Tillie’s Punctured Romance

Year: 1914

Grade: C+

Country: USA

Director: Sennett

Review

touted as the first feature length comedy, this 1914 charlie chaplin flick has its moments, but isn’t his strongest. the film quality is quite bad and i hope someone comes along and cleans it up or restores it…soon. the movie itself could have used some work too. for the time it did a couple neat things. it broke the fourth wall a few times, which i think was fairly uncommon for features. there was also one scene at a movie theater where we see a movie within the movie. that was also probably a less common sight. most of the film was shot with the camera at eye level and stationary. there were only a couple shots (of the keystone cops) where they broke this convention. in these instances the camera was in the car with tight shots on the cops’ faces. it was funny and gave the sense of excitement that was appropriate for the scenes. there are some decent laughs in the film, but it’s not nearly the same caliber of film that chaplin would go on to make. then again, this one wasn’t directed or written by chaplin so… chaplin’s acting was the highlight of the movie – he did his usual slapstick schtick and it was right for the part. he plays a con-man of sorts which was different, at least for the half dozen or so films i’ve seen him in. there were times when is little more exposition would have been nice…there were lots of jumps in action or leaps in time. in some cases time within the film would be rather slow and in other cases a cut would indicate the lapse of several minutes (characters would be wearing different clothes, characters would all of a sudden be in very different settings than in the last cut, etc.). this wasn’t totally confusing, but it wasn’t smooth either. it has a good score.

Short