Mack Sennett and Charles Bennett | Tillie's Punctured Romance / 1914

the innocent farm girl and the mean-hearted men

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hampton Del Ruth, Craig Hutchinson, and Mack Sennett (screenplay, based on the stage play by A. Baldwin Sloane and Edgar Smith), Mack Sennett and Charles Bennett (directors) Tillie's Punctured Romance / 1914

 

I have certainly not assimilated all of the commentary and critical dialogue regarding the films of Charles Chaplin or Marie Dressler, but I believe, given what I have read, that generally the discussions around the 1914 Mack Sennett film Tillie's Punctured Romance center upon the facts that the work was Dressler’s first film appearance, Chaplin’s first feature film, the first motion picture produced by the Keystone Film Company, and most importantly is regarded as the first feature film comedy. When the film is discussed at any length, the comments appear to center upon the fact that Chaplin, although dressed similarly to his Tramp character, plays the role basically of a villain, a city slicker bent on robbery and marital betrayal.

 

      Regarding Sennett’s direction, the commentary is mostly critical, arguing that the sense of the film’s narrative time is vague and confusing and that the pacing, accordingly, detracts from the laughs the film provides. Dressler is criticized generally for overacting, with Mabel Norman, playing Charlie’s girlfriend The Other Woman, and Chaplin, despite his being cast as a cad, both praised for their ability to sustain laughter and serious acting in particular scenes.

       And there is certainly some truth to all these observations. But generally, I found no difficulty with the sense of narrative time in the film; I think any experienced filmgoer comprehends that these events take place over several weeks or perhaps months, some of them occurring simultaneously with others, but many happening in time with empty spaces between. Although some commentators have argued that the problems might be resolved if the directors had better employed intertitles, I was actually appreciative that only a few intertitles were involved in this work, recognizing the fact that the actors so clearly displayed their emotions through their facial expressions and body gestures that the explanations were not truly needed despite a rather complex story moving through a period of time.

      Chaplin and Normand are the excellent performers they almost always were, bringing fresh insights the characters who by this time—at least four years after the play’s successful stage premier—would have been well-known not only through its New York run, but through numerous newspaper reviews and touring productions. Dressler, who was well known as a stage actor, had played this role on stage as well, and I believe she does a remarkable job, even if at times she hams it up—the role is after all a vaudeville standard which was played out again on stage in 1919’s Aaron Slick from Punkin Crick that has all the subtlety of the thousands of Hillbilly jokes before it.

 

    As a pretend shy overweight country girl desperate for any man, Dressler’s role might have been offered even to a crossdressing male, as a similar figure was two years later in the short film Busted Hearts when Oliver Hardy played a similar character named Peggy Plump. But Dressler allows us to truly comprehend Tillie as a large farm woman with all the love and desires of the slimmest society debutante. 

       As it is, the sight of the tall, large-girthed lesbian—which by the 1930s rumors had designated Dressler—being courted by the small bow-legged Chaplin is always hilarious; but nonetheless Dressler imbues her stereotyped figure Tillie Banks with a great deal of unspoken dignity and perseverance, despite the pain she obviously feels from being physically abused by her father (Mack Swain) both through beatings and hard labor and her rejection by nearly everyone she meets, including Charlie the City Slicker, who seduces her by insisting she rob her father and elope with him.

       Dressler plays Tillie as a lover who, unintentionally, but constantly lays flat her would-be lover, punching, knocking, hitting, and simply bumping into him, he responding in kind, the two performing as Punch and Judy-like adolescents who are both so awkward and clumsy at expressing their love they can only do so in course physical but non-sexual contact. Hers, however, is always well-meaning, while his is often in vengeful reaction, particularly since his love is all pretense.

       Once in the city, Charlie gets her so drunk that nearly all of her bashful inhibitions are erased, as she becomes an incredibly light-on-her-feet dancer (her terpsichorean feats represent some of the most charming moments of the film) and romancer of nearly everyone she meets including the cops who cart her off—after she is robbed by Charlie and cannot pay the restaurant tab—to jail, where once more, in love with the world, she knocks down, bites, pummels, and shoves everyone who comes near.

