Auld Acquaintance

One last jaunt into Echo Lake Park, AKA the violently inclined idiot’s Forest of Arden.

Charlie is married to Phyllis Allen, Keystone’s own Marie-Dressler-Alike. It’s a seaside postcard marriage, the big, domineering woman and the henpecked little man. Phyllis has the sniffles, and Charlie, rather than being sympathetic, is mocking her for our benefit: he does a trombone mime, and pretends to blow his nose on her knitting.

Wikipedia informs us that the character names this time are Mr. and Mrs. Sniffels — possibly a Sydney Chaplin interpolation, as he rewrote the text and recut the action in much of his brother’s Keystone output at a later date.

Meanwhile (there are several meanwhiles in this) MABEL, we are told, ADMIRES HER HUSBAND AMBROSE. An extraordinary statement. Ambrose, of course, is Mack Swain, and there’s admittedly plenty of him to admire. Wires have not become crossed yet, but the mere introduction of wiring to a Keystone short promises that this will happen. 1914 audiences would be chuckling in anticipation.

A motor car enters frame. Mack & Mabel are enchanted by the gasoline-driven chariot. Their faces light up with religious awe. OK, so Chaplin needed to introduce an auto, and had to find a way to make it interesting (ignoring Sidney Pollack’s dictum, for the good reason that it hadn’t yet been formulated — Pollack wouldn’t be born for twenty years yet — “Let the boring crap BE boring crap”) so he has his lovers ooh and ahh at the mundane jalopy as if it were Hitler flying in at the start of TRIUMPH OF THE WILL. Instead, its someone called Joe Bordeaux and his crate promptly breaks down. Ambrose gets distracted trying to help, and Mabel is left alone…

A meting between Charlie and Mabel is now anticipated, but Chaplin pulls a fast one, instead he introduces a whole new character, “Mary, the flirt” per Wikipedia, played by the fetching Cecile Arnold. On seeing her, Charlie/Mr. Sniffels immediately distances himself from his slumbering spouse. Adultery, or anyhow a flirtery, is on the cards.

“It’s the story of a girl who is searching… searching… SEARCHING!” as Jerry Lewis will say in HOLLYWOOD OR BUST. Can Charlie help? HE WOULD BE DELIGHTED!

Scanning the area for whatever MacGuffin Cecile is hunting, Charlie’s eyes alight on her bottom as she bends to examine the lawn. A quick display of beaming innocence is produced when she catches him at it.

Charlie prowls after Cecile, leaving the snoozing Phyllis. It’s a little strange that he’s dressed as a tramp in this one, since his wife is clearly not indigent. Indignant, yes. But Charlie’s costume is now firmly established. It’s taken most of a year.

The plot is now thickened in a startling fashion as Glen Cavender abruptly appears, dragged up as some kind of dagger-wielding Turk in a fez. Cecile is with him, apparently. He stabs Charlie Sniffels in the arse, and that’s that dealt with. Charlie makes his unheard excuses and leaves.

Fleeing the dread Turk, Charlie now discovers Mabel, still waiting alone as Ambrose struggles to crank the stalled automobile, his capacious buttocks thrusting rhythmically upwards in a grotesque parody of the sexual act. Can someone recut Cronenberg’s CRASH, Guy Grand style, so that the characters are watching this on TV?

Chaplin is now composing in depth in a way that greatly enhances the visual interest.

The late John Belushi contrived to meet his wife by hitting her on the arm with an oar. Here, Sniffels, having tidied himself up a bit (a rare moment of near-pathos), thwacks Mabel across the rump with his cane — it’s up to us to decide if it’s deliberate — and then apologises. An introduction is made. Well, it’s one way of doing it.

Picking an imaginary thread from Mabel’s shoulder, Charlie demonstrates how pantomime may be used to further the gentlemanly art of bothering women. And gets a slap in the face. Things are going great.

Charlie inadvertently — it seems — hooks Mabel’s hem and lifts her skirt to expose a shapely ankle. In response to her outrage, he sternly spanks the crook of his cane, a fresh image, startling in its implications.

