In 1914 Charlie Chaplin was hired by Mack Sennett to replace outgoing star Ford Sterling at Sennett’s Keystone Pictures for $7500 a year. Two years later, Charlie was making $600,000 a year at Mutual Pictures. The fruits of that $600,000—12 two-reel comedies traditionally known as “the Mutuals”—have been stunningly restored to what is probably “beyond pristine” condition—better than they looked when they were first shown—by Flicker Alley, which did a similar job with Chaplin’s Keystones.1 The Mutuals have been in pretty good condition since the dawn of the DVD era, but this new restoration is easily the best.
I won’t bore you with the details, since I don’t know them, but you can track them down on the net—check the “comments” section at Amazon if you’re really curious. But the film’s the thing, after all, so if you have any interest in silent comedy at all—most people don’t, of course—you need to get these.
That being said, I will point out that not all the Mutuals are gems, but “Easy Street” is perhaps the greatest short ever made, and, well, check my review of all 12 Mutuals for those details.
Having done such extraordinary work with both the Keystones and the Mutuals, the Flicker Alley gang, actually an extended, intercontinental effort, needs to take on the “Essanays” as well, where Chaplin made his first “Chaplinesque” films, back in 1915. And, let me point out, Flicker Alley folks, if you’re really looking for funny, the funniest two-reelers in the world, to my mind, were made the two guys known as Stan Laurel and Oliver Norvell Hardy. Yes, they’re available, one way or another, but, considering that they were done in the late twenties and early thirties, the quality isn’t nearly what it should be. Get cracking on this! Now!
Afterwords
A complete listing of my reviews of all of Chaplin’s work is here.
- This photo is actually taken from one of Chaplin’s early Keystones. ↩︎
