of transformative effect on its wearer, so that the Tramp really seems a different character than Chaplin out of uniform or Chaplin in drag.

This is Charlie’s first glamorous drag act, and I have to say, he’s tempting, draped in furs and with his forearms immersed in a huge muff. I’d probably take him over, say, Edna Purviance. This is quite different from the drag in the CARRY ON films or A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM, where the unhandsome man typically makes a hideous woman and the men falling over themselves with lust are ridiculous. Here, Chaplin really is sexy. Director Murray gets flirtatious, then audacious, then bodacious. He’s either going to get rapacious or salacious, when an office boy interrupts.

Chaplin does that drag-act teasing thing where, joshing with a male admirer, he unexpectedly WALLOPS them with sudden masculine strength, then goes back to joshing demurely. That always seems to work.

Now Murray starts chasing Miss Chaplin around the dressing room, and Chaplin does the one-footed skid, suggesting that there IS one character binding his three guises together, but that it’s the Tramp, not the actor Chaplin.

Now Chaplin dis-drags, and there’s a sense that this might be intended as a surprise — a CRYING GAME penis in the third act moment — and maybe it would have been for audiences at the time. We get to see him glue the moustache on — I doubt that’s on film anywhere else — Jackie Coogan recalled with Proustian wonder that the spirit gum having “kind of an offensive smell” — and for a moment we have Chaplin, wearing the moustache, and a dress, and not in character as anyone in particular, just focussed on glueing his upper lip. Kind of uncanny. Like seeing Mickey Mouse out of costume, shortsless, scratching himself.

She-Charlie has thrown the studio into tumult by taking over the whole dressing room, so Murray has to shout down an incipient revolution. Then Charlie reveals himself, making believe that the sexy girl — himself — is locked in the cupboard. Murray investigates and gets the time-honoured kick up the arse.

Charlie runs rampant through the studio, slapping and kicking people, then falls down a well. The crew resolve not to rescue him, making this the second CHaplin film where he drags up then drowns.

It was another mad experiment, suggesting that Charlie was already either trying to escape the Tramp persona, or define it by stretching and distorting it, seeing what it could be made to do. And maybe what he learned was that IT was more real on screen than HIM?