Mabel is outraged by all this. Charlie keeps trying to get fresh, and gets another slap. His character really is a repulsive little sex pest at this point. Ambrose has given up trying to crank that jalopy and comes to defend his wife’s honour. Except he’s too busy “getting acquainted” with Charlie — a new friend! — to listen to his wife’s complaints. So he leaves them together and returns to his solo cranking activities, a contented cuckold. He gets the car going and is offered a lift, leaving Mabel with the creepy little guy in the derby. This is getting kind of distressing.

Edgar Kennedy gets a laugh! Mabel called “Help!” and Edgar the brushy-moustached kop BOUNDS into shot. Not her shot — he’s just one shot to the right.

It’s funny because it feels like he’s just been waiting, coiled, in an unseen third shot just to the right of the one he springs into.

Then, defying the Kuleshovian imaginary geography that has us expecting him to cross into Mabel’s frame from screen right, he emerges in the background behind Charlie (more depth staging) so we can have British pantomime “He’s behind you!” poignancy/dramatic irony. Chaplin, the master of suspense.

Mabel now relaxes, encourages Charlie to incriminate himself, as Kennedy hovers menacingly behind him with truncheon erect and wagging. Charlie is overjoyed by Mabel’s new smiling responses. His quaint blandishments have borne sexy fruit. They always yield in the end! Very good slow burn response to the truncheon and then its owner. Kennedy is not only a slow-burner himself, but the cause of slow-burning in others.

They’re off! Konstable Kennedy pursues Charlie like an eager dog, lolloping round the bushes… Charlie indulges in some purely-for-fun buttock-piercing with a pin, even though this gains him nothing. But when a foe presents his backside, you have to either boot it or jab it with something sharp. Them’s the rules.

The chase circles dizzyingly around Mabel, with Charlie pausing to raise his derby — he is, after all, a gentleman, albeit a sleazy one —

This plot needs added astringency, so Ambrose dismounts the jalopy a mere shot away from Phyllis, now awake and back to her knitting. He drops his kerchief at her feet, accidentally. But now this is a tricky situation. Phyllis assumes this was a deliberate act, designed to allow him to check out her ankles. Embarrassing. And so much psychology going on in a plain americain wide shot. These wraiths of 106 years ago are still thinking thoughts and beaming them into our eyeballs as if we were all there, in the shade of a Los Angeles recreation area, two pandemics ago.

Ambrose inexplicably exacerbates his blunder by sitting down next to Phyllis, while a random dog photobombs the cast.

Evading the Kop, Charlie backs into the Turk, who then takes a mis-aimed blow to the fez from Kennedy’s truncheon.

All men are sexual nuisances, part 2: Mack is now pinching Phyllis’s cheek and capering on in nonconsensual fashion. The difference between Phyllis and Mabel is that when Phyllis hauls off and slaps you, you stay slapped. Now she’s yelling for a cop and Mack is reduced to a pitiful, whining schoolboy begging her not to get him in trouble.

Eyeline trouble. With all these tangled plot threads, it’s not too surprising when Kennedy exits Mack’s frame screen left and then arrives in Phyllis’s frame left, a feat requiring either a single-frame spin by the character or by the viewer’s brain. Still, Phyllis is able to sic Kennedy on Swain, and now both he and Charlie are fugitives from erotic justice.

Ambrose collides with the Turk, who again receives an accidental thwack from Kennedy. It’s called a night stick because it makes you see stars. Kennedy, realising he’s concussed a Turk by mistake, wallops him again on purpose just for being foreign.

Mabel meets Phyllis, and the #MeToo movement is born.

The Charlie blunders upon the scene and, after some more suspense, is presented to Phyliis’s new bosom buddy. Shock! Charlie goes weak at the knees. Then, luckily for him, some footage goes missing and when we rejoin the scene, Phyllis has been abstracted by Melesian jump-cut. Charlie runs off, and Mabel is alone at last.

