One A.M. (1916)
Chaplin's Mutual Comedies (1916-1917) • 27m
ONE A.M, Chaplin's fourth Mutual, is an impressive piece of virtuosity, a solo performance except for a brief appearance by Albert Austin as a taxi driver. The film is a tour de force of Chaplin's superb pantomime and comic creativity performed in a restricted space, a brilliant experiment that he never repeated. The film's simple situation revolves around a drunken gentleman as he arrives home early one morning and tries to get upstairs into bed.
Art director Scotty Cleethorpe designed the splendidly surreal set, and technical director Ed Brewer created the folding bed that Chaplin turned into a memorable foil. The film is not only a remarkable experiment, but also an invaluable record of Chaplin’s famous drunken character, earlier seen in the Fred Karno sketch Mumming Birds.
Up Next in Chaplin's Mutual Comedies (1916-1917)
-
The Count (1916)
The fifth film in the Mutual series, THE COUNT, further develops the situations of Caught in a Cabaret (1914) and A Jitney Elopement (1915) and anticipates the future Chaplin films The Rink (1916), The Idle Class (1921), and City Lights (1931), films in which Charlie impersonates a man of means i...
-
The Pawnshop (1916)
In the sixth Mutual film, Charlie is a pawnbroker's assistant in a pawnshop that evokes the London of Chaplin's childhood. The film is rich in comic transposition, a key element to Chaplin's genius. The apex of such work in the Mutuals is the celebrated scene in THE PAWNSHOP in which Charlie exam...
-
Behind the Screen (1916)
A refinement of his earlier comedies set in a film studio, BEHIND THE SCREEN, Chaplin's seventh film for Mutual, lampoons the unmotivated slapstick of the kind Chaplin disliked when he worked for Mack Sennett. Chaplin made the film as a sort of parody of the knockabout, pie-throwing comedy of the...
