Charles Chaplin | The Rink / 1916

merrily rolling along

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vincent Bryan, Charles Chaplin, and Maverick Terrell (screenwriters), Charles Chaplin (director) The Rink / 1916

 

The Rink is a messy double-header of a film, 30 minutes long, that allows us to visit Charles Chaplin as a completely inept waiter and as a roller-skater who alternately is brilliant and disastrous to all those in skating distance. The only interlinking aspects of this film are that some of the restaurant’s customer as well as Chaplin also enjoy the skating rink located nearby.

     One of those regulars, Mr. Stout (Eric Campbell) begins the film as Charlie reckons up the bill by noting the spilled foods upon upper chest, neckline, and even his hair. That is perhaps the last actual bill he is allowed to present, since the rest of the time he causes absolute chaos by perpetually entering the kitchen from the “out” door, whereupon he crashes into other waiters about to serve up dishes to the customers and encounters the wrath of both the restaurant manager (Frank. J. Coleman) and its heavily-bearded cook (Albert Austin).

     At intervals when the food is spilled, Charlie helps to pick items up off the floor, in one case replacing soup, a sponge, and other materials with the former items of food. At another point he opens his hot plate cover to discover inside neither chicken of pheasant, but a live cat. Between the angry gestures and demands of the manager and the outrage of his customers, the waiter manages to drop and spill most of the contents of his plates upon the floor and his customers himself.

       In another instance heavy-set Mrs. Stout (a role performed in drag by Henry Bergman), enters with a diner, the two of them two playing at being adjacent tables before eventually joining up with one another. And at another moment Stout appears to be having an affair with a woman (Leota Bryan) who is a friend to Charlie’s would-be girlfriend (Edna Purviance). 

      But it is Chaplin’s two visits to the skating rink that make this film so very memorable. He first visits it during a work break, alternating with brilliant dancing moves and fall-down-knock-them-all-out antics. If you ever wondered where Fanny Brice (Barbra Streisand) came up with the routine the young Fanny does on roller skates in Funny Girl, you need only watch The Rink, where Chaplin commonly appears to be a skater trying out his first set of rollers before he suddenly takes off into the most daring and stunning of skating routines.

       It is Chaplin’s second skating adventure, this time at a party thrown by his girlfriend’s friend, where he arrives dressed in a top hat and tails, professing to be Sir Cecil Seltzer, that puts the film in cinema history. Introduced to Mr. and Mrs. Stout he is recognized as their waiter and warned to be quiet about all their past histories. By pantomiming their finger-to-the-lips warning, he manages to tell everyone in the room, before skating off in great glory only to engage the wrath of the Girl’s father, which forces him to collide with Mrs. Stout (upon who he is place in such a way that any attempt to rise only knocks both them to the floor again), managing eventually to accidentally pull down her skirt.

    It isn’t long until he has felled so many of the party guests that the police are called to restore order, with Charlie escaping eventually by hooking his cane around a moving automobile which rolls him smoothly off out of harm’s way.

 

Los Angeles, March 19, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).