Mack Sennett | A Busy Day (aka The Militant Suffragette) / 1914

the violent suffragette

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mack Sennett (screenwriter and director) A Busy Day (aka The Militant Suffragette) / 1914

 

Charles Chaplin appeared in clothes generally worn by the opposite gender—a popular gimmick for males and females in silent films—three times, twice in 1914, in the six-minute long A Busy Day and in the 14-minute work The Masquerader, and in July of the following year in the two-reel movie A Woman.

    The first, in which he convincingly and without attempting to establish a male identity played an increasingly enraged woman, might almost be seen as a kind of warm-up to the more complex obviously “drag” roles he performed in the other two films.

    The radical differences in style and how Chaplin related to others while playing the role might have something to do with the fact that the first short was directed by Mack Sennett and the other two by Chaplin himself. Clearly A Busy Day doesn’t fully use the gender switch as an important comic device since he is merely a female impersonator, while the other two are focused upon the transformation Chaplin makes from man to woman.

    Filmed at the San Pedro Harbor pier during a military parade, A Busy Day* begins as a couple sits down in the stands to watch the parade of soldiers. The wife (Chaplin), apparently a  “militant suffragette” (as the original title of this short characterizes her) is a rather roughly hewn woman, who clumsily falls back in the bleachers almost the moment she is seated and when she finds, seconds later, herself with a runny nose, uses the hem of her dress to wipe it dry—much to the disconcertion of the woman who sits next to her, who attempts to hand her a hanky as an alternative.

 

    Almost from the moment her eyes are trained upon the marching soldiers, her husband (Charles Swain) slips away with the woman (Phyllis Allen) who is sitting on his other side. His wife rises it anger, surveying the crowd to determine where he might have stolen off to and soon after marches onto the street of the parade itself where a camera crew is set up to film the celebrations.

     She interrupts the filming of the event and is told to get out of the way, quickly kicking the camera man (Mack Sennett himself) and doing the same to a policeman (Billy Gilbert) who also tries to move her away from the route of the parade. As in many a Chaplin film it ends up in a kind of free-for-all, with the wife lifting up her skirts several times to take out her anger on those who attempt to control her rage.

      Soon, however, as she spots her husband at a short distance with the woman with whom he has stolen away, the wife turns her attention back to the matter at hand, racing up behind the couple to jab the interloper with her umbrella.

      The woman runs off as the wife scolds, slugs, kicks, and beats her husband over the head with her umbrella, he finally shoving her back to the parade bandstand, where she crashes into the lap of another policeman who throws her back to her husband for another kicking, shoving, and boxing bout between the couple.

      Finished with her husband, the suffragette returns to the policeman to again box his ears, and push and pull him, herself landing on the bandstand where she dances for a few moments and where, now having become so wrought up, she eventually slugs a nearby woman and her husband, the latter of whom pushes her into the ocean where the story stops.

     As a post accompanying the San Francisco Festival of “Silent Films and Suffragettes” correctly noted: “the film promotes the stereotype of suffragettes being belligerent, unreasonable, and ultimately unlovable women.”

 

*Some DVDs, the would-be viewer should be warned, combine this film with another Chaplin movie, Mabel’s Busy Day in order it to create a more normal seeming early half-realer. The two films, however, are not related.

 

Los Angeles, February 15, 2021

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