Her Friend The Bandit

[Rob Farr]

Hello Mabel has turned up and Chaplin's not in it. The most likely bet for the Chaplin-Normand-Booker frame grab is some promotional film or newsreel promoting the Keystone brand. Why just two frames survived and how they came into the possession of Maurice Bessy is anyone's guess.

[Richard M Roberts]

Brent Walker has said he think those frames might be from HOW MOTION PICTURES ARE MADE (released January 15, 1914), which may have had cameos from a number of Keystone stars and Chaplin could have appeared in this while at the studio waiting to make his first starring film MAKING A LIVING.


RICHARD M ROBERTS

[Thierry G. Mathieu]

On How Motion Pictures Are Made :

As first said p.51 in the following book

https://www.chaplin-at-keystone.com/en/issue-26.html

and more recently developed p.48 in the new volume

https://www.chaplin-at-keystone.com/en/issue-30.html

it was Bo Berglund who was the first in july 2006 to put forward the idea that the three frames in Bessy's book (initially published in Cinemonde in 1933 and 1939) came from How Motion Pictures Are Made. These frames (cut from Les Coulisses du Cinema, the french release title of this short film, when screened in the city where lived Bessy when he was young) can be seen in the two books quoted above, whith some other original documents and ads on the film from US, UK and French sources.

On Her Friend the Bandit :

Please, Richard Warner, let us know which issue of 1964 of the National Film Theatre London Programme includes the title Her Friend the Bandit (I think there was an issue each two months). Also, what is the number of the page ? (and how many pages in total in this progamme ?). Perhaps the best solution would be to show us a copy of the concerned page.

The issue #30 of my serie includes some new informations on what I call a « reconstructed synopsis » of this lost film, and some new reviews and ads (from the US and the UK) where the name of Chaplin is clearly listed.

The complete serie through : https://www.chaplin-at-keystone.com/en

With pleasure...

Thierry

[Rob Farr]

Do you offer English-language versions of your books, Thierry? Can they be ordered as eBooks or PDFs?

[Richard Warner]

chaplin a.jpg (87.32 KiB) Viewed 1637 times

chaplin b.jpg (98.03 KiB) Viewed 1637 times

[Richard Warner]

Pictures posted above as requested. Brochure 28 pages. Chaplin season on pages 1 to 7. In a previous posting I said they didn't screen eleven Keystones (not counting Thief Catcher of course). I should have looked at the rest of the booklet more closely. There was also a season of spy films (Secret Agent, Lady Vanishes etc.) and five additional Keystones were shown in support of those films - Between Showers, Twenty Minutes of Love, Tango Tangles, Kid Auto Races, Star Boarder.
So, the ones they didn't show (or didn't list in the booklet) were His Favourite Pastime, Cruel Cruel Love, Busy Day, Fatal Mallet, Knockout and Recreation. (Also, they didn't list Triple Trouble).
As mentioned before, the introduction to the season claims that they had "traced" all but four of Chaplin's early shorts (even though they didn't show seven). They did not name the four shorts.
The 1965 McDonald, Conway, Ricci book lists Cruel Cruel Love, Mabel's Strange Predicament, A Busy Day and Her Friend The Bandit as lost, but the NFT listed Mabel's Strange Predicament and Her Friend The Bandit as showing in their 1964 season. I attended a major Chaplin season at the NFT in the 1970s. Mabel's Strange Predicament was definitely shown. Her Friend The Bandit definitely wasn't!
Hope that helps,
Richard

[Thierry G. Mathieu]

Thank you Richard for the pictures.

Of course Her Friend the Bandit (K.16) was a wrong title listed here.
I think the correct title was The Fatal Mallet (K.15) because at the time this film was available from many years at the BFI (at least two copies, a 16mm from The Ensign Library, and a 35mm from a private collector).
Recreation and A Busy Day was still missing in the early 60s, and the BFI only obtain a copy of Cruel Cruel Love (at the end of the 60s or early in the 70s) from Enrique Bouchard, in exchange of a 16mm copie of The Fatal Mallet.
Bouchard also sold a 16mm copy of Cruel Cruel Love to the US collector Brian Anthony who later made from this spanish version an english version, the wellknown one we can see on Youtube and many dvd editions (but he kept the wrong intertitle lettre "Dear Charlie ... Minta" which was not an original Keystone intertitle). Some years later this english 16mm version was marketed by Em Gee Film Libray (Glenn Photo Supply), and much later used by the Cineteca of Bologna and Lobster Films for the 2010 "restoration".

Thierry

[Richard Warner]

Thank you Thierry - that's exactly the information I was seeking!
Richard

[Richard M Roberts]

Thank you Thierry - that's exactly the information I was seeking!
Richard

We’re glad you’re happy Richard, but I hate to tell you, with all due respect to Thierry, it’s still nothing but a guess, an educated guess perhaps, but still a guess nevertheless. Unless Thierry was physically present at the actual screening, or has actual evidence from someone who was there, or some sort of documentation, there’s no way Thierry can accurately predict what was shown that night. The only thing we all definitely know is that they didn’t show HER FRIEND THE BANDIT, but who knows at this late date what they exactly showed. How do we know they didn’t show HIS FAVORITE PASTIME? How do we know someone just didn’t stand up and say, “Sorry, HER FRIEND THE BANDIT is off”. They could have just re-run one of the other Chaplin’s they had already shown.

And if the BFI had had a print of THE FATAL MALLET available for exhibition at the time, wouldn't they have put it on the regular program since they were trying to be completest in what they were showing? I'm sure all of those Chaplin Keystones they ran with the program of spy films were the ones in which the prints didn't become available to the NFT until after the regular Chaplin program had run.

