Charles Chaplin | The Masquerader / 1914

disappearing beauty

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Chaplin (screenwriter and director) The Masquerader / 1914

 

     The Masquerader* is a far less raucous and vastly more entertaining piece of cinema than was Chaplin’s first crossdressing movie. Chaplin begins this film on home turf, in the dressing room of the Keystone Studio where we see him sitting across from Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle as they both make up and get into costume for their roles. There is the usual horse play of Chaplin attempting to steal a sip of Arbuckle’s soda and the latter’s tricking him to drink from a bottle of hair-tonic, all of which results in brief flurry of powder puffs and a final butting of foreheads as they rise simultaneously to look over the barrier that divides them. But this is merely a warm-up for the more important business of the film shoot for which the Tramp has been hired.

 

   The director (Charles Murray) quite explicitly explains what he wants the Tramp to do in the melodrama they are about to shoot. As the villain (Jess Dandy) raises his knife to threaten the poor widow (Minta Durfee, Arbuckle’s wife at the time) and her baby in the crib before her (represented by a doll), the Tramp is to rush in and attack the evil-doer, saving the day.

     The camera begins rolling, but the Tramp becomes distracted by two flirtatious actresses and misses his cue. Frustrated, the director replaces the Tramp with another actor (Chester Conklin), who the Tramp holds back from entering, finally after a scuffle himself returning to the set only to scoop up the baby and hit the villain over the head with it, pushing his replacement out a nearby window.

      The Tramp is terminated once again, but not without a lot of pleading from the desperate-to-work actor and a fair number of pratfalls and scuffles that finally send Chaplin’s character out the door, suitcase in hand.

      The next morning the studio is visited by a glamorous and stunningly beautiful “Newcomer,” an immediate hit with all the studio males, particularly the director, who dubs her the “magnate.” In a long interview with her in his office he attempts to caress and kiss his newfound beauty, who smiles and batts her eyes while skillfully slipping through and around his embraces and his attempts at a full body press. This, and the scene after it in the dressing room, where he chases her around the makeup cubicles, must be one of the first on-screen portrayals of the phenomena long known as the “casting couch.” It would have been fascinating to see what might have happened if he caught her. But she has evidently teased and evaded him just enough that he momentarily retreats, leaving her to put the finishing touches to her face.

      Those consist of her pulling off her wig, shaking out her own curly hair, and applying a moustache, becoming recognizable now as our belovèd Tramp who rises just in time to face off with the director who, pressured by the men he has temporarily dispossessed, returns to find his nemesis standing at the very spot where a moment before sat the woman over whom he had been drooling. The Trump, now fully recognizable, doesn’t budge, and when the director turns to peer into a locker to see if his dreamboat might possibly have hidden herself away, the little clown raises his foot and implants a good swift kick in his butt before returning to the endless road he must eternally wander—only after a chase, however which lands him once more in dark waters, this time of a wishing well.

       This film is not only one of the first “real” Chaplin films, but serves as a kind of master template for later films such as Some Like It Hot and even Tootsie.

 

*A reedited version of this film, so I’ve read, cuts the section where the Tramp misses his cue and interferes with his replacement’s entry. Added intertitles unintentionally reveal the surprise ending.

 

Los Angeles, February 15, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (February 2021).