       The successful thieves, meanwhile, treat themselves to lavish new costumes, without the holes of previous garments but, at least in Charlie’s case, even more ill-fitting. They also attend a movie with a plot that nearly perfectly matches their own contemptable acts, replete with a detective just like one in the movie, sitting in the very next theater seat.

       I am sure that someone, if not several individuals have written about “Chaplin and the movies,” but perhaps it’s worth mentioning again that Chaplin’s characters visit more movies in his films that any other actor I can name, including French director François Truffaut’s Jean-Pierre Léaud. Indeed, almost all silent actors visit movie theaters at one time or another, a totally explicable action given that it was the perfect way for the new industry to normalize movie-going as a natural activity for the rich and the poor.

       In this case, however, Chaplin resists watching the film, while Mabel watches it attentively, feeling true guilt for their actions, which explains her final dismissal of her lover Charlie at film’s end.

       The problems that most commentators attribute to the film’s narrative sequences is more likely the fault of the loose joints of the absurd plot. How are we to imagine that this country bumpkin is also the niece of the richest man in town “Uncle Banks” (Charles Bennett), or that, particularly given what is clearly inebriated behavior, that he would immediately reject his niece and send her back to the streets, or finally, that in “order to recover from the event” he would go on an adventure to climb Mt. Baldy in the Los Angeles forest (the film’s newspaper reports this as the locations of his death later) where suddenly it appears that he has found an Alpine establishment that seems to have been pulled out of a film about Bavarian or Swiss mountain climbers? How to believe that, falling down a high cliff, he is reported dead only to be revived and return by film’s end, again sending her and everyone else back to the streets? And if he cannot bear his niece why, when he is reported dead, does his will leave everything to her?

        If the logic of film in terms of time is a problem for you, so should be the logic of the story. But any devoted viewer of comic films of this period knows that one simply has to allow oneself to be swept up into the fabric of the fantasy for it to work.

       Without a wealthy uncle who leaves everything to his niece, Charlie would have no reason to once more leave the arms of his loving Mabel (Normand) and rush back into the pricks and kicks of the hippopotamus whom he has just robbed in order to swindle even more millions of dollars from her.

 

      And without the estate being left to Tillie the film would have no grand party in which to entertain us through various set skits, from several ironical visions of the so-called upper class—a course bourgeoise couple acting as if Tillie and Charlie were now almost royalty, a queer boy who has such limp hands that you might think he were trying to fly rather than simply greet the wealthy couple—to another dance marathon with a drunken Tillie let loose, a ruckus between Charlie and a rowdy guest, a delicious moment when Tillie thinking she is squeezing the leg of her husband Charlie discovers she actually pinching the flesh a young woman next to her who doesn’t to mind a bit, to a final breakdown of all order when Tillie, discovering her husband’s deceit takes out a gun and shoots at virtually every partygoer attending her fête.  I can’t be sure, but in looking over the LGBTQ movies I’ve written about previous to this film’s release, this scene may be the first presentation of openly gay man represented through the actions that would later constitute the cinema stereotype. Even Algie, before he became a miner, was not as fey as is this party guest.

     Without the uncle’s unexpected resurrection and return there would be no finale calling for all branches of the Keystone cops, the foot soldiers tripping over one another, the maritime boat rowers allowing their oars to pull them into the ocean, and the speed boat contingents of cops slicing through whole divisions of fallen swimmers. We would not have been able to witness the water-soaked and flailing Tillie be towed time and again up the side of the Santa Monica pier only to have her fall into the dark waters below all over again. And there would be no way for the put-upon women of this movie to finally find justice, as Tillie pulls off her ring and offers it to Charlie whereupon Mabel also gives him the heave-ho, the two women falling into a deeply felt hug, as if they might marry one another and live happily ever after all the film’s mean-hearted men.

 

Los Angeles, July 3, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).