Playgoers and critics have long wondered about the enigmatic Hamlet of William Shakespeare or longed to know the secret behind Mona Lisa's smile in the famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci. What if one day someone found Shakespeare's initial drafts for his play or Da Vinci's early sketches for Mona Lisa? Something like that very thing happened with one of the greatest artists in movie history - Charles Chaplin.

Chaplin never meant them to be seen. His brother Sydney, who jealously guarded his brother's business enterprises, avidly collected all the out-takes and unused sequences from his famous sibling's movies from 1916 on, keeping them in a warehouse at Chaplin's studio. When Charles Chaplin left America during the Red Scare of the early 1950's, he sent word back to his loyal cameraman of 40-plus years, Roland Totheroh, to destroy every bit of this massive collection.

Why did Chaplin want it all destroyed? This may never be known. Totheroh was too good an employee to question the wishes of his long-time employer, so he gathered all the material and sent it off to the incinerators. Somehow, however, a lot of the reels did not reach the flames. Instead, this incredibly valuable footage found its way into the hands of Raymond Rohauer, the Los Angeles-area film collector. Rohauer may have enjoyed watching the material privately, but there was nothing he could do with it. If word had gotten back to Chaplin that the footage still existed, he would almost certainly have demanded it be destroyed.

It was only after Chaplin's death, that British film historian Kevin Brownlow and his documentary-making partner David Gill discovered Rohauer's stash while making their series Hollywood (1980). Coordinating with the Chaplin estate, Brownlow and Gill recovered the material from Rohauer, receiving a van tightly packed with reel after reel of unseen Chaplin footage. Some of the material, sadly, had deteriorated beyond repair due to nitrate damage, but the rest provided an incredible insight into the work of the most famous filmmaker of all time.

Episode 1 of Unknown Chaplin (1982), the documentary crafted from this material by Brownlow and Gill for Thames Television, deals with a handful of shorts Chaplin made for the Mutual Film Corporation in 1916 and 1917. Chaplin, who once told his cameraman Totheroh, "Film's cheap!" would build sets or set up a premise with no script and few specific ideas. With camera rolling, Chaplin would meticulously work out gag after gag as these surviving out-takes show. In The Floorwalker (1916), Chaplin puts an escalator in a department store then builds a story around it, requiring him to always run the wrong way down the moving staircase. In Behind the Screen (1916) Chaplin works out an elaborate gag involving footage running backwards, a sequence that did not survive the final cut. The Cure (1917) goes through take after take built around a story that sees Charlie as a bellboy in a posh health spa. Only after working and re-working the material does he discover he needs to be in another role. The biggest changes of all come in another 1917 short, this one built around Chaplin's fear of aggressive waiters. Working backwards from a caf¿equence, Chaplin creates a meeting place for him and his heroine, a ship bringing new arrivals to America. As the rushes show, an idea for an inauspicious comedy bit led to one of his greatest triumphs, The Immigrant (1917).

The Unknown Chaplin is one of the most wonderful insights into the processes of an artist ever provided. Had Chaplin succeeded in having this material consigned to the flames, it would have been an incalculable loss, not only for film lovers, but also the history of 20th Century art.

Writers/Producers: Kevin Brownlow and David Gill
Narrator: James Mason
Music arranger/conductor: Carl Davis
Video Editors: Terry Badham, Grant Goodwin, Tom Kavanagh
Film Editor: Trevor Waite
BW & C-53m.

by Brian Cady