Mack Sennett

A Keystone comedy directed by Mack Sennett, featuring Charlie Chaplin and Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle together on screen. Set in a dance hall, the film features Chaplin as a troublemaker who disrupts the dancing, while Arbuckle appears as a large, clumsy tango enthusiast. The film is a rough, raw example of the Keystone style—fast, chaotic, and full of physical mayhem—made before Chaplin developed the Tramp character that would make him world-famous. Seeing Chaplin and Arbuckle together is a rare treat; both would go on to become two of the most important figures in silent comedy. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

Tillie's Punctured Romance is a 1914 silent comedy film directed by Mack Sennett for Keystone Studios, distributed by Mutual Film. The first feature-length comedy ever made, it stars Charlie Chaplin (in his first feature role), Marie Dressler, and Mabel Normand. Chaplin plays a city con man who seduces a farmer's daughter (Dressler) for her money, only to abandon her when he discovers she's been disinherited. The film was based on Dressler's stage success Tillie's Nightmare and was a massive hit, helping establish Chaplin as a major star. As a 1914 work, the film is in the public domain.

Comedy

Charlie Chaplin plays a waiter at a cheap cabaret who passes himself off to a society girl as a foreign dignitary, then has to juggle both lives when her wealthy family invites him to a garden party. The imposture collapses in a brawl back at the cabaret, with Mabel Normand's character watching her two worlds collide. Made at Keystone in Chaplin's first year on screen, the film was directed by Normand, his co-star, though Chaplin later claimed he had taken over direction himself. Whoever called the shots, it is an early showcase for the Tramp's gift for turning class resentment into slapstick. A 1914 release, it is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

Mabel Normand's only feature-length production, made under the banner of the Mabel Normand Feature Film Company, a short-lived division of Mack Sennett's Keystone studio. Normand plays Mickey, a tomboyish orphan raised in a western mining camp who is sent to live with her aunt in New York society. The film's production was troubled — it was begun in 1916, halted by Normand's illness, and then shelved for nearly two years because distributors thought it was a flop. When it finally screened at a small theater in Bayside, Long Island, it became a surprise smash, eventually grossing millions and proving that Normand could carry a feature as easily as a two-reel comedy. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Drama · Silent

A Mack Sennett two-reel comedy built around Ben Turpin and his famous cross-eyed double take. Turpin plays a hapless suitor who competes with Harry Gribbon for the girl, played by Madeline Hurlock, and stumbles through the kind of physical chaos Sennett's studio was known for, with Del Lord directing the mayhem. The surviving version is abridged but keeps the core gags and gives a clean sample of Sennett's short-form style at its peak. Like the other 1923 releases, the film entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2019.

Comedy · Silent · Short

Mabel Normand stars as Sue Graham, a small-town girl who wins a fake screen test and heads to Hollywood to become a star, only to find herself working as an extra and a wardrobe assistant while the studio tries to pry her away from her sweetheart back home. The picture balances comic set pieces, including a runaway lion and a chaotic fashion-show sequence, with a behind-the-scenes look at a working studio lot. Mack Sennett produced through his own company, F. Richard Jones directed, and Normand, one of the biggest comediennes of the silent era, gets to play both slapstick and pathos. The film was released by Associated Exhibitors and is one of Normand's surviving features. Its copyright expired at the end of its first term, and it entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2019.

Comedy · Silent

A Keystone one-reeler from Charlie Chaplin's first year in pictures, set behind the scenes at a movie studio — a sly bit of self-reference from Mack Sennett's comedy factory. Chaplin plays a film actor who keeps ruining takes until the director fires him; he returns in drag as a strikingly elegant actress and turns the set upside down before being unmasked. Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and Chester Conklin play fellow actors, and the studio door glimpsed in the film is Keystone's own. Written and directed by Chaplin in 1914, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Silent

One of the Keystone one-reelers Charlie Chaplin directed as well as starred in during his astonishing first year in pictures, Those Love Pangs — released in some markets as The Rival Mashers — casts Chaplin and Chester Conklin as competing mashers who chase the same girls through a park and into a movie theater, where the brawl that erupts in front of the screen mirrors the slapstick playing on it. Chaplin was still refining the Tramp here, but the short already shows his gift for building gags on top of gags. Made for Mack Sennett's Keystone Studios in 1914, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Silent