Charlot, panadero

Dough and Dynamite was one of Chaplin's longest films at the time it was made, and also featured an unusually complex plot. Granted, "complex plot" meant something very different in 1914 than it means in 2008, but this was certainly a step up from his previous films, many of which were little more than exaggerated fist-fights. There is even some dramatic tension in this one!

The story involves some bakers going on strike demanding more money and less work, and so Charlie and one other man, played by Chester Conklin,have to take over for them. Neither of them is in anyway qualified to be baking bread.

There are some memorable moments, such as Charlie getting revenge against his co-worker for hitting him over the head (not knowing that his co-worker had been hit over the head himself), the floury dough-fights, and Charlie making dinner rolls by wrapping the dough around his arm.

The film seems to build up its story and have some semblance of a genuinely developed plot but ultimately ends like so many of these other early short films, with a fight and a seemingly meaningless ending. Still, it's clear that Chaplin was beginning to make genuine advances in his film techniques.

This picture, which is to be released on October 26, is the first of the long-promised two-reel Keystone comedies that are to be released hereafter at regular intervals. So far as the story itself it could easily have been told in a half reel, but there is a genuine laugh in nearly every scene and the picture is one of the cleanest ones that Keystone has done. The scene of the story is a combined bakery and restaurant elaborately constructed with three rooms, shop, restaurant and kitchen on the street level, and two bakerooms in the cellar. In all of these and in the back yard, the "goat" gets into all kinds of trouble. He is a waiter and when the bakers go on strike the proprietor makes him take their places. The strikers buy a loaf of bread, put a dynamite cartridge inside of it and then return it to the shop as being too heavy. The waiter-baker chucks in into the oven to cook some more and then after a while things happen. The explosion of course wrecks everything and the last views we have are of the proprietor digging himself out of the debris of bricks and mortar that was once the bake oven and of the "goat's" head slowly emerging from a great mass of dough that completely envelops him. - Moving Picture World, October 24, 1914

'Dough and Dynamite', an early Chaplin piece scripted by Mack Sennett, has all the hallmarks of a try-out (which indeed it was, its speed and plot reappearing in later work from the little comic).

Chaplin is good, but the story lacks focus. There's a manic and exasperated character (the priceless Chester Conklin); a flash customer (John Francis Dillon), and a mysterious loaf. The dough of the title gets everywhere but it can't hold this disappointing short together.

My feeling is that 'Dough and Dynamite' drags too much for a short piece - as an example of how to do set pieces of comedy, it's fine, but it is hard going for audiences today compared to the rest of Charlie's work.

For those who are familiar with later Chaplin films, this is interesting in a film-school sort of way. Chaplin was working with a script by Mack Sennett, and the story and gags follow the high-speed comedy methods favored by him; yet the gags and the situations were re-used by Chaplin in later films, from THE PAWNSHOP through MODERN TIMES. The difference is that when Chaplin was working for Keystone, he turned out 35 short films, about nine hours of screen time, in one year. By the time he did his later films, he would take several years for each, rehearsing and perfecting each gag through sometimes hundreds of takes.

In this film, we see them in in primitive form. They lack the polish and grace that would make them so very funny in later films, but they have their own charm, if you feel that speed and destruction are the basics of good film comedy.

Mack Sennett in his "King of Comedy" proposes that this is the film that made Chaplin a star. Like much else in his autobiography, Sennett seems to be relying on a jumble of memories and imaginations. This was released in late Oct. 1914, and Chaplin was certainly a huge star several months before this.

Moving Picture World had this to say about the film in 1914: "This picture, which is to be released on October 26, is the first of the long-promised two-reel Keystone comedies that are to be released hereafter at regular intervals. So far as the story itself it could easily have been told in a half reel. but there is a genuine laugh in nearly every scene and the picture is one of the cleanest ones that Keystone has done."

It does seem to have only half a reel of plot. The magazine is being kind when they say that there is a genuine laugh in nearly every scene. Many of the laughs are repetitious and only three or four sequences are well choreographed.

The picture lacks a love interest for Chaplin and the vicious beating he gives to co-worker Chester Conglin makes him less than lovable. While lots of pastry and dough gets flung around, the only pie appears at 23:40 and Chaplin flings it pretty quickly, so it is at best a very minor gag in the film.