JamesWhitehead
Piffle Prospector
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2001
- Messages
- 14,209
Lost, Found & Lost Again
A Cautionary Tale
I suggest that those with fast Internet connections go through this experience in the same order I did. My journey was slower but more exciting . . .
The recent restoration of the Keystone films has received a lot of attention in classic film circles. It is lacking one title. Every source gives the Keystone 1-reeler Her Friend the Bandit, 1914, as the only Chaplin film which is entirely lost. From time to time, there are rumours it has been rediscovered but these turn out to be posts by attention-seekers.
So there I was on a frosty day, calmly enjoying some rather nice Chaplin posters on a Polish website.
Clicking the title of this long-supposed lost film, I was amazed to find there was a link to some clips!
http://www.chaplin.pl/films/herfriendth ... clips.html
So far as I could tell (from Google) this was unnoticed on the specialist English-language film sites, perhaps because of its alternative title: Flirt Mabel. Clips appeared on a number of Polish websites.
The clips on this site open in a very small window only and cannot be saved. However it looks like a Chaplin film (or several outtakes??) and the quality is reasonably good, for a Keystone of 1914.
I had seen all the completed Chaplin films many times (apart from Gentlemen of Nerve) and had seen a lot of the deleted scenes. I am thinking the first five clips may be what they claim to be. The last is probably an outtake from something else, though again, it was unfamiliar to me.
My description of the clips follows:
1, 4.31Mb: Charlie pesters Mabel outside a shop. He is an escaped convict? pursued by two prison guards. The chase features large gates of an institution and a round-topped concrete wall over which some acrobatic tumbles take place. Mabel? is eating a very large cake in the doorway of a shop.
2, 4.98Mb: In a typical park scene. Charlie disrupts the tryst of Mabel with a Count (I was going by the cast-list which gives a Count de Beans as a character, played by Charles Murray). Charlie seems to wish to muscle in on the amour, hiding behind a newspaper to push himself closer to the courting pair. When the Count departs, Charlie nuzzles up to Mabel - she turns away from him. Meanwhile, the two guards have informed the Governor of Charlie's escape.
3, 2.38Mb: Charlie pursues Mabel to (her father's?) barber's shop, where he accepts the offer of a job. A woman is seen waiting outside a shop with a parcel the size of a brick.
4, 2.70Mb: Back in the salon, now dressed in a white jacket, Charlie flirtatiously helps Mabel on with her apron. The passing Count sees this and storms in. Charlie makes him sit in the barber's chair and spins him around before landing him such a blow that the chair topples over and he falls near to Mabel. She now seems to be sympathetic to him.
5, 6.39Mb: While Mabel offers the Count a manicure, Charlie busies himself with a thickly black-bearded customer. His face-fungus is so dense, it calls for a vacuum-cleaner in place of a razor - a nice visual pun, as the tube is at first obscured by his arm and the wide attachment seems like a huge razor. Once the beard has gone, he offers the man a sniff of the Bay Rum (?) before doing some dainty work with this hair-dressing and talcum for his face. When the customer refuses to pay, Charlie hauls him back to chair, restrains him with a towel and proceeds to give him back his thick beard, courtesy of some backwards-running film. This is an unusual camera trick in the Keystone period. This barber's chair sequence looks forward to scenes in Sunnyside and of course The Great Dictator.
6, 3.23mb: This has no continuity with the other clips and seems to belong to a different film completely. Probably an outtake. Charlie and female companion arrive at the cloakroom of a ballroom. They interrupt a curious queer interlude between three men. One, obese, rather like Oliver Hardy, seated is laughing at the curlers? of his big-haired fairy friend. A third man seems to have been putting the curlers, pegs? clips? in the man's hair but he moves away, leaving Charlie pauses at the cloakroom window to sympathise mockingly with the sissy by kissing him on the forehead then delivering a slap. The scene shifts to the ballroom proper, where a large dowager is sipping punch and concealing a cuspidor? beneath her voluminous frock. Charlie is in full tramp gear in this scene.
So, was this something hiding in plain sight on the Internet? It seemed too good to be true. And so it was . . .
Before posting this discovery on a dedicated film forum, I thought I had better use that site's search function.
http://www.nitrateville.com/viewtopic.php?t=7521
Someone had, of course, been there before and the film was unmasked.
Not a recent fake at all but a Chaplin wannabe, Billy West in His Day Out, 1918!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0009179/
Billy West was a rip-off merchant, or what would be now called a Tribute Act. Yet those aware of his work consider the films are not inferior to the real thing. Viewed with an innocent eye, I rated this high among the Keystone Chaplins!
It certainly made for an entertaining couple of hours - my connection is not the fastest. Proof, again, if we needed it, that things that look too good are probably untrue.
