Work

Work is the kind of farce Chaplin seems to have been aiming for in By the Sea, but here it’s smartly stretched to two reels. It’s superb.

Charlie is a put-upon paperhanger’s helper, a fact pointedly emphasized by his having to drag a workcart containing the day’s supplies and his boss (Charles Inslee) through the city streets and up a hill. Their day’s work is at a mansion run by a snobby couple (Billy Armstrong and Marta Golden). In a beautifully pointed gag, Marta takes one look at the woebegone paperhangers and quickly locks up her good silver in a safe. The duo quickly figure out what she’s getting at and return the favor, storing their good pocket watches in Charlie’s pocket for safe-keeping.

From here, you could guess that the movie would be one long slapstick slog through glue, and you’d mostly be right, but it’s well-done nonetheless. Chaplin obviously began to have an eye towards “extended” gags, because two of them pay off beautifully. One is a small nude statue which continually catches Charlie’s eye. He finally puts a small grass skirt on it and makes it dance a naughty hoochie-koochie for him. The other is a gas stove whose small explosions accelerate each time the impatient house-owner tries to light it. This ends up giving the movie a perfect “wow” ending, abetted by a subplot of the housewife’s extra-marital lover (Leo White) entering the house to make his moves at precisely the wrong time.

Like the movie’s errant stove, it seemed to take Chaplin a few Essanay shorts to catch fire again, but Work was the payoff. It’s a winner.

(If you really want your intelligence insulted, check out the public-domain print of Work at The Internet Archive [www.archive.org], wherein an ostensibly helpful narrator thoughtfully describes each and every gag that Chaplin has had acted out quite clearly in front of us.)

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