Chaplin at Essanay Studios - Part 3 is comprised of four shorts Charles Chaplin made at Essanay during his period at that studio, which encompassed the full bloom of the great comic's screen persona as The Little Tramp -- the lovable vagabond who repeatedly triumphed over impossible odds. Chaplin's year and a half at Essanay began in 1915, the year that all four of the films in this collection were produced.

A Woman, Chaplin's ninth film for Essanay, is set, like many other of his shorts, in a park. Edna Purviance, Chaplin's favored leading lady in silent films, plays a pretty girl with whom Charlie flirts while her father (Charles Inslee) is chasing another female through the park. Later, to disguise himself from the father and a dandy (Billy Armstrong) with whom he has fought in the park, Charlie uses Edna's clothing to impersonate a female -- the third and last time Chaplin would stage such an impersonation onscreen.

Chaplin biographer David Robinson wrote of the star that "Female attire suited him disturbingly well" and considered that it was "no small tribute" to Chaplin's convincing impersonation that A Woman was banned in Scandinavia until the 1930s."

Director/Screenplay: Charles Chaplin
Producer: Jessie T. Robbins
Cinematography: Harry Ensign
Principal cast: Charles Chaplin (Gentleman/"Nora Nettlerash"), Edna Purviance (Daughter of the House), Charles Inslee (Her father), Marta Golden (Her mother), Billy Armstrong (Father's friend).

The Bank, Chaplin's 10th film for Essanay, casts Chaplin as a bank janitor who dreams of courting a lovely stenographer (Edna Purviance) in between slapstick accidents with a wet mop. Chaplin, critically praised for his radical blend of comedy and sentiment in The Tramp earlier the same year, went even further here in adding a touch of tragedy to the comedy. Scenes in which the stenographer spurns Charlie's declarations of love, wrote Robinson, "touched depths of pathos quite unfamiliar in film comedy."

Director/Screenplay: Charles Chaplin
Producer: Jessie T. Robbins
Cinematography: Harry Ensign
Principal cast: Charles Chaplin (Janitor), Edna Purviance (Secretary), Carl Stockdale (Cashier), Charles Inslee (Manager), Billy Armstrong (Janitor).

Shanghaied, Chaplin's 11th film for Essanay, finds Charlie once again in love with Edna Purviance, who plays the daughter of a ship owner. Hired to help shanghai crew members for the ship by hitting them over the head with a mallet, Charlie is given the same treatment by the first mate and ends up going to sea himself. With Edna on board as a stowaway, Charlie enters into a series of misadventures involving a loading crane, a spell of seasickness and a keg of TNT that threatens to blow up the ship.

For the making of the film, Chaplin rented a boat, The Vaquero and worked with his cameraman, Harry Ensign, to simulate its rocking motion at sea by swinging the camera on a pivot. Chaplin also had a cabin built on rockers to suggest the feeling of a storm-tossed ship.

Director/Screenplay: Charles Chaplin
Producer: Jessie T. Robbins
Cinematography: Harry Ensign
Principal cast: Charles Chaplin (Tramp), Fred Goodwins (Shanghaied Seaman), Edna Purviance (Daughter of Shipowner), Billy Armstrong (Ship's Cook).

Chaplin makes a cameo appearance at the beginning of His Regeneration, a short in which Essanay studio boss Gilbert M. Anderson stars as "Broncho Billy," a character he had played in more than 400 episodes to become the movies' first cowboy hero. His Regeneration tells the story of a bandit who reforms for the love of a girl. Chaplin appears in a brief bit as a tramp in a barroom.

Director/Producer/Screenplay: Gilbert M. Anderson Principal cast: Gilbert Anderson (Broncho Billy), Hazel Applegate, Marguerite Clayton, Charles Chaplin.
* The length of the entire program is 95m. B&W.

by Roger Fristoe