A Cautionary Tale
I suggest that those with fast Internet connections go through this experience in the same order I did. My journey was slower but more exciting . . .
The recent restoration of the Keystone films has received a lot of attention in classic film circles. It is lacking one title. Every source gives the Keystone 1-reeler Her Friend the Bandit, 1914, as the only Chaplin film which is entirely lost. From time to time, there are rumours it has been rediscovered but these turn out to be posts by attention-seekers.
So there I was on a frosty day, calmly enjoying some rather nice Chaplin posters on a Polish website.
Clicking the title of this long-supposed lost film, I was amazed to find there was a link to some clips!
http://www.chaplin.pl/films/herfriendth ... clips.html
So far as I could tell (from Google) this was unnoticed on the specialist English-language film sites, perhaps because of its alternative title: Flirt Mabel. Clips appeared on a number of Polish websites.
The clips on this site open in a very small window only and cannot be saved. However it looks like a Chaplin film (or several outtakes??) and the quality is reasonably good, for a Keystone of 1914.
I had seen all the completed Chaplin films many times (apart from Gentlemen of Nerve) and had seen a lot of the deleted scenes. I am thinking the first five clips may be what they claim to be. The last is probably an outtake from something else, though again, it was unfamiliar to me.
My description of the clips follows:
1, 4.31Mb: Charlie pesters Mabel outside a shop. He is an escaped convict? pursued by two prison guards. The chase features large gates of an institution and a round-topped concrete wall over which some acrobatic tumbles take place. Mabel? is eating a very large cake in the doorway of a shop.
2, 4.98Mb: In a typical park scene. Charlie disrupts the tryst of Mabel with a Count (I was going by the cast-list which gives a Count de Beans as a character, played by Charles Murray). Charlie seems to wish to muscle in on the amour, hiding behind a newspaper to push himself closer to the courting pair. When the Count departs, Charlie nuzzles up to Mabel - she turns away from him. Meanwhile, the two guards have informed the Governor of Charlie's escape.
3, 2.38Mb: Charlie pursues Mabel to (her father's?) barber's shop, where he accepts the offer of a job. A woman is seen waiting outside a shop with a parcel the size of a brick.
4, 2.70Mb: Back in the salon, now dressed in a white jacket, Charlie flirtatiously helps Mabel on with her apron. The passing Count sees this and storms in. Charlie makes him sit in the barber's chair and spins him around before landing him such a blow that the chair topples over and he falls near to Mabel. She now seems to be sympathetic to him.
5, 6.39Mb: While Mabel offers the Count a manicure, Charlie busies himself with a thickly black-bearded customer. His face-fungus is so dense, it calls for a vacuum-cleaner in place of a razor - a nice visual pun, as the tube is at first obscured by his arm and the wide attachment seems like a huge razor. Once the beard has gone, he offers the man a sniff of the Bay Rum (?) before doing some dainty work with this hair-dressing and talcum for his face. When the customer refuses to pay, Charlie hauls him back to chair, restrains him with a towel and proceeds to give him back his thick beard, courtesy of some backwards-running film. This is an unusual camera trick in the Keystone period. This barber's chair sequence looks forward to scenes in Sunnyside and of course The Great Dictator.
6, 3.23mb: This has no continuity with the other clips and seems to belong to a different film completely. Probably an outtake. Charlie and female companion arrive at the cloakroom of a ballroom. They interrupt a curious queer interlude between three men. One, obese, rather like Oliver Hardy, seated is laughing at the curlers? of his big-haired fairy friend. A third man seems to have been putting the curlers, pegs? clips? in the man's hair but he moves away, leaving Charlie pauses at the cloakroom window to sympathise mockingly with the sissy by kissing him on the forehead then delivering a slap. The scene shifts to the ballroom proper, where a large dowager is sipping punch and concealing a cuspidor? beneath her voluminous frock. Charlie is in full tramp gear in this scene.
So, was this something hiding in plain sight on the Internet? It seemed too good to be true. And so it was . . .
Before posting this discovery on a dedicated film forum, I thought I had better use that site's search function.
http://www.nitrateville.com/viewtopic.php?t=7521
Someone had, of course, been there before and the film was unmasked.
Not a recent fake at all but a Chaplin wannabe, Billy West in His Day Out, 1918!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0009179/
Billy West was a rip-off merchant, or what would be now called a Tribute Act. Yet those aware of his work consider the films are not inferior to the real thing. Viewed with an innocent eye, I rated this high among the Keystone Chaplins!
It certainly made for an entertaining couple of hours - my connection is not the fastest. Proof, again, if we needed it, that things that look too good are probably untrue.
