Between Showers (1914)

Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess

Admirable film.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Just watched this, an early Charlie Chaplin performance in a Keystone-Mack Sennett film, on the Internet Archive site. It only showed 8 minutes of what according to this site was 15 minutes of this short but what I did see was quite funny and fascinating nonetheless. In this one, a masher (Ford Sterling) steals a cop's umbrella, unbeknownst to the cop, and encounters a woman who's trying to cross a water-flooded street which he sees as an opportunity to woo her. Chaplin's Tramp character arrives at this point and tries to to the same. There's a funny bit where he almost falls into the water. After this come a few more highly amusing stuff in which Charlie and Ford start to poke each other before the thing abruptly ends. Like I said, I found the thing quite amusing so on that note, Between Showers is worth a look. P.S. A few minutes ago, I watched much of the rest on YouTube so it seems I've now seen the entire short.

Between Showers (1914) ** 1/2 (out of 4) After a rainy day a woman (Emma Bell Clifton) is trying to get across a muddy street when a man (Ford Sterling) offers to help but soon a Tramp (Charles Chaplin) tries to help as well. Soon the two men are fighting and others jump in. This was Chaplin's fourth film as an actor, the third playing the Tramp and in my opinion the first one where he could call himself the star. It's rather amazing to see how far advanced Chaplin was even though he hadn't yet turned the character into the masterpiece we all know him for. Just look at how Chaplin acts compared to everyone else in the film. I'm certainly not saying the others are bad but they are typical of what you'd see in a Keystone film and then there's Chaplin doing his magic. The first five minutes are the best when Chaplin is losing his balance as he tries to flirt with the woman and eventually has one of his feet fall in. The joke that happens when he pulls his foot out is priceless. The rest of the film is rather routine and I doubt too many will find laughter but if you want to see Chaplin evolve then this here is important.

In 1914, Charlie Chaplin began making pictures. These were made for Mack Sennett (also known as "Keystone Studios") and were literally churned out in very rapid succession. The short comedies had very little structure and were completely ad libbed. As a result, the films, though popular in their day, were just awful by today's standards. Many of them bear a strong similarity to home movies featuring obnoxious relatives mugging for the camera. Many others show the characters wander in front of the camera and do pretty much nothing. And, regardless of the outcome, Keystone sent them straight to theaters. My assumption is that all movies at this time must have been pretty bad, as the Keystone films with Chaplin were very successful.The Charlie Chaplin we know and love today only began to evolve later in Chaplin's career with Keystone. By 1915, he signed a new lucrative contract with Essenay Studios and the films improved dramatically with Chaplin as director. However, at times these films were still very rough and not especially memorable. No, Chaplin as the cute Little Tramp was still evolving. In 1916, when he switched to Mutual Studios, his films once again improved and he became the more recognizable nice guy--in many of the previous films he was just a jerk (either getting drunk a lot, beating up women, provoking fights with innocent people, etc.). The final evolution of his Little Tramp to classic status occurred in the 1920s as a result of his full-length films.Apart from one or two moments, this film has little to offer other than guys slugging each other and mistreating women. No laughs--just amateurish crap by today's standards.

Although Chaplin still had many kinks to work out of his Little Tramp character by the time he made this, his fourth movie, Between Showers nonetheless shows tremendous improvement over his first attempts at developing a screen persona. In the first, Making a Living, he played a rich villain. In Kid Races at Venice and Mabel's Strange Predicament, the Tramp made his debut, but was portrayed as a rather mean-spirited, and in the Mabel Normand film, almost lecherous, jerk.But Between Showers, for the first time, presents the Little Tramp as a somewhat noble, almost heroic character, who comes to the aid of a damsel in distress (here portrayed by an Edna Purviance prototype). He still has rough edges, but Chaplin was starting to flesh out the character.The plot of Between Showers is an illustration of how delightfully simple and high concept early silent comedies could be. A man steals an umbrella -- that's pretty much the plot, with a little (attempted) romance tossed in for good measure. It's a fun little film, and fascinating to watch from the perspective of observing how Chaplin is slowly crafting his most famous character.