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Charles Chaplin is universally hailed as the greatest comedic talent in the
history of motion pictures. And yet Chaplin's earliest efforts - which account
for more than half of his total output - are often ignored in favor of his
later, better-known films.
In 1914 Chaplin appeared in a total of 35 movies for the Keystone Film Company;
the following year he signed with the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company, where
he wrote, directed, and starred in more than a dozen short comedies. Though the
resulting pictures were frequently crude and erratic, they reveal the emergence
of a formidable comic genius.
Charlie Chaplin at Keystone and Essanay: Dawn of the Tramp, by Ted Okuda and
David Maska, is a film-by-film examination of this period in Chaplin's career,
tracing the birth of his beloved "Tramp" character, his evolution as an actor
and filmmaker, and citing gags and themes that would become his trademarks. From
his first film, Making a Living, Chaplin strove to bring a new dimension to
movie comedy. Beginning with Twenty Minutes of Love, he began directing his
own
pictures, gradually developing his craft through such Keystone productions as
Mabel's Married Life, The Face on the Bar Room Floor, The Rounders, The New
Janitor, and Dough and Dynamite. Soon, the "Chaplinesque" style came to
the
forefront in the Essanay productions The Champion, The Tramp, The Bank,
Burlesque on Carmen, and Police.
The authors also examine how these movies have been re-edited, recopied,
reissued and retitled over the years (with a special section that matches
pseudonym titles to their original source film), a look at various home-movie
distributors that manufactured abridgements for the collectors market (in the
days before video and DVD), footage that was reworked for anthologies and
unauthorized releases, and why the substandard quality of some surviving prints
makes it difficult to properly assess these pictures today.
To order Charlie Chaplin at Keystone and Essanay: Dawn of the Tramp, use
this link to Barnes and Noble.
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