Once you've seen a few Keystone comedies made before Charlie Chaplin arrived on the scene you get a sense of the impact he had on contemporary viewers. Sure, the best of the 1912-13 Keystones have a gritty vitality, but they take a little getting used to. They're sometimes haphazardly constructed, and often quite violent. This is not to say that Chaplin's arrival brought about an instant change in approach, for his earliest directorial efforts such as A Busy Day or The Property Man are easily as rough as the studio's typical output, but in his best Keystones we can see Chaplin begin to find his style. As a director he smoothed out the stories and slowed down the pace, while as an actor he showed more finesse than most of his colleagues, and also influenced them to temper their mugging and gesticulating. Mabel's Married Life is one of the Keystones I enjoy. It tells a coherent if simple story, violence is kept to a minimum, and it builds not to a wild chase but to a genuinely amusing, leisurely paced routine: Charlie's drunken encounter with a boxer's dummy. Compared to Chaplin's own later work this short is still a bit ragged; the routine with the dummy isn't as fully developed as it might have been, and the character Charlie plays is far from admirable, but there are laughs along the way and the tone is agreeably lighthearted, despite the saloon sequences and Charlie's heavy drinking.
Like so many Keystone comedies this one begins in a park. Charlie and wife Mabel Normand sit together on a bench, but Charlie is miserly and only grudgingly shares some of the banana he's eating. When he goes off to drink in a nearby saloon a burly gent played by Mack Swain attempts to make time with Mabel, who is decidedly uninterested. (Swain is clean-shaven here, and rather less cartoon-y than usual.) Charlie returns but finds it difficult to assert himself against the big guy, who treats him as an ineffectual pest. Eventually Swain's wife must intervene and call him off. When Charlie returns to the saloon Mabel, exasperated, purchases a boxing dummy so that her husband can learn self defense. That night when Charlie returns home tipsy he believes the dummy is Swain, and has a hard time ejecting him while Mabel watches in amusement.
Charlie's encounter with the dummy is the comic highlight, but Mabel has some nice moments, too. Whenever I see this film I always enjoy her disgusted impersonation of her husband's waddling walk, and she has her own lively confrontation with the dummy before Charlie returns home. When we watch Chaplin's early films we tend to compare them to his mature work, so of course they tend to come up short, but Mabel's Married Life stands as one of the better comedies he made for Mack Sennett during his apprenticeship.
P.S. I was lucky enough to acquire a Super-8 print of this comedy from Blackhawk Films in the '70s, and when I screened it again recently I appreciated the quality of the musical score they provided, a series of peppy themes played on a Wurlitzer organ. Sometimes I find organ music inappropriate for comedies, but this score really works, and definitely enhances the impact of the film. Many thanks, Blackhawk!