Kennedy is still chasing Ambrose and thumping the poor Turk, if that’s what he is. Charlie has rejoined his wife and inexplicably (and disappointingly) escaped dismemberment at her hands. But now Kennedy has located Charlie. More dramatic irony type panto suspense — Chaplin’s favourite device here, along with the in-depth framing he’s discovered.

The runing about is getting repetitive but when Mabel introduces Ambrose to Phyllis, reprising the earlier meet-uncute that got Charlie in hot water, the device works nicely, building on our anticipation. And hopefully there won’t be any lost frames this time so we’ll see what happens. Not than much, actually. And we’re back to running and cowering in bushes. It’s looking like Mabel might go off with the big woman, as she just had in TILLIE’S PUCTURED ROMANCE, for sapphic consolation. Will Charlie and Ambrose do likewise? But first, Kennedy’s kosh at last finds its mark, clobbering each cranium, and the creeps are collared.

But before the can be konfined in klink, their wronged women plead piteously on their behalf. Kennedy is confused by the discovery that the woman molested by masher #1 is married to masher #2 who is married to the woman molested by masher #1. His brain is going in circles. He storms off to beat the shit out of Henry McCoy, who was there at the start as leading man in Chaplin’s MAKING A LIVING and is here again, bothering another lovely in another part of the park. THWACK! Ouch!

Realizing their lucky escape, the foursome congratulate one another (?) and the thing more of less stops. An above-average park romp that does show Chaplin developing some new visual ideas.

I’ll Bet You Five You’re Not Alive If You Were In This Film

It’s all go. In a shattering development, Uncle Donald, played by Charles “Oh Mr. Kane” Bennett, is discovered prone in the snow, apparently alive — well, it did seem a bit harsh to kill him off in a slapstick comedy. Not that we had particularly come to care about him or anything.

Tillie and Charlie, newlywed, move into Uncle Donald’s palatial estate. Chaplin had found the best way to get comedy business past the hyperactive Keystone cutters was to slip it in during entrances and exits, since for the sake of mere comprehensibility the editors couldn’t really get away with not showing characters appear in or leave a scene. But all bets are off now — Sennett wants six reels, so the frenetic pace of previous Keystones isn’t really being pursued. It’s a relief: we get to watch actors act.

This scene is a relief too, since we get a different shot size from the usual full-figure or occasional wide medium. Of course, head-to-toe is the ideal framing for Chaplinesque comedy, but some variety is also nice. A blast of grainy, monochrome oxygen is admitted into the film.

Chaplin gets some play out of treating the footmen as objects: hanging his hat and cane on one, even leaning on him as if he were a meat pillar. The Henri Bergson idea of comedy arising from the lines of separation between organic and mechanical do seem particularly relevant to Chaplin’s comedy. Probably more than anybody else’s.

Disturbingly, Tillie now becomes a domestic tyrant, browbeating and actual-beating the unoffending footmen.

Mabel gets herself hired as a maid, demonstrating her cute curtsey, which in those days served as a résumé.

Enter Conklin! Charlie and Tillie are throwing a ball. Conklin is described on the internet as playing “Mr. Whoozis,” but he doesn’t seem to have a name in this print. He’s wearing an even bigger version of his Mr. Walrus walrus moustache.

Another guest, this one a simpering fop. Charlie begins instinctively limbering up to kick him. This is undoubtedly a bit homophobic although, on the other hand, Charlie’s character is a blackguard and hound of the first water. Can’t identify the actor: the IMDb makes clear that Keystone thriftily recycled all the contract players from the restaurant, dressed up as party guests. We have familiar worthies like Hank Mann and Harry McCoy (who seems to have played a record nine roles in this), Alice Davenport and Glen Cavender, and of course token extraterrestrial Grover Ligon (that name!). Cautioned by Tillie against booting guests up the rear, Charlie settles for smacking a flunky, to which nobody could possibly object.

