The Tramp **** (1915, Charlie Chaplin as The Tramp Edna Purviance, Lloyd Bacon, Leo White, Bud Jamison, Ernest Van Pelt) – Classic Movie Review 9011

Writer-director Charles Chaplin’s 1915 silent comedy The Tramp (with English intertitles) stars Charlie Chaplin as The Tramp, who works on a family farm and is hurt rescuing the Farmer (Ernest Van Pelt)’s daughter (Edna Purviance) from criminal bad guys (Leo White as First Thief). But his fantasies of happiness ever after with her are shattered by the return of her fiancé (Lloyd Bacon).

The Tramp is a very welcome, amusing, typical Chaplin short, with very skillful clowning, but with the funny slapstick comedy mixed with the now unfashionable sentimentality and unsympathetic pathos. Though Chaplin played The Tramp character in earlier films, it is the debut of the sad but caring persona best known today, with a bitter-sweet ending to the film. This is more attractively artful but also more alienatingly dated.

Also in the cast are Bud Jamison as Third thief, Paddy McGuire as Farmhand and Billy Armstrong as Minister.

It is Chaplin’s sixth film for The Essanay Film Manufacturing Company and the fifth and final film made at their studio at Niles, California, near where the outdoor scenes were filmed on location.

Bizarrely, The Tramp got itself into censorship problems, and was cut by American city and state film censorship boards. The Chicago Board of Censors cut from reel one the scene of Chaplin burning his bottom and then sitting in a sewage drainage pipe.

The Tramp is directed by Charles Chaplin, runs 26 minutes, is made by The Essanay Film Manufacturing Company, is released by General Film Company (1915) (US), is written by Charles Chaplin, is shot in black and white by Rollie Totheroh and Harry Ensign, and is produced by Jesse T Robbins.

It was released in the UK on DVD by BFI Video in 2003.

It was restored in 2014 through the Chaplin Essanay Project with financial support by David Shepard.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Classic Movie Review 9011

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