- Director: Charles Chaplin
- AMG Rating:
- Genre: Comedy
- Movie Type: Romantic Comedy, Slapstick
- Themes: Down on Their Luck
- Main Cast: Charles Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Fred Goodwins, Lloyd Bacon, Paddy McGuire
- Release Year: 1915
- Country: US
- Run Time: 20 minutes
Plot
The Tramp, Charlie Chaplin's sixth film for Essanay, is generally considered his first masterpiece. It is the first of his films that blended pathos with comedy and contains subtle pantomime along with the knockabout slapstick. Charlie is truly a tramp in this film, wandering down a dusty country road carrying his bindle. He is knocked down by near misses from two passing autos and pulls a whisk broom from his pocket and dusts himself off. He sits by a tree to eat his lunch, but it is stolen by a hobo (Leo White). Despondent, Charlie salts some grass and eats it. We next meet a farm girl (Edna Purviance) and her father (Fred Goodwins), who gives her some cash and sends her on an errand. She stops on her way to count her money and is robbed by a sinister hobo (Leo White). Her cries bring Charlie, who rescues her from the hobo and two other tramp thieves. The girl brings Charlie home to the farm, where he is rewarded with a job as a farmhand. He is inept at the job, the source of several funny scenes with a fellow farmhand (Paddy McGuire). The three thieving hoboes show up and try to involve Charlie in a scheme to rob the farmer's money. Charlie foils their efforts by hitting them on their heads with a mallet as they reach the top of the ladder that he has set up at his bedroom window.Farmer Fred, alerted by the noise, grabs his shotgun and chases off the crooks, but Charlie gets shot in the leg accidentally. This scene is played completely straight and is utterly convincing as Charlie passes out from the pain. Charlie is next seen recuperating from his injuries, lounging at an outdoor table with the farm girl and squirting seltzer into his drink. But his happiness is short-lived. Her boyfriend (Lloyd Bacon) arrives on the scene and Charlie, seeing that his love for her is unrequited, goes into the farmhouse and writes a note: "i thout your kindness was love but it ain't cause i seen him." He turns his back to the camera and picks up the girl's hat, kisses it, and walks outside. Bidding the two farewell, Charlie refuses the money offered by the boyfriend. The film closes with what would become Chaplin's classic ending -- Charlie walking sadly back along the road, but suddenly putting an optimistic little spring in his step as the camera irises in. ~ Phil Posner, All Movie Guide
Review
One of Chaplin's most famous comedies for the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company, and one which helped to sharply define the persona of the Tramp character, The Tramp finds Chaplin directing himself as a hobo, adrift on the highway of life, when fate takes hand in his affairs. He comes across a young woman (Edna Purviance, one of Chaplin's most frequent leading ladies in his early comedies) who is being beset by a group of other hoboes (one of whom is played by Bud Jamison, who would later become a regular in the Three Stooges shorts at Columbia in the 1930s). Charlie steps in and beats them all up, throwing them in a lake in the process. The young woman takes The Tramp back to her father's farm, where Charlie tries and fails miserably at performing even the most menial chores, much to the young woman's amusement. Much of the film is taken up with these farm gags, and Chaplin builds up his timing perfectly, so that even the simplest task seems absolutely beyond his reach. When the gang of hoboes whom Charlie has beaten off before try to break into the house, Charlie once again comes to the rescue, hoping secretly that the young woman will find a place for him in her heart. Alas, she is already engaged (her fiancé is played by future director Lloyd Bacon, who also does double duty here as one of the hoboes in an obvious economic move), and Charlie is left to pen a farewell note and drift out of her life and into his next adventure, as the character of the Tramp must. In his unrequited quest for romance, Chaplin here is working on one of his favorite themes: the Tramp, unlucky in love, and beset from all sides by adversity, who nevertheless manages to triumph in a variety of small yet significant ways, and who, although capable of minor acts of larceny, is essentially the moral center of the universe he inhabits. Chaplin's star would continue to rise in his other films of the period; he was on his way to becoming one of the highest paid performers in the film industry, exerting total creative control over his films. ~ Wheeler Winston Dixon, All Movie GuideCast
- Charles Chaplin - A Tramp
- Edna Purviance - Farmer's Daughter
- Fred Goodwins - Farmer
- Lloyd Bacon - Edna's Fiance
Paddy McGuire - Farmhand