As predicted, Mabel makes an adorable maid. She sticks a finger in a creamy dessert, sampling it. Will she get to flinging pastries later? Sennett recalled, perhaps untruthfully, Mabel pie-ing Ben Turpin upon a random impulse (no such scene appears to exist): “She weighed and hefted the pastry in her right palm, considered it benevolently, balanced herself upon the balls of her feet, went into a wind-up like a big-league pitcher, and threw. Motion-picture history, millions of dollars, and a million laughs hung on her aim as the custard wobbled in a true curve and splashed with a dull explosion in Ben Turpin’s face.”

(Ben Turpin was at Essanay and wouldn’t come to Keystone until years later. But Wikipedia now credits him with receiving the first onscreen pie to the face in 1909, so Sennett was in a way right to give him credit. They also remark that Fred Karno sketches utilised the gag, so Chaplin would have come to Keystone familiar with it.)

I will be kind of disappointed if this party doesn’t turn into a pie fight, even though I rarely find them that funny. I also want a big chase. Ditto.

Mabel confronts Charlie, a spectre at the banquet. Then she retires to the kitchen to ladle booze into herself.

An interesting gaglet occurs when Charlie sneaks off to see Mabel. Tillie, thinking he’s still beside her, reaches over to squeeze his knee while laughing at Mr. Whoozis’s witticisms, or whoozisisms. So instead she’s squeezing a woman’s knee. She finds out her error and is embarrassed, apologises. Her victim goes from looking annoyed to acting forgiving, but as soon as Tillie turns her back the woman is sort of twisting away from her, giving her the fish-eye, a look that says “You’re a weird one, you are.” So is this a lesbian joke? Dressler is an intriguing choice to be doing it, given the rumours and claims.

Charlie persuades Tillie to have a drink, to stop her bullying him, I think. But this is surely a recipe for disaster, or at least for another Highland fling, which is much the same thing. Indeed, soon Tillie has been bitten by a dancing bug, which necessitates for some reason changing from her current weird frilly pantsuit to another, different frilly pantsuit.

Meanwhile, Charlie and Chester start a fight, for no particular reason. This is kind of the problem with circus clowns (and Chester had been one): lack of narrative/character context for the funny business. They’re used to just prancing into the ring and acting up. Same thing with so much Keystone material. It’s just random mucking about, performed by skilled comedians but without any meaning and therefore of limited entertainment value. The triangle of Charlie, Marie and Mabel ought to be enough of a premise to develop some fun slapstick battling, but WHO IS WHOOZIS?

Charlie ejects Whoozis and makes nice with Mabel — demonstrating again his Richard III-type ability to seduce, enchant and befuddle.

Charles Bennett continues to recover from his mountain. A shaft of light pierces the smoky interior of his Alpine convalescence. The first deliberately place grace note of lighting in a Keystone picture, I’ll hazard. It’s placement, a luminous intrusion, is as odd and alien to the scheme of a Sennett picture as if a Dalek were to trundle onto the set.

Whoozis returns for more fighting. Charlie does sling some food at him. Additionally, the larger than usual rich guy sets allow for some unusual in-depth staging as Charlie drives Chester deeper and deeper into the background of shot. This doesn’t make things any funnier, but it’s an interesting variant.

END OF PART 5

PART 6

Tillie, newly attired, rampaged back into the party, making exotic Mata Hari arm movements. Theda Bara’s reaction is unrecorded. Lipreaders and other persons with eyesight may detect her yelling “CHARLIE!” from the top of the stairs.

AND NOW THEY TANGO. This is, admittedly, pretty good. Hippopotamus and stoat. And yet they’re so graceful in the water. In fact, they’re graceful here, it’s just that their grace includes tripping and falling.

Now here’s Harry McCoy, formerly a leading actor who Charlie supported, now got up as a pod person Ford Sterling,. Sterling had been the #1 Keystone star who had recently left to pursue a career elsewhere (he’d be back). I guess Sennett wanted to not only find roles for all his regular actors (but not Roscoe Arbuckle, for some reason), he wanted to create simulacra of those no longer under contract. Previously Chaplin had been tried in this role. McCoy, it must be said, is not markedly less appealing that the original, but it would be hard to surpass the lack of enthusiasm I feel about F.S.

