The first of the shorts, A Dog's Life (1918), effectively paralleled the Tramp's hand-to-mouth urban existence with that of a plucky mongrel named Scraps. The dog has as much trouble wresting a loose morsel from a roving pack of mutts as Charlie has elbowing his way past the other bindlestiffs to the employment office window. The tramp ultimately takes the pooch under his protection, and the duo soon become intertwined with another unfortunate leading "a dog's life," a dance-hall singer (Edna Purviance) encouraged to flirt with the customers in order to retain her job. A chance for the trio to escape their circumstances crops up when Scraps unearths a buried wallet, but there's the matter of dealing with the hulking muggers who hid it in the first place.
The short's idyllic finale, where Chaplin and Purviance lovingly hover over a bassinet until the pan down reveals it to contain Scraps and a litter of pups, speaks to a time when continuity wasn't the greatest concern for filmmakers. Through the course of the film, the footage of the male canine co-star patently proves that Scraps just wasn't equipped to be a mother.
Next up is Shoulder Arms (1918), a project that Hollywood had decried as chancy at the time of its announcement. The public, it was feared, wouldn't appreciate Chaplin's misadventures as a doughboy in the trenches while World War I continued to rage on. Released only a few months before the Armistice, Chaplin proved the doubters' fears groundless, as the short became one of his greatest critical and popular successes to that point. The vicissitudes of the foot soldier's life--floods, vermin, loneliness--all gave Chaplin comic grist, and he made it all work. The film is at its most inventive and most surreal when Chaplin volunteers for dangerous espionage, which requires him to don the camouflage of a papier-m¿¿ree costume. Throw in a squad of decamped German soldiers in search of firewood, and the end results remain hilarious to view.
Chaplin integrated genuine WWI combat footage into the narrative of The Chaplin Revue as a means of showing the accuracy that the set designers of Shoulder Arms achieved. As originally conceived, Shoulder Arms was to have opened on the soldier's miserable stateside home life from which he's gratefully drafted, and then shift the scene to his induction physical. Amazingly, Chaplin shot all of this material, and then discarded it when he concluded that it wasn't working.
Last on the bill is The Pilgrim (1923), Chaplin's final work for First National. The premise has Charlie as an escaped convict who's appropriated a minister's clothing. Catching the first train out of town, he disembarks deep within Texas, where the local community immediately mistakes him for the new parson they've been expecting. Faced with delivering his first sermon, he launches into an elaborate pantomime of the David and Goliath story, which delights the congregation to his surprise. But maintaining the ruse becomes that much harder when an old cellmate (Charles Reisner, Chaplin's longtime assistant director) happens into town, and becomes determined to separate the bogus reverend's landlady from her mortgage payment.
Like Shoulder Arms, the timing of The Pilgrim was regarded as less than fortuitous by the industry. Hollywood was still racked by the scandals of the Fatty Arbuckle rape trial and the William Desmond Taylor murder, and was moving toward the establishment of the Hays Office; satire of the church wasn't something that should be attempted. Chaplin's ribbing of religion proved simultaneously clever and sufficiently innocuous to ensure the short's acceptance.
BW-119m.
by Jay S. Steinberg
