Charlot #8: His Favorite Pastime

The moment we met we ignited; it was mutual, and my heart sang. How romantic were those morning’s turning up fro work with the anticipation of seeing her each day.

Chaplin, My Autobiography

Charlie appears at risk of being out-Tramped in this one, as the film begins with him sharing the screen with one of the filthiest creatures Hollywood could imagine. Perhaps Roscoe Arbuckle is showing us a vision of the Tramp without the charm.

Yeah, I’m still waiting for my old professor’s prophecy about Chaplin’s consideration towards alcohol to come true. Drinking is the titular pastime! This isn’t the first of these films that can be summarized as “The Tramp gets drunk and aggressively pursues a woman,” and we’re only on number 8.

The plot of the film is so disorganized that actually trying to follow it is disorienting, so let’s not. Chaplin’s physical comedy continues to develop – I’m particularly impressed by a stunt where he elegantly falls off a staircase onto a couch and emerges lighting a cigarette as if it were intentional. Another scene where he elaborately pantomimes directly at the camera also tickles me. But for this film, I’m more interested in a couple of secondary actors.

The first is Peggy Pearce, who plays the love interest. While her star didn’t shine as brightly in Hollywood as the likes of Lillian Gish or Mary Pickford, Pearce played an important role to Chaplin during his time at Keystone: The two shared a brief but powerful love affair. To read Chaplin write of it in his autobiography, her mere presence at the studio was a motivation to show up. Despite this, His Favorite Pastime is their only on-screen collaboration, and the affair ended swiftly due to Chaplin’s unwillingness to marry. At least, that’s how he tells it.

The other notable extras particularly stand out over a century removed from filming. Yes, we need to address the blackface. Hollywood had few Black actors at the time, so those roles (servants, etc.) would simply be performed by white actors. I want to emphasize just how different attitudes about blackface were back then. When Al Jolston covered his face in shoe polish such as at the end of the Jazz Singer, he thought he was paying homage to the Black artists that influenced him. Critical conversations only identified the implicit racism in retrospect.

As far as I know this is the most prevalent blackface becomes in Chaplin’s filmography, which for 1910s America deserves praise. Chaplin claims (or at least, Chaplin’s estate claims that Chaplin claims; I haven’t found a source for the quote) that he was too sympathetic to the suffering of African-Americans to find jokes at their expense funny. His contemporaries, including Buster Keaton and particularly Harold Lloyd, used racial humor as yet another tool in the toolbox. Great as Keaton’s College is, the restaurant scene where he disguises himself as a black waiter has rightfully become uncomfortable to modern audiences, even if it could be argued the substance of that scene is sympathetic to African-Americans. Chaplin himself never wore blackface on-screen, and that’s a major reason his films have endured so gracefully.