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In this comedy short we see a man steal an umbrella from a police officer. After a big shower the man who stole the umbrella wants to help a woman cross the street without getting her feet wet. While he is looking for things she can walk on, Charles Chaplin enters the film. He also wants to help the woman. While Chaplin is looking for useful things as well the woman is carried across the street by a police officer. Chaplin and the man who stole the umbrella have a fight.

With some of the usual Chaplin moments 'Between Showers' is entertaining enough to watch, but it misses the magic of Chaplin's later work. We see some little things from his famous tramp, one moment when he is walking away with the umbrella in particular, but it is not enough to really recommend this short. There are many better Chaplin shorts, but if you like his work you probably enjoy this one as well.

Chaplin is groomed like the tramp and he looks like the tramp but he could be anybody in this disjointed tale about three mashers, a puddle, and an umbrella.

The editing is poor enough to lose the plot from time to time, if there is a plot that extends beyond the individual slapstick-filled scenes.

The film has a certain slight charm as an historical curiosity. Here it is -- 1914 in Los Angeles, and what looks like Echo Park might have looked in 1914 Los Angeles.

A dog wanders innocently in and out of a scene but nobody cares. The pratfalls are backward somersaults. It's all very casual and lacks poetry.

Although Chaplin still had many kinks to work out of his Little Tramp character by the time he made this, his fourth movie, Between Showers nonetheless shows tremendous improvement over his first attempts at developing a screen persona. In the first, Making a Living, he played a rich villain. In Kid Races at Venice and Mabel's Strange Predicament, the Tramp made his debut, but was portrayed as a rather mean-spirited, and in the Mabel Normand film, almost lecherous, jerk.

But Between Showers, for the first time, presents the Little Tramp as a somewhat noble, almost heroic character, who comes to the aid of a damsel in distress (here portrayed by an Edna Purviance prototype). He still has rough edges, but Chaplin was starting to flesh out the character.

The plot of Between Showers is an illustration of how delightfully simple and high concept early silent comedies could be. A man steals an umbrella -- that's pretty much the plot, with a little (attempted) romance tossed in for good measure. It's a fun little film, and fascinating to watch from the perspective of observing how Chaplin is slowly crafting his most famous character.

The ten minute short film Between Showers is best seen, perhaps, as a historical document. More than ninety years old, it serves as a reminder that movies has both changed and not changed since that time. This is obviously a silent, which calls for a visual kind of humour. The plot is thus fairly straight forward and serves as an excuse for the characters to fall on their butts and fight in an overly theatrical manner, judged by today's standards anyway. However, it is interesting to see Chaplin's crude and early attempts at what he and others (Jackie Chan to name one of our contemporaries) would later perfect – well timed physical humour. No doubt intended as entertainment for the moment, Between Showers lacks the social commentary of the 22 years younger masterpiece Modern Times, but it contains a seed, albeit small, of the breathtaking acrobatics displayed therein.

Of historical interest.

Am a big fan of Charlie Chaplin, have been for over a decade now. Many films and shorts of his are very good to masterpiece, and like many others consider him a comedy genius and one of film's most important and influential directors.

He did do better than 'Between Showers'. Can understand why the Keystone period suffered from not being as best remembered or highly remembered than his later efforts, but they are mainly decent and important in their own right. 'Between Showers' is a long way from a career high, but does have historical significance for obvious reasons.

'Between Showers' is not as hilarious, charming or touching as his later work and a good deal of other shorts in the same period. The story is flimsy and the production values not as audacious, the humour only amusing and lacking freshness at times.

For someone who was new to the film industry and had literally just moved on from their stage background, 'Between Showers' is not bad at all.

While not audacious, the film hardly looks ugly, is more than competently directed and is appealingly played. Chaplin looks comfortable for so early on and shows his stage expertise while opening it up that it doesn't become stagy or repetitive shtick. The Tramp did become more likeable later but again he was still evolving.

Although the humour, charm and emotion was done even better and became more refined later, 'Between Showers' is mildly humorous, sweet and easy to like, though the emotion is not quite there. It moves quickly and doesn't feel too long or short.

Overall, far from one of Chaplin's best but not bad at all. 6/10 Bethany Cox

In 1914, Charlie Chaplin began making pictures. These were made for Mack Sennett (also known as "Keystone Studios") and were literally churned out in very rapid succession. The short comedies had very little structure and were completely ad libbed. As a result, the films, though popular in their day, were just awful by today's standards. Many of them bear a strong similarity to home movies featuring obnoxious relatives mugging for the camera. Many others show the characters wander in front of the camera and do pretty much nothing. And, regardless of the outcome, Keystone sent them straight to theaters. My assumption is that all movies at this time must have been pretty bad, as the Keystone films with Chaplin were very successful.

The Charlie Chaplin we know and love today only began to evolve later in Chaplin's career with Keystone. By 1915, he signed a new lucrative contract with Essenay Studios and the films improved dramatically with Chaplin as director. However, at times these films were still very rough and not especially memorable. No, Chaplin as the cute Little Tramp was still evolving. In 1916, when he switched to Mutual Studios, his films once again improved and he became the more recognizable nice guy--in many of the previous films he was just a jerk (either getting drunk a lot, beating up women, provoking fights with innocent people, etc.). The final evolution of his Little Tramp to classic status occurred in the 1920s as a result of his full-length films.

