A Day's Pleasure (Charles Chaplin Productions, First National Pictures, 1919)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, September 20) Turner Classic Movies showed a rather odd-seeming grab bag of films on their “Silent Sunday Nights” feature: A Flirt’s Mistake and The Rounders (both 1914), Character Studies (1923), and The Movies (1925). It turned out that what linked these movies together was the involvement of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle (1887-1933), the second most popular male silent-era comedian (next to Charlie Chaplin) until his career was wiped out overnight when he hosted a “wild” party in San Francisco on September 5, 1921. Among the guests were starlet Virginia Rappé, who was found seriously ill when the party broke up and died of a ruptured bladder four days later. Arbuckle was arrested and tried for Rappé’s murder – though modern researchers generally agree that Rappé’s death was accidental, the result of an infection she got from a botched illegal abortion. Arbuckle went through three trials and his legal plight was such a boon to the news business that William Randolph Hearst once said coverage of Arbuckle’s case had sold more papers than anything since the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915.) He was ultimately acquitted, but the film industry blacklisted him and forced him to keep himself alive as a director under the pseudonym “Will B. Goodrich.” (When the news of who that was finally came out, the joke around Hollywood was it was an Arbuckle pun on “will be good and rich,” though the name actually came from Arbuckle’s father, William Goodrich Arbuckle.) Arbuckle finally got a shot at a comeback when Warner Bros. signed him to make six sound shorts in 1933, and they did well enough they promised him a shot at a feature film, only he died of a heart attack at age 46 before that could happen. The TCM program on Arbuckle included two films he made at Mack Sennett’s Keystone studios and two in his “Will B. Goodrich” directorial days. One of the Keystone films was The Rounders, a minor masterpiece in which Arbuckle and Chaplin co-starred; I remember seeing this as part of a five-film Chaplin at Keystone collection which proved how much better Chaplin’s movies got once he was permitted to write and direct them himself. The Rounders seemed to me the prototype of all the Laurel and Hardy movies, and it’s worth remembering that before either of them had made a movie Stan Laurel had understudied Chaplin in Fred Karno’s music-hall troupe and Chaplin based The Rounders on a skit he’d done for Karno.

Because Charles and I were busy watching the Blu-Ray disc of Stanley Kubrick’s Fear and Desire and the three shorts included as bonus content, we missed the Arbuckle movies but I got to watch A Day’s Pleasure, an unusually rare Chaplin short from 1919 that I’d never seen before. At least part of the reason was that from the time Chaplin signed with First National Pictures in 1918 he owned all his subsequent movies outright, and many of them were not seen again until the 1970’s when Chaplin went over them, prepared background musical scores, and sometimes re-edited them for official reissues. A Day’s Pleasure is a minor Chaplin film, created while Chaplin was concentrating on bigger things: specifically his feature-film debut, The Kid (1920). (The Kid was one film Chaplin severely screwed up when he re-edited it for the 1970’s reissue; if you can locate a copy of the original public-domain version, grab it!) Chaplin had already signed Jackie Coogan to play the title role of The Kid, and in order to screen-test him he gave him a minor role in A Day’s Pleasure. A Day’s Pleasure is different from the run-of-the-mill Chaplin film in at least one particular: though he’s mostly dressed in the familiar “Tramp” costume, with a jacket too small for him and pants too large, he’s not playing lower-class here (and his shoes are the right size instead of too big for his feet, as they were in the full-out “tramp” costume): he’s sufficiently established in the working class to have a wife (Edna Purviance), two sons (Marion Feducha and Jackie Coogan), a stand-alone suburban home, and a Model “T” Ford car. The family set out on a weekend outing involving buying tickets for an excursion boat, and to get there Chaplin goes through an unequal struggle with his car’s hand crank. (Other cars had self-starters by 1919 but Henry Ford, anxious to keep costs down, still had the Model “T” equipped with a hand crank so you needed to start it manually – and a lot of people worried that the kickback from the crank would break their arms.) For some reason Chaplin keeps trying to get into his car via the right side – was he still thinking of how people drive in his native Britain? – and whenever he does that, the car shudders to a halt and the motor stops running, meaning he needs to get out and crank it again. He finally gets his trip going by literally crawling over Edna to get to the steering wheel. Once the family gets to the dock and gets on the boat, they have a new set of problems. The boat is starting to sail when Chaplin arrives and the only way he can get on is by using the body of a heavy-set woman (apparently played by Tom Wood in drag!) as a gangplank.

Once they’re all on the boat Chaplin finds that the seat next to Edna and their kids has been taken by a large, obnoxious fellow passenger (Tom Wilson) and his even larger and more obnoxious wife (Babe London). A Day’s Pleasure is one of Chaplin’s nastiest films, as he literally attacks the male passenger who’s got in his way and even at one point comes close to kicking him off the boat. (I remember one writer for The Nation who praised Chaplin’s comedy for delivering a good, swift kick in the pants to authority figures and others who needed it, but it occurred to me that over his career Chaplin got more kicks in the pants than he gave. Not in this movie, though.) There’s also a quite surprising scene in which Chaplin runs afoul of an all-Black jazz band playing on the deck of the excursion boat (and, though they appear to be genuinely Black instead of white actors in blackface, their names, with one exception, are listed on imdb.com only with initials: C. Allen, J. A. Irvin, El Sorral, and the one who actually gets a full name, John Williams – ironic in itself because a white man named John Williams is now, and has been for decades, the most prominent living film composer). That surprised me because, according to Theodore Huff’s 1947 biography of Chaplin, he'd said about Blacks, “I never laugh at their humor. They have suffered too much ever to be funny to me” – yet here he is doing a gag in which the Black trombone player tickles Chaplin’s upper lip with his slide so much Chaplin literally grabs the instrument and throws it overboard. (I felt too sorry for the poor guy losing his trombone to find it funny.) Chaplin also has an unequal (and extended) wrestling match with a deck chair he’s trying desperately and unsuccessfully to assemble, in a scene that seems to have been copied in just about every comedy taking place in a watercraft. He also trips over a sandwich vendor (Loyal Underwood) who got in his face. The family finally gets back from their cruise but that’s not the end of their troubles: Chaplin is stopped at an intersection by an officious cop who tells him to go back where he came from – an obvious impossibility in the highly crowded intersection. Then he bumps his car against a truck that’s carrying a barrel of highly sticky tar, which immobilizes the cop who was trying to ticket him. There’s one great gag scene in which one of the cops (there were two, one relatively lightweight and one heavy-set) falls down a manhole and then emerges again when its cover (obviously just a trash-can lid because a real manhole cover would have been way too heavy) pops open and he thrusts out. A Day’s Pleasure is minor Chaplin, but also proof that even the minor work of a genius can still be great.