While Charlie and Tillie are not so much cutting as lacerating a rug, Mabel gets into fights with random party guest and random footman. Finally, Tillie catches Mabel and Charlie canoodling. PIES ARE THROWN!

Then, surprisingly, Tillie draws a revolver (from nowhere — Mr. Chekhov was not consulted) and bullets are now substituted for pastries (incidentally I always felt a Peckinpahesque slomo pie fight would be worth attempting — Kubrick of course would have been the man to do it, in STRANGELOVE, but he apparently never thought of it).

As shooting sprees go, this is pretty amusing, with Charlie throwing himself into the other guests in his wild flight, creating well-dressed scrummages all over the dance floor. It’s funnier/less nauseating than the comparable scene in MEET THE FEEBLES. It’s comparable the way Tillie wants to shoot absolutely everyone, regardless of whether they’ve actually offended her.

Charlie hides in a huge, unconvincing urn that wasn’t there a minute ago. Mabel hides in a polar bear skin, a fetish object inside a furry. This chase is limited by the number of sets Sennett is prepared to pay for.

Smashing the urn, Tillie is about to, perhaps, tear Charlie’s head from his shoulders, when her not-dead uncle returns home. He throws everyone out. Charlie now has to choose between Mabel and his lawful wife, who is now not a desirable millionairess but a penniless hick in strange pajamas. He boots her in the gut and leaves.

For some reason, a footman calls the kops. I’m not quite clear on which crime is being reported. The kops come bumbling into the station house, falling over one another, a familiar bit of business I haven’t actually seen in many films.

Tillie now has her gun again, and it’s the kind that never needs reloading (funny how you can’t buy those anymore) and she chases Charlie and Mabel onto a pier. This is not the best place for them to have fled to, one senses. From Sennett’s viewpoint, though, it’s useful. Ducking his casts was a reliable way of ending a picture, though I don’t think it’s going to be satisfactory in this case.

The kops are in pursuit, naturally. The kop kar rear-ends Tillie and propels her, miraculously transfigured into a burly stuntman, into the sea. The salt water transforms her back into the likeness of Marie Dressler. Then the kop kar drives off the end of the pier, because all the kops are bumbling imbeciles. They turn into dummies as the kar goes over, but soon are themselves again, splashing about and hitting one another with rubber tyres. The transformative power of saline. Tillie is now attempting to spank an eel.

Mabel and Charlie having inexplicably failed to topple into the drink like civilised people, rush to a police call box (literally a small box with a phone in, an Officer Dibble not a TARDIS) and call the Water Police, which is where Al St. John gets into the picture, belatedly. It’s weird that Charlie and Mabel are now trying to get everyone rescued. Also, the water police are just as inept as the “regular” kops. It’s becoming a vision of hell. People are drowning and their lives are in the hands of physical incompetents.

The source play has been abandoned. Chaos reigns.

Tillie is finally dredged up, and returns Charlie’s ring to him. Mabel is supportive, rejects Charlie with a “We’re through!” gesture, and for a while it looks like Mabel and Tillie/Marie will walk off into the sunset, or up Sunset, together.

And in fact… Dressler embraces Normand, kisses her affectionately, and the curtain closes. Then she reemerges from behind it, bows to us, invites Mabel and Charlie (“CHARLIE!”) to join her. Chaplin does a very good impersonation of a man not acting, facing an audience instead of a camera crew. Then, as they prepare to bow, they are airlifted out of the film by Melesian jump-cut. Dressler looks to each side and does two double-takes (or one quadruple-take?) at finding them vanished.

Then she shrugs, confused.

“This film lark is a mystery to me…”

TILLIE’S PUNCTURED ROMANCE stars Carlotta Vance; Adenoid Hynkel; Paddy, the Nickel Hopper; Robert Bunce; William Pitt; Sixth Member Ale and Quail Club; Charley – Son of the Desert from Texas; Josie Hunkapillar; Tarzan – Younger; Jane Porter; Detective Sweeney; Mrs Cohen; Al Cohen; Wizard of Oz; Fuzzy Jones; and Rear End of Horse.

