Charlot #5: Between Showers

The films are successful agitations, successful explorations of elaborate visual possibilities; if laughter once accompanied them, it has to have been the laughter of breathlessness.

Walter Kerr, The SIlent Clowns

Another Ford Sterling vehicle, but this time Chaplin gets a heftier role and appears in character as The Tramp. The two get to comedically square off in several scenes, which puts directly on the screen the stylistic incongruity between these two Keystone keystones. For what it’s worth, I disagree with the Walter Kerr quote above. I laughed plenty, pure and genuinely. It just so happened that all my laughs were harvested by Chaplin.

Sterling, as, um, “Mr. Snookie,” comes across a romantically distracted policeman and steals his umbrella, an object that will change hands several times before the cop returns to reclaim it. He then meets a woman anxious about crossing a flooded street and, eager to impress, goes off to find a tool. Charlie appears and does the same. Before they return, another cop carries her across, setting up a slapstick battle for her attention.

My first question: Were umbrellas especially expensive or extravagant in the early 1900s? My googling suggests they were a bit more expensive but not so much to justify such a bold theft. It could be the relative nonprevalence of cars at the time is the cause of the disconnect. Alternatively, hey, it’s a simple comedic set-up in a film with all the consideration and cinematic craft of a modern-day student film.

It’s hard not to think about the craft of the filmmaking from the first scene, where the umbrella dangles into frame so deliberately that you can practically see the crew member holding it level. Later, Charlie’s introduction to the film gets mysteriously cut short when an odd cut deletes him from the image. It would also be easy to poke fun at the location shoots, but I find the lack of sets in most of these Keystone shots refreshingly endearing. We need a space for the three men to chase each other? There’s a park over there, let’s go to the park.

I have nothing against Ford Sterling. His style of comedy just isn’t for me. After this film, Chaplin was reassigned to another director. Maybe that will allow him to flex his stuff more? (Sorry, I’ve read ahead, there are many more creative conflicts to come.)