A Busy Day (1914)

SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

No one would confuse Charlie in drag with a woman or would they? While the tramp is not here there is plenty of physical comedy in this split-reeler with Kids Auto Races. It has all of 6 minutes to go through the action.One important thing is one of the early pairings of Charlie with Mack Swain. Mack would do several films with him in these formative years and very often Swain was a good support foil for Charlie. I had this film on 8MM film for many years from when I was young.The history of Charlie doing this is more important than the quality of the film. This was one of those early pieces that started to get him an audience. This would be important later when he became a legend.

A Busy Day (1914) ** (out of 4) Chaplin plays a woman(!) who gets tired of her husbands and decides to fight with him in public. This here really doesn't have a single funny moment but it's still interesting to see Chaplin playing a woman.Caught in a Cabaret (1914) *** (out of 4) Chaplin is mistaken as a Greek Ambassador and must keep a girl's family from finding out. This one here is a real riot with some wonderfully funny fight scenes but the real highlights are the title cards, which feature some very funny one-liners. Also of note is that this storyline would play a big part in future Chaplin films.Fatal Mallet, The (1914) *** (out of 4) Chaplin, along with two other guys, fights for the affection of a woman. Instead of using their fist the guys instead throw bricks at one another. This is a very funny film that has some outrageous violence that makes for a good time.Knockout, The (1914) *** (out of 4) To show off his braveness, Fatty Arbuckle challenged a professional boxer to a fight. Fatty is funny as usually and like the above film, this one here gets the laughs from violence ranging from punches to items being thrown. Chaplin has a small but funny cameo as the referee.

'A Busy Day' is proof of something I've often maintained: namely, that no so-called 'lost' film should ever be considered truly lost unless it was deliberately destroyed. 'A Busy Day' was unavailable for many decades, and was generally assumed to be lost ... until an acetate-stock dupe print (intended for home-movie exhibition) was discovered in 1970; the movie is now widely available on video.'A Busy Day' was made by Mack Sennett's Keystone studio, and even by that studio's slapdash methods this was a cursory effort. It ran only about 5 minutes. Cinema projectionists' reels run about 10 minutes; to make up the difference, Sennett purchased an educational film from an outside source ... releasing the two unrelated subjects as a single 'split-reel'.'A Busy Day' is also a good example of Keystone's guerrilla filmmaking techniques. Sennett and his crews would often take advantage of some local event, placing their actors (in costume) in front of this so as to co-opt the event as background for the actors' slapstick antics. When a military band performed its manoeuvres near Venice, California, the Keystone gang ad-libbed this movie at the edge of the parade grounds ... using the musicians as a backdrop.This movie features Keystone's mushroom-faced comedian Mack Swain ... but without the bushy moustache he usually wore in his 'Ambrose' characterisation. Swain is teamed here with Charlie Chaplin, in the role of (wait for it) Swain's wife!Cross-gender casting was fairly common in silent films ... usually employed when a female character had to endure some rough stuff, so a male 'actress' was cast. In two other films ('The Masquerader' and 'A Woman'), Chaplin - a small, graceful actor with delicate features - played a man who dons female disguise: in both cases, he looked quite passable as a *beautiful* woman. (On at least one occasion offscreen, Chaplin wore female disguise in public, without being detected, so as to escape from some overly zealous fans.) In 'A Busy Day', for the only time in his screen career, Chaplin played a biological woman ... so, it's intriguing that 'she' has no sex appeal at all. This woman is a pantomime dame, like Widow Twanky or Monty Python's pepperpot women. She shrieks, she leaps into the air, she blows her nose on her long skirt and beats her husband with an umbrella.Because Chaplin stars in 'A Busy Day', it is often assumed that he also directed this film. That is almost certainly incorrect. Chaplin's personal archives in Vevey did not include a print of this film, indicating that he did not care to own a copy ... and that he had probably participated in 'A Busy Day' only as an actor for hire, rather than as scenarist or director. Surviving records from Sennett's studio indicate that this film was probably directed by George Nichols, a general factotum at Keystone whose best talents were managerial.There is some clever editing work in this movie, of a type that I call 'modular' filmmaking. Two different camera set-ups are used for a sequence in which Chaplin's female character is tossed back and forth by two men. The two set-ups function as two separate modules, or even two separate movies running simultaneously, with Chaplin tossed back and forth between them. The effect is amusing, but I suspect that it was born of necessity ... to make two separate locations look as if they were geographically adjacent.I'll rate 'A Busy Day' 4 points out of 10. It's not especially funny, but it has some historical value as an early example of on-the-fly filmmaking.

A Busy Day is probably one of Chaplin's first comedies (it's at least in his first year of screen acting, 1914). He is not the Tramp, but actually playing a woman, a henpecking wife who drives her husband to another woman. Alas, film comedy had not matured yet, so, like many of its kindred films, A Busy Day contains only the broadest slapstick comedy: woman hits man, man hits woman, woman kicks man in butt, repeat. However, scrolling through this film's alternate titles, I came upon something utterly interesting: one of those alternate titles was The Militant Suffragette!!! I'm not exactly sure when women got the vote (I know that the first presidential election they voted in was 1920), but, judging from that title, this film may have been criticizing (humorously, not seriously) women who wished to have political rights! Now how's that for history!