Doobugle of Greenland

Charlie with Mabel again, directed by Mabel again — or maybe co-directing WITH Mabel — this was released nine days after MABEL AT THE WHEEL, with TWENTY MINUTES OF LOVE slotted in between. Keystone are really churning them out — and remember, they have other stars working at the same time, Arbuckle and so on. I reckon these films were mostly shot in a day, maybe two days for a two-reeler like this. And “written” in an hour. And the editing is largely a matter of selecting the preferred takes from a small number filmed, cutting off the slates, and doing the titles. So you could “easily” make two a week.

Despite the fact that Chaplin had earlier refused to work for Mabel as director, she was the most talented director he’d had — see her WON IN A CUPBOARD for bits of visual experimentation otherwise unheard-of at Sennett’s studio. And this is in many ways his best film yet.

We meet Charlie, the world’s worst waiter, working in a rowdy dive. He spills the food he’s serving all over the floor, quite carelessly, then slips in it, then serves the empty plate and gets stroppy when the patron complains. He also “tidies up” by emptying shot glasses into a stray pint, then drinking the resulting grog-melange. There’s no indication yet that he’s above his station. He seems to be beneath it. He’s not even nice. Still, we get further iterations of Man’s Eternal Struggle with the Swing Doors.

Give him a dog, do I hear you suggest? OK, here’s a nameless dachshund which he keeps in a cupboard and walks on his lunch hour. Long before A DOG’S LIFE. Some good mischief comes of this: his cuff comes off and slides down the leash. An anticipation of MODERN TIMES.

The dog doesn’t seem to be making Charlie more sympathetic. He trips over it. Then loses it. Fights a small boy for it. (Tiny Tarzan again: kid does a good fall.)

Meanwhile, Mabel is a posh girl. More trouble than usual is taken to delineate her world of awnings and parasols, versus Charlie’s skid row planks and beggary. There’s a distinct lack of irony in Charlie coming to Mabel’s rescue — better if he got caught up in the struggle by accident, rather than suddenly showing out-of-character heroism. But then there’s some good dirty fighting. His opponent is William Hauber, whose sour, pinched, aggrieved face suits this story better than his previous Chaplin roles.

Charlie now starts flirting with Mabel, who’s impressed by his violence. Previous beau, the inevitable Harry McCoy, has disgraced himself by cowering before the ruffian. Chaplin undergoes a remarkable transformation, and so do his props. He picks his tooth with his cane, just about the first instance of him making the physical world repurpose itself for his benefit, a major Chaplin trope. He presents a card, which he somehow has on his person, giving his identity as Baron Doobugle, Prime Minister of Greenland. (Other prints make him “O.T. Axle, Ambassador for Greece” — even The Chaplin Encyclopedia is unsure which version is authentic.) Mabel is even more impressed, and who can blame her? I would be too. Additionally, his display of upper-crust simpering is quite deserving of our awe.

Seeing Chaplin put on airs is exciting, as if he’s discovering what his Tramp outfit is for. Contrast. It’s perhaps not quite there yet, since this is an act, and the future Tramp’s pretensions are quite sincere ones. Moments before, he was stumbling about half asleep, his fag-ash dropping heedlessly down his front, visible even in long shot in a 100 year-old print found on a tip. Now he’s a slicker, a swell. It’s visible in the way he thrusts his tiny butt in a manner both pugilistic and aloof. The walk is coming together more and more. He needs to fuse hobo walk with posh walk. (When a music hall rival said, “I have more talent in my arse than you have in your whole body,” Chaplin replied on the spot, “That’s where your talent lies.” Wrong. Chaplin’s arse speaks volumes. The most expressive rear end since the days of Le Petomane.)

But THE STRAIN… Charlie must keep up this posh act. He meets Mabel’s parents, his cane slung nonchalantly in his jacket pocket. Can they see through me? The comedy of social anxiety — it feels like Mabel has a good handle on the kind of stuff Chaplin can instinctively immerse himself in and get comedy out of. And there is, buried in this idea, pathos. For the first time.

