A Night Out

Viewers interested in Charlie Chaplin's early work (i.e. the rough stuff, with lots of drunken foolery and butt-kicking) may well enjoy this film. I confess I enjoyed it, the way I might get a kick out of watching Championship Wrestling for twenty minutes or so. If it's Chaplin the Artiste you want then try the later productions, but if you're in the mood for rude and unrefined slapstick then A Night Out should fit the bill nicely.

This is the second film Chaplin made for the Essanay company, and it also marks the second and last time he teamed up with knockabout comic Ben Turpin. Chaplin and Turpin don't pair especially well on screen, and it's said they didn't get along off-camera either, which is no surprise. Chaplin was a gifted mime, an inspired comedian and an exacting filmmaker, while Turpin was a low-comedy clown with crossed eyes. Ben could take a fall with the best of them, but it's said he didn't understand why Chaplin the perfectionist demanded take after take of each scene. There in a nutshell you have the difference between an artist and a hack.

As it happens, despite the modest trappings of this film Chaplin's special gift comes across in several nice little moments. Early on, during the sequence in a swanky restaurant, the drunken Charlie stands at an indoor fountain and suddenly seems to believe he's washing up in the privacy of his own home, so naturally enough he brushes his teeth with the stem of a plant. It's a strange bit of business, almost dreamlike, but Chaplin makes it appear perfectly normal and routine. Later, checking into a hotel, Charlie attempts to rest his foot on the bar rail -- which happens to be invisible -- and drink ink from the inkwell.

This film is most notable as the debut of Chaplin's longtime leading lady Edna Purviance, who was only 19 years old at this time and very pretty indeed. Her first scenes are fairly low-key, but later on, when she's in pajamas playing with her dog, Chaplin grants Edna a couple of close-ups which look something like a screen test. Obviously she passed the test with flying colors, for Edna went on to play opposite Chaplin in virtually every film he made for the next eight years, the happiest and most prolific period of his creative life. If for no other reason, A Night Out is worth seeing for the debut of this beautiful and underrated silent screen actress.

Though there are some good moments, mostly later in the feature, overall this short comedy has too much of the same basic material, and it starts to get old rather soon. Charlie Chaplin and Ben Turpin play a couple of drunks who cause a series of difficulties for each other and for those with whom they come in contact. They both do a creditable job (in itself) of performing the material, but it is just too much of the same thing. Drunkenness just is not funny enough to carry even a short feature all by itself, and the use of it as a pretext for the characters to behave in a chronically impolite fashion wears thin relatively quickly.

Things do get a little better in the second half, when the material and the plot become somewhat less one-dimensional. Then too, anything with Chaplin in it will have some good moments - but overall, "A Night Out" is below Chaplin's usual standard. It's probably most memorable for the first of Edna Purviance's many appearances in a Chaplin movie.

Upon finishing "His New Job," Chaplin had enough of the cold midwestern weather and decided to return to California where Essanay had a small studio 30 miles outside of San Francisco. Part studio owner and cowboy actor Max Anderson had earlier established a facility to shoot and edit his Westerns for the mountainous typography.

For his next film, February 1915's "A Night Out," Chaplin was yearning to find a leading comic actress similar to Keystone's Mabel Normand, but without all the drama associated with filming with her. There are varying stories how Chaplin discovered a 19-year-old secretary, Edna Purviance, to be selected for that acting position. Either through an audition, spotting her in a San Francisco lobby, or through an introduction, Chaplin was intriqued with her looks and picked Purviance despite his reservations she never had acted in front of a camera before.

Despite her humble opinion she had stunk up the joint in her first film, Purviance performed well enough in "A Night Out" to continue a stretch of 33 films where she was that funny lady opposite of Chaplin. To boot, she also had a romantic relationship with him for the next three years.

"His Night Out" is also noteworthy as being the first movie where Chaplin met cameraman Rollie Totheroh, who was working with Anderson and his Westerns.. Totheroh would soon become Chaplin's director of photography throughout his career, all the way until the mid-1950's.

This was Charlie Chaplin's second picture at Essanay studios, and his second to co-star Essanay's resident funny man Ben Turpin, who had been with the studio since its first picture in 1907. With the exception of his earliest Keystone appearances, many of which were ensemble pieces, A Night Out is perhaps the closest Charlie came to being part of a double act.

Turpin was neither as versatile or inventive as Chaplin, but he had bags of experience and his movements were spot on. In particular, and importantly for this picture, he could do a great drunken lurch and could pratfall superbly. Here he has almost as much screen time as the tramp himself, and even gets a few bits of comedy business to himself. Chaplin's male co-stars tended to be the butt of much of the physical comedy, and because he falls so well, every time he gets knocked down he draws attention to himself and away from Charlie. Turpin is hilarious here and he really lends something to this picture, but to progress Chaplin couldn't let anyone share his limelight, and it's no surprise that the pair would make just one more picture together.

Like most of the early Essanay shorts, A Night Out doesn't really have much in the way of plot, being simply the tramp (or, in this case, tramps) wandering around causing mayhem in an established environment. Although the result is not entirely satisfying, Chaplin does take time to develop his tramp character with drawn out comedy routines and interaction with the props and people of the setting. He is continually reducing the number of edits and keeping each series of gags to a single shot. For example, in the Keystone pictures and his first Essanay picture (His New Job), when characters get pushed over, more often than not there is a cut showing them flying into the next frame. However, in those early scenes in the restaurant in A Night Out, whenever people fall down it's towards the back of the room, so as not to break the flow at this more relaxed stage of the picture. Chaplin does however put in a few of these two-shot pratfalls towards the end to liven up the frantic finale.

A Night Out marks the debut of Edna Purviance, who would be Chaplin's only leading lady for the next eight years. Chaplin didn't demand his female leads become part of the comedy, he only required them to act well, and Purviance was a superlative actress. She is a relatively minor figure in this one however, although Chaplin does treat her to one of his rare close-ups. A Night Out is also the first time we get to see Leo White's "French character". White was another hilarious supporting player in the Chaplin troupe, who at times would also threaten to upstage Charlie, although his comic persona – a stuck-up, straight-laced twerp – was so different to Chaplin's that he made a perfect counterfoil and antagonist for the tramp. Ben Turpin however was too similar to Chaplin's tramp character, so his days as Charlie's sidekick were numbered. A Night Out is the best opportunity to see him in action.

And now, the all-important statistic –

Number of kicks up the arse: 4 (3 for, 1 against)

After this, the second Charles Chaplin two-part Essanay release, it is clear that the comedian lost none of his ability to entertain when he left the Keystone Company. "One Night Out" keeps an audience in an almost perpetual uproar. It is Chaplin at his funniest, and supporting him is a strong company that follows his method as though accustomed to it from long experience. The situations are rather good in themselves and they are used to the very best advantage. - The Moving Picture World, March 6, 1915