LA Times: Classic Hollywood: Restoring Chaplin gems

[Bruce Calvert]

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/ne ... 4585.story

Classic Hollywood: Restoring Chaplin gems
Gone are the grainy, broken silents from the star's Keystone years. A new DVD set showcases the birth of the Tramp.
By Susan King, Los Angeles Times
October 20, 2010
For the first half of the 20th century, Charlie Chaplin was the most famous movie comedian in the world thanks to his endearing Tramp character and the masterpieces he wrote and directed, including "The Gold Rush," "City Lights," "Modern Times" and "The Great Dictator." But every genius has to start somewhere, and for Chaplin that was with the Keystone Film Co., where he honed his craft and created his iconic character — the baggy-pants, bowler-hatted Tramp.

The terrific new "Chaplin at Keystone" DVD set arriving Oct. 26 from Flicker Alley, beautifully illustrates how Chaplin's star was born at Keystone.

"In one year and in 35 films, Chaplin not only becomes the Tramp, he learns about movies, how movies work. He becomes Chaplin," says Serge Bromberg, whose Paris-based Lobster Films got the ball rolling on the Keystone set.

In 1913, Chaplin was a young British comedian touring America with the Fred Karno theatrical company making $75 a week. That spring, Keystone Film Co. in Los Angeles asked the 24-year-old to become one of its stock company of comedic characters. He was offered $150 a week for three months with a raise to $175 per week for the rest of the year — more money than he had ever seen.

Keystone was the brainchild of Mack Sennett, often called the "king of comedy." Among its stable of comedic players were Sennett, Mabel Normand, Fred Mace, Ford Sterling, Fatty Arbuckle, Chester Conklin, Mack Swain and Edgar Kennedy. Sterling was about leave to start his own company, and Chaplin stepped in as his replacement

So on Jan. 14, 1914, Chaplin began his first Keystone short, "Making a Living," in which he plays a dandy of questionable character. When he stepped in front of the camera that day, Chaplin didn't know anything about filmmaking. By year's end, he had not only developed the Tramp but was also writing and directing the short films. Though Sennett didn't believe in publicizing the names of his actors — he considered the Keystone name to be the star — by the end of 1914, Chaplin's name would appear in some ads. Some theaters would have a poster of Chaplin as the Tramp with the sentence "I'm here today."

In these early incarnations, the Little Tramp isn't quite the sweet little guy of "The Gold Rush" or "City Lights" but a man who loves to drink, smoke and is a bit of a lecher. Because those Keystone film have been seen over the years in bad, edited prints, often with different titles and projected in the wrong speed, these Keystone comedies are often dismissed as not very good.

But that assessment should change with this new DVD set; these Keystone films haven't looked this sharp and clear in decades. Among the highlights are "Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal.," which marks the first on-screen appearance of the Tramp; "Twenty Minutes of Love," which was his first effort at writing and directing, though no one really knows if he completely directed it; "A Busy Day," in which he plays a woman interrupting a parade; and "Tillie's Punctured Romance," the first feature-length comedy, which was restored by UCLA Film and Television Archive. The set also includes an excerpt from "A Thief Catcher," a recently discovered Keystone short in which Chaplin has a lengthy cameo as a Keystone cop.

With the support of Association Chaplin (the company the filmmaker created for his children), eight years ago the British Film Institute National Archive, the Cineteca Bologna and its lab L'Immagine Ritrovata and Lobster Films began to gather from archives and collectors the best 35-millimeter early generation materials on the Keystone Chaplins. Bromberg describes the process as "one of the most difficult restorations … like climbing Everest."

Keystone went out of business in 1917, and all of the studio's remaining negatives and films were sold at auction a few years after that. By the time the negatives were sold, Chaplin was the most famous comic actor in the world. Because Keystone was out of business, "no one could sue for piracy," Bromberg says. "So a lot of people tried to grab prints or any kind of material on those 35 films, retitle them and say it is a new Chaplin comedy."

BFI and Bologna made new 35mm negatives for films they restored. Lobster did digital restoration, getting rid of any shaking in the frame and smoothing out transitions between source materials. They also used 16mm and 35mm clips supplied by restorationist David Shepard and his Blackhawk Films in the U.S.

"It turns out that [my material] was less blemished than a lot of the stuff that the archives had found from old prints," Shepard says. "We were able to put in little missing bits, and in some cases we used the entire film."

susan.king(at)latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times

[Bruce Calvert]

New York Post: DVD Extra: Early Chaplin

http://www.nypost.com/p/blogs/movies/be ... prYz92rvrN

DVD Extra: Early Chaplin, late Sirk, full-frontal Burstyn with bedbugs
8:51 AM, October 26, 2010 ι Lou Lumenick

English musical hall veteran Charlie Chaplin began his film career just after New Year's 1914. By Halloween, he'd shot 34 short films and the first full-length slapstick comedy and was already well on his way to superstardom. He had also made his debut as a director.


Nearly a century later, the fruits of Chaplin's remarkable year at the Mack Sennett's studio in California (he left for a more lucrative deal at Triangle soon afterwards) have been assembled in the wonderful collection "Chaplin at Keystone,'' out today on DVD from the dedicated archivists at Flicker Alley.


The set is the result of a decade-long restoration effort by the British Film Institute, Italy's Cineteca de Bologna and France's Lobster Films that utilized negatives and prints from archives around the world, working miracles with state-of-the-art chemical and digital restoration methods. They've produced the clearest, steadiest and most complete copies of these oft-reissued, abridged, retitled and badly-duped films that have been available in more than 80 years.


Chaplin introduces his signature character, The Tramp, in his second short, in a beautiful transfer of the famous "Kid Races at Venice,'' in which he creates a sensation disrupting a real-life sporting event. But the pathos he later invested in the character is rarely present in these often quite violent but very funny shorts that have Chaplin either teamed with or supporting (and frequently upstaging) Sennett's established stars, Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle, Ford Sterling, Chester Conklin and Mable Normand (the latter directed one of the shorts and co-directed two others).


Demonstrating an extraordinary instinct for performing on camera at the outset, Chaplin appears in a variety of other comic guises, playing a dandy turned newspaper reporter in his debut "Making a Living,'' an immigrant German in "Mabel at the Wheel'' and a con man who tries to fleece Marie Dressler in the feature "Tillie's Punctured Romance,'' adapted from Dressler's 1910 stage hit (it was remade by Sennett in 1927 in an apparently lost version with W.C. Fields).







In several other films, Chaplin recreates his vaudeville role as a drunk, appearing in "Tango Tangles'' more or less as his handsome self with Arbuckle and Sterling at a Venice, Calif. dance hall. By March, Chaplin had persuaded Sennett to let him co-direct "Twenty Minutes of Love'' and "Caught in a Cabaret,'' making his solo directing debut in April with "Caught in the Rain,'' which he also wrote. Chaplin was already introducing themes that would reoccur throughout a film career that stretched into the 1960s.


That September, Chaplin wrote and directed the hilarious "Dough and Dynamite'' co-starring with Turpin as waiters pressed into service as reluctant bakers during a strike. An excellent booklet by Jeffrey Vance accompanying the set says the film -- which grossed more than $130,000 on an $1,800 budget -- was considered "one of the greatest of all Hollywood comedies'' of the silent era.


Besides featurettes on the restorations and the filming locations, the set also includes a surviving fragment from "A Thief Catcher,'' a long-lost short with Chaplin appearing as a Keystone Kop that was discovered earlier this year. "Chaplin at Keystone'' includes all of his other shorts from 1914 except for "Her Friend the Bandit'' with Normand, which sadly is no longer known to exist.