Dough and Dynamite

Dough and Dynamite was one of Chaplin's longest films at the time it was made, and also featured an unusually complex plot. Granted, "complex plot" meant something very different in 1914 than it means in 2008, but this was certainly a step up from his previous films, many of which were little more than exaggerated fist-fights. There is even some dramatic tension in this one!

The story involves some bakers going on strike demanding more money and less work, and so Charlie and one other man, played by Chester Conklin,have to take over for them. Neither of them is in anyway qualified to be baking bread.

There are some memorable moments, such as Charlie getting revenge against his co-worker for hitting him over the head (not knowing that his co-worker had been hit over the head himself), the floury dough-fights, and Charlie making dinner rolls by wrapping the dough around his arm.

The film seems to build up its story and have some semblance of a genuinely developed plot but ultimately ends like so many of these other early short films, with a fight and a seemingly meaningless ending. Still, it's clear that Chaplin was beginning to make genuine advances in his film techniques.

This picture, which is to be released on October 26, is the first of the long-promised two-reel Keystone comedies that are to be released hereafter at regular intervals. So far as the story itself it could easily have been told in a half reel, but there is a genuine laugh in nearly every scene and the picture is one of the cleanest ones that Keystone has done. The scene of the story is a combined bakery and restaurant elaborately constructed with three rooms, shop, restaurant and kitchen on the street level, and two bakerooms in the cellar. In all of these and in the back yard, the "goat" gets into all kinds of trouble. He is a waiter and when the bakers go on strike the proprietor makes him take their places. The strikers buy a loaf of bread, put a dynamite cartridge inside of it and then return it to the shop as being too heavy. The waiter-baker chucks in into the oven to cook some more and then after a while things happen. The explosion of course wrecks everything and the last views we have are of the proprietor digging himself out of the debris of bricks and mortar that was once the bake oven and of the "goat's" head slowly emerging from a great mass of dough that completely envelops him. - Moving Picture World, October 24, 1914

Takes every aspect that works from the previous Chaplin-written-and-directed Keystone comedies, adds new formal accents/experiments, and hybridizes them into a two-reel show-stopper:

(1) From Laughing Gas, The Property Man, and Recreation, brings precise continuity of staging as anchor for cross-cutting frame-extension gags that playfully expand illusion of space - but this time also on the y axis vertically into the cellar/oven room (adding a 'mind the hole' dynamic that creates tension throughout the film).

(2) Draws from The New Janitor (specifically the safe in the President's office) in how objects are modeled for three dimensions and kept in deep focus to suggest opportunity for interaction;

(3) and, wow, does Chaplin's Pierre touch, bump, poke, trip over, get burned by or stuck in nearly every object or transitional space in frame, creating a sense of limitless narrative/gag potential (probably the most impressive aspect of the film)

(4) First short since His New Profession to feature not one but three medium close-ups - one with three-quarters modeling, and each of them story/character motivated - with a banger of a closer.

(5) Also notable: a third sub-plot - lending actual story logic to the final flurry of slapstick violence:

a. Pierre and Jacques (Chester Conklin) taking over the bakery operation as scabs

b. The striking bakery workers plotting revenge (intriguing anti-union sentiment here)

c. Monsieur la Vie (Fritz Shade) starting a fight with Chaplin/Conklin upon suspicion of them canoodling with his wife (Norma Nichols) in the 'bum covered in flour' bit

Favorite moments:

-- Pierre dropping a bag of flour on Jacques and just leaving him there passed out for a while

-- "The Fatal Loaf" intertitle

-- the 10 different 'burn hand on oven door' gags (laughed every time)

Mack Sennett in his "King of Comedy" proposes that this is the film that made Chaplin a star. Like much else in his autobiography, Sennett seems to be relying on a jumble of memories and imaginations. This was released in late Oct. 1914, and Chaplin was certainly a huge star several months before this.

Moving Picture World had this to say about the film in 1914: "This picture, which is to be released on October 26, is the first of the long-promised two-reel Keystone comedies that are to be released hereafter at regular intervals. So far as the story itself it could easily have been told in a half reel. but there is a genuine laugh in nearly every scene and the picture is one of the cleanest ones that Keystone has done."

It does seem to have only half a reel of plot. The magazine is being kind when they say that there is a genuine laugh in nearly every scene. Many of the laughs are repetitious and only three or four sequences are well choreographed.

The picture lacks a love interest for Chaplin and the vicious beating he gives to co-worker Chester Conglin makes him less than lovable. While lots of pastry and dough gets flung around, the only pie appears at 23:40 and Chaplin flings it pretty quickly, so it is at best a very minor gag in the film.

'Dough and Dynamite', an early Chaplin piece scripted by Mack Sennett, has all the hallmarks of a try-out (which indeed it was, its speed and plot reappearing in later work from the little comic).

Chaplin is good, but the story lacks focus. There's a manic and exasperated character (the priceless Chester Conklin); a flash customer (John Francis Dillon), and a mysterious loaf. The dough of the title gets everywhere but it can't hold this disappointing short together.

My feeling is that 'Dough and Dynamite' drags too much for a short piece - as an example of how to do set pieces of comedy, it's fine, but it is hard going for audiences today compared to the rest of Charlie's work.