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