Charlot e il manichino

This short feature is a nice chance to see Charlie Chaplin and Mabel Normand together, and it's a decent comedy as well. Charlie and Mabel play a married couple, with the wife receiving a lot of unwanted attention from an annoying brute played by Mack Swain. As you would expect, Mabel is charming, and Charlie is a rather ineffective but generally sympathetic husband. Some of the comedy is a bit routine, especially towards the beginning, but there is a very good sequence later on that gets good mileage out of some amusing props. Take a look if you like these old Keystone comedies.

Amusing, but there's not all that much to this short. Chaplin gets drunk and picked on by guys at a bar before he starts throwing roundhouses, then later spars with a dummy that wobbles back and forth (you can kind of guess how that goes). To be honest, my favorite part was Mabel Normand, especially when she imitates the tramp's walk. It's just 17 minutes and worth seeing for her.

In one of the most effective and thorough characterizations in any of Chaplin's films up until that time, in Mabel's Married Life Charlie plays Mabel's husband, an feeble drunk incapable of deflecting the oafish advances of a huge man in the park, who hits on Charlie's wife right in front of him. Starting these films in the park was one of Chaplin's favorite things to do back in the earliest days of his career, but here he starts his film there and then takes us into the mind of one of the characters, rather than just having some on screen slapstick goofiness.

Soon after the park incident, Charlie goes to a bar and is teased by the other patrons as he slowly gets drunk. His wife, meanwhile, is at home fashioning a blow-up doll to resemble the man in the park, thus providing a scenario from which her drunken husband can emerge her hero.

There have been some criticisms that the scene involving the dummy wasn't fleshed out and made into the effective scene that it could have been, but I have to disagree. It is very stereotypical Chaplin comedy that comes out of the scene, but I can't think of any reason to expect anything different. What we do get is a brief but effective look at the desperation of a woman who is married to someone who wants to but is unable to protect her from undesirables, and her efforts to improve her husband's confidence. It doesn't seem to work too well, but I have a feeling that the film's original audiences were more than pleased.

This film, by the way, is notable as being the first that Chaplin was allowed to write and direct on his own, and as compared to the rest of his films from this time, it is clear that he immediately began to prove his talent.

Oh, and one more thing - you may notice that the film has French intertitles. I'm not sure why this is, but those of you lucky (and smart) enough to own a Mac, you can just type them into the translator on your Dashboard and have it translated into your language of choice...

A man (Charles Chaplin) can do little when a masher starts moving in on his wife Mabel. She buys a boxing dummy to toughen him up. Meanwhile, he's in a bar drinking his blues away. The masher shows up and taunts him. In a drunken state, he actually fights back and knocks everyone down. He goes home and mistakes the boxing dummy with a real person.

Chaplin fighting a dummy is pretty funny but not unexpected. The biggest laugh happens with Mabel doing a Tramp impersonation. I don't like the split second when Chaplin starts choking Mabel and the short should always end with the couple stumbling out of the room and crashing into the nosy neighbors.

This one's poor even by Keystone standards, with Chaplin struggling to wring any laughs from his encounters with Mack Swain and a clothing dummy. At least Mabel Normand looks cute in pyjamas.