Apart from one or two moments, this film has little to offer other than guys slugging each other and mistreating women. No laughs--just amateurish crap by today's standards.

Just watched this, an early Charlie Chaplin performance in a Keystone-Mack Sennett film, on the Internet Archive site. It only showed 8 minutes of what according to this site was 15 minutes of this short but what I did see was quite funny and fascinating nonetheless. In this one, a masher (Ford Sterling) steals a cop's umbrella, unbeknownst to the cop, and encounters a woman who's trying to cross a water-flooded street which he sees as an opportunity to woo her. Chaplin's Tramp character arrives at this point and tries to to the same. There's a funny bit where he almost falls into the water. After this come a few more highly amusing stuff in which Charlie and Ford start to poke each other before the thing abruptly ends. Like I said, I found the thing quite amusing so on that note, Between Showers is worth a look. P.S. A few minutes ago, I watched much of the rest on YouTube so it seems I've now seen the entire short.

Let's be honest, Charles Chaplin's earlier films with The Keystone Studios weren't usually very good. This is the case with this one. Most part, the problem lied in the production - they made these movies extremely quick, and the artistic outcome wasn't very important, only the profit (like with today's major studios). At that time Chaplin was just the hired hand (although appreciated one) and lacked any artistic control.

In this one, Chaplin shares the screen with another big star of the time, Ford Sterling. These two fight over the attention of the woman (and over the umbrella). Although, Ford Sterling's character seems to fight more with the woman, than with the other man. I guess I didn't find the blatant beating of the woman that funny (oh, the modern 'soft' man).

The film had some moments that proved to grow into something, but I guess the rushed production prevented the development of more elaborate gags. The film itself is not very memorable but it gives us a good comparison between young Charles Chaplin and an already established star. When you pay attention to the styles of these two comedians then it is clear why the world still remembers and hails on as the greatest of all times while the other is totally forgotten (besides by the small subculture of silent comedy aficionados). Chaplin's star started to shine almost immediately.

Chaplin's fourth short, appearing less than a month after his debut, is good fun. A rival tramp steals an umbrella from a policeman, then sets about seducing a woman with it. Charlie also has his eye on the femme, and soon a battle for both the brolly and the girl ensues. Even though it's so early in his career, Chaplin has most of the Little Tramp mannerisms and tics down pat in this effort (except for the pathos, which would come later), and it's fascinating to see the beginnings of the expressions and gags which he'd be exploring for the rest of his life. Not as polished or imaginative as his later films, but a very early gem.

Between Showers (1914)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

After a rainy day a woman (Emma Bell Clifton) is trying to get across a muddy street when a man (Ford Sterling) offers to help but soon a Tramp (Charles Chaplin) tries to help as well. Soon the two men are fighting and others jump in. This was Chaplin's fourth film as an actor, the third playing the Tramp and in my opinion the first one where he could call himself the star. It's rather amazing to see how far advanced Chaplin was even though he hadn't yet turned the character into the masterpiece we all know him for. Just look at how Chaplin acts compared to everyone else in the film. I'm certainly not saying the others are bad but they are typical of what you'd see in a Keystone film and then there's Chaplin doing his magic. The first five minutes are the best when Chaplin is losing his balance as he tries to flirt with the woman and eventually has one of his feet fall in. The joke that happens when he pulls his foot out is priceless. The rest of the film is rather routine and I doubt too many will find laughter but if you want to see Chaplin evolve then this here is important.

Charlie Chaplin had only starred in a few movies and had just debuted the Tramp when he appeared in Henry Lehrman's "Between Showers". The plot involves a stolen umbrella, but is mainly an excuse for a bunch of physical humor. Cinema was still in its relative infancy, and the absence of sound meant that people had to do a lot of the acting with their faces. Despite the simple plot, it's a fun 15 minutes. It's ironic seeing a city block in LA surrounded by water, now that California's running out of water.

Anyway, pretty fun. Chester Conklin (the policeman) later played the technician in "Modern Times".

In Kid Auto Races at Venice, Chaplin first tried on the costume of the little Tramp, and was clearly unsure what to do with it. He wandered around and made himself seen, making it clear that he wanted to be noticed and had something to show the world, but he still wasn't sure what the personality of his character was. In Mabel's Strange Predicament, he tries something new, and finds that it went wrong. Now, in Between Showers, we have another example of the incredible, almost prophetic foreshadowing and symbolism that we saw in Kid Auto Races. Whereas in his last film, he was an obnoxious, belligerent drunk, in Between Showers he decides to try helping people. Not only that, but within the first few minutes of the film, he is literally testing out the waters. And as we would see in the years to come, the experiment worked with phenomenal success.

What Chaplin also largely discovers in this film is the hyperbolic fight scene, exaggerated to cartoonish proportions for the benefit of the slightly fast motion and the absence of close-ups, which provides a comic effect sufficient to inspire years of including similar scenes in future films. The plot is simple, as they were in those days, and concerns the varying degrees of possession of an umbrella, with hilarious results, as they say. Between Showers probably marks the last major change for the Tramp that we would ever see, since Chaplin got it nearly perfect here. Let the show begin…