A Night in the Show (Essanay Film Manufacturing Company, 1915)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Balboa Park organ concert, the annual showing of one or more silent films with live organ accompaniment, underwent a sudden last-minute change which apparently was organist Clara Gerdes’ idea. The scheduled films were Charlie Chaplin’s 1915 short A Night in the Show, Buster Keaton’s 1920 short Neighbors, and two experimental films by French director Segundo de Chomón, Avant la Musique (translated by imdb.com as “Music, Forward!”) (1907) and La Leçon de Musique (*The Music Lesson”) (1909). Instead Gerdes apparently asked to perform the Chaplin short and a full-length Keaton feature, Seven Chances (1925). I was particularly anxious to see the Chaplin short – one from his year at the Essanay studio (which made mostly Westerns, as evinced by the silhouette of an Indian head that was the company’s logo) – because it was based on the famous sketch, called Mumming Birds in Britain and A Night in an English Music Hall in the U.S., that Chaplin performed in his apprenticeship with Fred Karno’s comedy troupe on stage well before he first set foot in front of a movie camera. Chaplin made his American stage debut with the Karno company in a different sketch, “The Wow-Woes,” which parodied the popular British summer camp resorts, on October 3, 1910 at the Colonial Theatre in New York, and Variety gave him this review which indicates he already was a major star on both sides of “The Pond” before he started making movies: “Chaplin is typically English, the sort of comedian that American audiences seem to like, although unaccustomed to. His manner is quiet and easy, and he goes about his work with a devil-may-care manner. … Chaplin will do all right for America.”

A Night in the Show is a thinly veiled reworking of A Night in an English Music Hall, in which Chaplin played “The Drunk,” who stumbled into the theatre and disrupted the show. (HIs understudy in the role was another British comedian who became a screen legend, Arthur Stanley Jefferson, later Stan Laurel of Laurel and Hardy.) For A Night in the Show Chaplin played a dual role, “Mr. Pest” and “Mr. Rowdy.” As “Mr. Pest” hw wore the familiar Chaplin makeup of tousled hair and toothbrush moustache; as “Mr. Rowdy” he wore the older makeup he had worn with the Karno troupe, with a pointed cap and a walrus moustache. (This is the get-up Chaplin wore in his first film, Making a Living, made at Mack Sennett’s Keystone studio in 1914, before he hit on the “Tramp” makeup and costume in his second film, Kid Audy Races at Venice.) “Mr. Pest” first attracts the ire of the other patrons when he cuts in front of them in the line to buy tickets. When he finally gets in, he sits in an orchestra seat quite near the stage, gets moved around a lot by the ushers, picks a fight with several musicians in the pit (including the conductor, who accidentally strikes him while moving his arms to lead the band) and ends up on stage, where his antics convulse the audience. It’s a situation Chaplin would later use in what’s probably his most underrated feature, The Circus (1928), in which he plays a young man desperate to break into the circus and get a job as a clown, but who can make people laugh only when he’s not deliberately trying to.

“Mr. Rowdy” arrives drunk, takes several near-close calls during which he almost falls off the balcony where his seat is, and at the film’s climax he grabs a fire hose and tries to put out the fires set on stage by the fire-eater, whose antics seem to have been copied from the famous “trick films” of Georges Méliès. Ultimately he drenches the entire audience with the outflow from his hose. A Night in the Show is not major Chaplin (as some of his Essanay films, notably The Tramp and Police, are), but it’s a fascinating curio and a fortunate insight into Chaplin’s beginnings as a performer. My husband Charles noticed a Black man in the balcony audience, and though it was actually a white actor, frequent Chaplin foil Leo White, in blackface, it was still a surprising sight. There are also a lot of gender-bending scenes; at least one of the heavy-set “women” performers in the show-within-the-show is played by a man in drag, and in one scene that seems audacious even today “The Pest” sits next to a heavy-set straight couple, reaches for the woman’s hand and grabs the man’s hand by mistake.