When I first saw complete Keystone comedies, as opposed to whirligig montages in silent movie documentaries, I was kind of appalled at how incoherent and unfunny they were. Sennett, it seemed, had an aversion to setting anything up, and the frames were packed with grandstanding comics competing for our attention. Sennett thought he had found the formula for comedy gold, but you can only call something a formula when it’s more than a list of ingredients — there should be measures, and a process.
Since then, I’ve found some redeeming qualities and some stand-out films, but my main objections remain…
I hadn’t realised, somehow, that Chaplin made so many films in his first year — over thirty. No wonder he complained about the pace. Allowing for the occasional holiday, a film a week might not be that much in the silent era, I guess, but as he gradually took over as his own director (pushing Mabel Normand out quite nastily), he wasn’t just performing, but coming up with stories and gags, too.
THE NEW JANITOR seems to be one of the best of his Keystones. There’s a plot. Suspense. Characters. And not everybody’s a clown. Although Al St. John can’t help himself, the others play it straight. Even an attempt by the baddie to mouth off at the audience, melodrama-fashion, is raggedly cut off by Chaplin’s — or Sennett’s — impatient scissors.
There’s even pathos — when Charlie gets the sack, the gags don’t exactly stop, but they become, well, pathetic — gags about him being sad and put-upon, delivered more slowly. Chaplin seems to have conceived his character this time as a virtual Stepin Fetchit, shiftless, dopey and incompetent. A reminder that the British working class have their own strategies for irritating hell out of the boss.
This modest little movie makes it clearer than most of the 1914 films why Chaplin stood out. The public had been quite content with rambunctious chaos as a substitute for comic construction — but now it was offered something better.
shadowplay 