Tillie’s Punctured Romance **** (1914, Marie Dressler, Mabel Normand, Charles Chaplin, Mack Swain, Charles Bennett) – Classic Movie Review 11,462

Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914) is notable as the first feature-length comedy in all of cinema.

Producer-director Mack Sennett threw everything he had into the movies’ first feature-length silent comedy, the 1914 Tillie’s Punctured Romance, in which Marie Dressler stars as Tillie Banks, the simple farmer’s daughter, Charles Chaplin (playing against type as Charlie the City Slicker and not his Tramp character) plays the villainous bounder who seduces her for her money, Mabel Normand plays Charlie’s girlfriend Mabel, Mack Swain is Tillie’s father John Banks, and Charles Bennett plays Tillie’s millionaire Uncle Banks.

With its funny major silent-comedy stars, chases and sight gags galore, plus the Keystone Kops (Slim Summerville, Al St John, Wallace MacDonald, Joe Bordeaux, Grover Ligon, Hank Mann, Nick Cogley), this obviously understandably dated silent could still raise many a smile and a laugh, and is a silent classic and well as a cinema landmark.

The film is based on Dressler’s stage play Tillie’s Nightmare by A Baldwin Sloane and Edgar Smith, in which Dressler had great success both on Broadway and on US tour from 1910 to 1912. Dressler later revived the play with her own touring company. In 1914 Mack Sennett proposed to adapt the play for the screen and hired its stage star, the then 45-year-old Marie Dressler, to play the guileless ingenue, Tillie Banks.

Marie Dressler in Tillie’s Punctured Romance.

It is the first feature-length film produced by the Keystone Film Company, and the only one with Chaplin, and the last Chaplin film that he neither wrote nor directed. It is one of only two films (along with another pre-Tramp film Making a Living) in which Chaplin appears with the Keystone Cops.

It premiered at the Los Angeles Republic Theatre on 21 December 1914 and was a big hit, remaining on cinema release for many years, being continually re-edited and shortened, and eventually having optical soundtracks added featuring music, sound effects and narration.

Then poor quality, cut prints circulated for decades, until David Shepard of Film Preservation Associates released his restoration on LaserDisc (1997) and DVD (1999) via Image Entertainment.

In 2003 a restoration by the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the British Film Institute saw the film restored almost to its original length, and released in the restored Chaplin at Keystone 4-DVD box set (2010). The 2003 restoration runs 82 minutes.

There were three sequels for Dressler as Tillie: Tillie’s Tomato Surprise (1915), Tillie Wakes Up (1917), and The Scrub Lady (1917).

It is revisited in a 1928 silent classic as Tillie’s Punctured Romance with W C Fields as a circus ringmaster, but the film bears no resemblance to the 1914 film aside from the shared title, though Chester Conklin and Mack Swain appear in both movies. The W C Fields film is sadly missing presumed lost, whereas the older film happily survives.

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 11,462

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