- Director: Charles Chaplin
- AMG Rating:
- Genre: Comedy Drama
- Movie Type: Melodrama, Slapstick
- Themes: Missing Persons
- Main Cast: Charles Chaplin
- Release Year: 1916
- Country: US
- Run Time: 20 minutes
Plot
Charlie Chaplin's third film in his Mutual period is his first minor masterpiece. It combines comedy and drama in the style that Chaplin had developed in his earlier Essanay film The Tramp and anticipates later dramatic comedies such as The Kid and City Lights. Charlie plays an itinerant violinist whose famous feet we first see emerging from the swinging doors of a saloon. He takes up his position outside the back door and begins his concert, but at this moment a street band begins playing outside the front door. When Charlie enters the saloon to pass the hat, the patrons, believing he's part of the band, contribute generously. When the real band leader enters to pass his hat, a fight and chase begin from which Charlie eventually escapes. The audience is now introduced to "The Mother," an obviously upper-class woman who interrupts her embroidering and looks longingly at a photograph of her long-lost child. Charlie, having forsaken the city, wanders down a country road where he comes upon a gypsy encampment where a beautiful drudge (Edna Purviance), under the control of the brutal Gypsy Chief (Eric Campbell) is washing clothes. Charlie plays a concert for his audience of one, the fast tempo causing the girl to scrub her laundry at a lightning pace and his soulful playing evoking her strong emotions. The concert is interrupted by the Chief, who pushes Charlie into a water basin and beats the girl severely for shirking her duties. Seeing this brutality, Charlie puts aside his cane and violin in favor of a stout club and rescues the girl in an exciting scene in which they dramatically escape in one of the wagons.Later, encamped by the side of a road, Charlie prepares breakfast while the girl goes for water. She meets a handsome artist (Lloyd Bacon), who, noticing a shamrock shaped birthmark on her arm, asks her to pose for him. After he finishes his sketch, she invites him to breakfast. During the meal, it's obvious from her face that she's infatuated with him, and Charlie is aware that he's losing her. When the artist leaves, the girl gazes longingly after him as Charlie watches her apprehensively. Some time later, the painting is exhibited in a posh gallery and the Mother, in attendance, almost collapses as she recognizes her daughter by her birthmark. Meanwhile Charlie tries to cheer up the despondent girl by promising that he'll learn to draw too. Suddenly a limousine pulls up and mother and daughter are reunited. Charlie gallantly refuses a cash reward and wishes the artist luck just before they drive off. Alone, Charlie tries to cheer himself but succumbs to his emotions. In the limousine the girl realizes her true feelings and makes the driver return to Charlie, whom she excitedly hauls off to the limousine and to a presumed life of luxury. This was not the ending originally planned for the film, in which Chaplin was going to have the Tramp attempt a drowning suicide, only to be rescued by a homely farm girl, and seeing her, jumping back in again. Fortunately, he opted for the happier, more optimistic ending. ~ Phil Posner, All Movie Guide
Review
One of the films directed by Chaplin during his white-hot streak of comedy shorts for the Mutual Film Corporation, The Vagabond also gestures toward the development of the Tramp persona in such films as The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), and City Lights (1931), and hones Chaplin's considerable skills as a director. After starting out in such primitive slapstick efforts as Henry Lehrman's Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914), which many agree is one of the first fully realized manifestations of the Tramp persona for which Chaplin became famous, Chaplin realized that he had to take control of his image, and his films, if he hoped to achieve any real and lasting artistic satisfaction and/or commercial impact. Just two years later, by the time of The Vagabond, Chaplin was already an assured director, even if his visual style remained deeply theatrical. In The Vagabond, Chaplin appears as a down-on-his-luck violinist who travels to the countryside and falls in love with a young woman (the radiant Edna Purviance) who is being held against her will by a group of gypsies led by veteran Chaplin heavy Eric Campbell. Rescuing her from the troupe, the Tramp accompanies the young woman as she has her portrait painted an itinerant artist (played by Lloyd Bacon, who would later go on to become one of Warner Bros.' most important directors in the 1930s and '40s). But, as is usually the case with the Tramp's comedies, there is heartbreak at the core of the work; the young woman falls in love with the artist, and Charlie's affections are once again spurned. Fate takes a hand when the portrait is seen by a older woman (Charlotte Mineau) who recognizes the young woman as her daughter, who had been kidnapped when she was just a child. At the film's end, the girl is reunited with her mother, and she offers Chaplin's character money as a reward, but the Tramp refuses any payment for his "services." Instead, he is content to wander into his next adventure, perpetually in search of romance, success, and a comfortable station in life.The Vagabond is one of Chaplin's most affecting short comedies, and in his ill-fated romance with Edna Purviance's character, Chaplin prefigures the leading ladies he would work with in his films throughout his long career: unattainable objects of desire who are always interested in some other suitor. But how could the Tramp's fate be otherwise? Destined to roam the back roads of society, continually searching for respectability, Chaplin created a character imbued with the essential paradoxes of human existence: the desire to belong, to be respected by one's peers, and yet remain apart from society, able to function with some degree of freedom. Chaplin was making a fortune with these early films, but he was also astutely paving his way for his later work as a director of feature films for his own studio, as the two-reel comedy format collapsed. ~ Wheeler Winston Dixon, All Movie Guide
Cast
- Charles Chaplin - Street Musician