One of my British Friends told me that the NFT was actually notorious for listing films in their full annual season programs that they didn’t end up showing, and that when they listed their later monthly or weekly programs there would from time to time be the words “Not available for season” added to the now deleted title.

Though this thread has elicited some interesting Chaplin information, the basic question asked that started it is frankly the equivalent of Laurel and Hardy in COME CLEAN asking Charlie Hall what other ice cream flavors he doesn’t have. The listing for HER FRIEND THE BANDIT is obviously an error, and however they corrected it doesn’t seem to actually answer or solve anything, especially at this late date, even if we had definite proof of what they actually showed. At the 2008 Slapsticon we advertised that we were showing SALLY OF THE SAWDUST (1925) with W. C. Fields and the print didn’t show up, so what did we show in its place (don’t anybody who was there chime in with the answer, we’re just illustrating a point here)? If we used Thierry’s line of reasoning, we must have shown IT’S THE OLD ARMY GAME or SO’S YOUR OLD MAN, since they were other surviving Fields’ silents. We didn’t.

The whole “legend” spread by the old MacDonald/Conway/ Ricci “Films of” book about what was considered missing on Chaplin in 1965 was also misleading. They mention A BUSY DAY as missing at the time, yet they have frame blowups from a print of the film exhibited in the book! The BFI had a print of MABELS STRANGE PREDICAMENT under its reissue title A HOTEL MIX-UP for decades, certainly going back to the fifties, that was likely the print the NFT showed in 1964. And other harder to find Chaplin titles also suffered from the same sort of misinformation, David Shepard was still using his poor quality blow-up of Enrique Bouchard’s 8mm print of RECREATION in his restoration for the CHAPLIN AT KEYSTONE set, without realizing or bothering to reach out to collectors to get a copy of CHARLIE’S RECREATION, a 16mm home movie reissue from the 1940’s that was relatively common, good quality and available (we used it in our superior restoration of the title on the Cinemuseum MACK SENNETT VOLUME ONE set) nor the good chunk of footage from 35mm that Paul Killiam possessed and had used in his SILENTS PLEASE compilation CLOWN PRINCES OF HOLLYWOOD which would have replaced some of the 8mm footage quite nicely and David would have had a copy of in the Blackhawk Collection.

Anyway, if the answer stops the screaming voices in your head that need to know Richard, fine, but forgive me for getting them to start singing in four-part harmony again if I say there is still no accurate answer to your question, and there is unlikely to be unless or until we have an genuine eyewitness to the event. Anything else on anyone's part is merely speculation.

RICHARD M ROBERTS

[Richard M Roberts]

I’ve always thought one of the most interesting pieces of evidence that Chaplin may not be in HER FRIEND THE BANDIT is the fact that he does not include the title in his early handwritten 1914 filmography.



Now admittedly, he does miss several pictures he had appeared in at Keystone, but I think the ones omitted were several quickies that he really did not think of as his pictures or of real import. TANGO TANGLES was an ensemble piece quickly shot at the Venice Dance Hall during an actual event. A BUSY DAY was shot in a day, more like an afternoon, and he certainly does not include his 90 second cameo in A THIEF CATCHER, but all of the pictures he starred in or spent much creative time on are here, and at the time he wrote this filmography (sometime around August as that is when the most recent films listed here, FACE ON THE BARROOM FLOOR, was released) he was closer to HER FRIEND THE BANDIT if he indeed actually worked on it than the earlier titles, so I think he be most likely to have remembered working on it if he had. So if he is in it, it may be a cameo part like A THIEF CATCHER and he may indeed be out of makeup (we do not know for sure that those Maurice Bessy frames are not from HER FRIEND THE BANDIT) and Chaplin did not think enough of it to include it on his list.

I hate to say that blurbs in small town newspapers, such bastions of fact and accuracy (not that big town newspapers were much better) don’t really add much to the pro side of the scale on the issue, especially when they can’t even get the name spelled right, and if it isn’t a review, just a “now showing” piece, the writer hasn’t seen the film. Chaplin was a big hit with audiences with his first four Keystones, by June (when BANDIT was released), he was a well known national figure, if he was in BANDIT, the publicity would be way more definite.

One more interesting bit of evidence one can glean is in the Keystone release schedule for Chaplin pictures. In June, if one includes BANDIT, five Chaplin films are released: THE FATAL MALLET (June 1), HER FRIEND THE BANDIT (June 4), THE KNOCKOUT (June 11), MABEL’S BUSY DAY (June 13), and MABEL’S MARRIED LIFE (June 20). Even considering the hectic Keystone shooting schedule, that is more films than Chaplin would usually deliver in a month, and the four days between the release of MALLET and BANDIT is slim time for two Chaplin starrers to be finished (Chaplin probably only spent a day or two on KNOCKOUT, he only has a cameo in that).

So again, the possibility that Chaplin is not in HER FRIEND THE BANDIT or only appears in a small cameo role out of makeup is more likely than it being a starring film. Or who knows, maybe it is another skinny comedian with a moustache, perhaps Charles Parrott (Charley Chase), who was at Keystone at the time, or Bill Hauber (who appears in a somewhat Chaplinesque moustache playing the villain in A VERSATILE VILLAIN (1915)), or Harry McCoy. All of this is conjecture of course, the real final proof will either be the film actually turning up, or at least some genuine stills or paper from Keystone, Mutual, Western Import, showing Chaplin to be in the film. One thing we do know, BANDIT was not considered much of a film at the time, some of the reviews call it a poor film, and Glenn Mitchell tells me that Western Import only ordered about half the number of prints for distribution that they would for the average Keystone Comedy, much less a Chaplin Keystone Comedy. Whomever is appearing in it, chances are slim that it is a comedy classic.


RICHARD M ROBERTS