Charlie returns to the wretched honky tonk where he earns his pittance — he’s completely forgotten he owns a dog — and has — what was I just telling you? — a profound emotional response to music. And Normand, always alert to the romantic touch, fades not-quite-out and then in on herself, the object of his reverie. The way the fades don’t dip all the way down to black is a lovely little grace note and another moment of experimental Mabel. You won’t see this anywhere else except 70s Fellini.

The dream over, Charlie is then kicked up the arse multiple times by his boss, Edgar Kennedy, wearing another florid moustache selected from his brimming coterie. Then more swing door vicissitudes and a brief but good and vicious skirmish with Chester Conklin.

Unlike in most of Chaplin’s previous films, we’re getting to see situations played out properly, give and take between performers unbutchered by the editor’s shears.

An interlude in which Charlie is challenged by the hulking Mack Swain (his GOLD RUSH co-star, “Big Jim”) seems to exist mainly to further elucidate the theme that women love a brute. Charlie soon has the dolls flocking to him after braining Mack with an outsize mallet (were these really kept behind the bar for such occasions? The hammersklavier interlude during The Trail of the Lonesome Pine persuades me this is so.)

PART 2: Charlie is now a big man on skid row, and is off to Mabel’s party in his slick new duds, featuring the silk hat and big coat that become a true prime minister of Greenland. Harry McCoy, demoted from bland leading man in previous films, is now the jealous rival scheming to sabotage him: Chaplin’s role in MABEL AT THE WHEEL. The humiliation! Chaplin blew him away in the villain role, and now the tables are turned, he’s still blowing him away as hero or anti-hero or whatever he is here.

We keep seeing from Mabel’s garden gate that she lives at number 666 but I refuse to attribute any demoniac significance to this.

The party. Mabel can overlook Charlie wiping his mouth with his coat-tails after a drink, but she looks aghast at his big, decaying shoes. Several sizes too big, of course, and worn on the wrong feet. Still, she’s enchanted by his heavy drinking and his loud belching is, it seems hilarious to her. Where has she been all our lives? I confess I relate somewhat to Charlie’s response to being at a party: free booze! It makes purely economic sense to down as much of it as possible, save you paying for it later in the week.

Nice little idyll with the band playing and Charlie singing and burping along to it, and Mabel reacting. Nice to see the people a bit closer to the camera. We’re sure to go wide again for the inevitably brawl. We have arrived at the inevitable drunk scene, with added dyspepsia. Can fisticuffs be far away?

Not sure how this one’s going to end (well, yes, with a fight, obviously). Charlie’s position seems untenable, but McCoy, shaking his fist in a variety of single medium shots, is a sneak and a yellow-bellied lizard and does not deserve fair lady’s hand.

Of course! The swine McCoy takes the party slumming to Charlie’s workplace, a dastardly ploy to expose his lowly origins. Is it really plausible, he will ask, that the prime minster of Greenland should be moonlighting in this filthy hole? Possible, perhaps, but far from likely.

Ensconced in the nameless gin-joint, Mabel, who could smile and wink as a gentleman eructated in her face, is scandalised by Minta Durfee’s sexy dance, and then Charlie, finally getting the better of the swing doors, passes flawlessly through to exposure and shame. Some good suspense first, though, as he cunningly disguises his apron in a variety of coy postures. But his boss, Edgar Kennedy, unreasonably expects him to do some work, and thus a scuffle breaks out. Mabel, recipient of cinema’s first face-pie, gets it splurch in the kisser once more.

All hell breaks loose. Various parties hit with various objects. Mabel crouches bottom left of frame clapping her hands like a clockwork monkey as Kennedy runs amuck with twin pistols. Charlie renders him comatose with multiple bricks to the brow — the set wall buckles notably as the big man slumps against it — there is an attempted reconciliation — but Mabel isn’t going to solve the problems of class and economic disparity in a single two-reel farce comedy, is she? You can’t expect it.