Mabel's Married Life (1914)

Great Film overall

A Masterpiece!

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Am a big fan of Charlie Chaplin, have been for over a decade now. Many films and shorts of his are very good to masterpiece, and like many others consider him a comedy genius and one of film's most important and influential directors. He did do better than 'Mabel's Married Life', still made very early on in his career where he was still finding his feet and not fully formed what he became famous for. Can understand why the Keystone period suffered from not being as best remembered or highly remembered than his later efforts, but they are mainly decent and important in their own right. 'Mabel's Married Life' is a long way from a career high, but has a lot of nice things about it and is to me one of the better efforts in the 1914 Keystone batch and one of Chaplin and Mabel Normand's collaborations. 'Mabel's Married Life' is not as hilarious, charming or touching as his later work and some other shorts in the same period. The story is flimsy and the production values not as audacious. Occasionally, things feel a little scrappy and confused.For someone who was still relatively new to the film industry and had literally just moved on from their stage background, 'Mabel's Married Life' is not bad at all. While not audacious, the film hardly looks ugly, is more than competently directed and is appealingly played. Chaplin looks comfortable for so early on and shows his stage expertise while opening it up that it doesn't become stagy or repetitive shtick. Mabel Normand is charming and has good comic timing, working well with Chaplin.Although the humour, charm and emotion was done even better and became more refined later, 'Mabel's Married Life' is humorous, sweet and easy to like, though the emotion is not quite there. It moves quickly and doesn't feel too long or short. Overall, far from one of Chaplin's best but pretty good and perhaps one of his better efforts from the early Keystone period. 7/10 Bethany Cox

"Mabel's Married Life" is a 14-minute black-and-white movie from 1914, so this one is already considerably older than a whole century. Wow. It was directed by the legendary Mack Sennett and the script is by the two protagonists themselves: Chaplin and Normand. The fact that Normand is mentioned in the title and not Chaplin in this movie already tells you what a big star she was back then, still in her 20s just like Chaplin. The story is relatively simple, even for such a brief movie. A bully hits on Mabel and Charlie is of course too weak and tiny to stand up to him. So Mabel gets him a dummy which Charlie is supposed to use for his training. But the dummy will not be subdued this easily. This little movie is certainly among Normand's most known works, also because of her famous co-lead of course. One of Chaplin's movies biggest strength is that, even without intertitles, the action and plot are so physical that you can not only understand the action, but even enjoy it. And this is a massive deal-breaker when it comes to silent films. I give this one here a thumbs-up. Worth checking out and the only slightly boring/forgettable thing was probably the bar scene. Mabel and Chaplin have great chemistry and work together very well.

In one of the most effective and thorough characterizations in any of Chaplin's films up until that time, in Mabel's Married Life Charlie plays Mabel's husband, an feeble drunk incapable of deflecting the oafish advances of a huge man in the park, who hits on Charlie's wife right in front of him. Starting these films in the park was one of Chaplin's favorite things to do back in the earliest days of his career, but here he starts his film there and then takes us into the mind of one of the characters, rather than just having some on screen slapstick goofiness.Soon after the park incident, Charlie goes to a bar and is teased by the other patrons as he slowly gets drunk. His wife, meanwhile, is at home fashioning a blow-up doll to resemble the man in the park, thus providing a scenario from which her drunken husband can emerge her hero.There have been some criticisms that the scene involving the dummy wasn't fleshed out and made into the effective scene that it could have been, but I have to disagree. It is very stereotypical Chaplin comedy that comes out of the scene, but I can't think of any reason to expect anything different. What we do get is a brief but effective look at the desperation of a woman who is married to someone who wants to but is unable to protect her from undesirables, and her efforts to improve her husband's confidence. It doesn't seem to work too well, but I have a feeling that the film's original audiences were more than pleased.This film, by the way, is notable as being the first that Chaplin was allowed to write and direct on his own, and as compared to the rest of his films from this time, it is clear that he immediately began to prove his talent. Oh, and one more thing - you may notice that the film has French intertitles. I'm not sure why this is, but those of you lucky (and smart) enough to own a Mac, you can just type them into the translator on your Dashboard and have it translated into your language of choice...

Once you've seen a few Keystone comedies made before Charlie Chaplin arrived on the scene you get a sense of the impact he had on contemporary viewers. Sure, the best of the 1912-13 Keystones have a gritty vitality, but they take a little getting used to. They're sometimes haphazardly constructed, and often quite violent. This is not to say that Chaplin's arrival brought about an instant change in approach, for his earliest directorial efforts such as A Busy Day or The Property Man are easily as rough as the studio's typical output, but in his best Keystones we can see Chaplin begin to find his style. As a director he smoothed out the stories and slowed down the pace, while as an actor he showed more finesse than most of his colleagues, and also influenced them to temper their mugging and gesticulating. Mabel's Married Life is one of the Keystones I enjoy. It tells a coherent if simple story, violence is kept to a minimum, and it builds not to a wild chase but to a genuinely amusing, leisurely paced routine: Charlie's drunken encounter with a boxer's dummy. Compared to Chaplin's own later work this short is still a bit ragged; the routine with the dummy isn't as fully developed as it might have been, and the character Charlie plays is far from admirable, but there are laughs along the way and the tone is agreeably lighthearted, despite the saloon sequences and Charlie's heavy drinking.Like so many Keystone comedies this one begins in a park. Charlie and wife Mabel Normand sit together on a bench, but Charlie is miserly and only grudgingly shares some of the banana he's eating. When he goes off to drink in a nearby saloon a burly gent played by Mack Swain attempts to make time with Mabel, who is decidedly uninterested. (Swain is clean-shaven here, and rather less cartoon-y than usual.) Charlie returns but finds it difficult to assert himself against the big guy, who treats him as an ineffectual pest. Eventually Swain's wife must intervene and call him off. When Charlie returns to the saloon Mabel, exasperated, purchases a boxing dummy so that her husband can learn self defense. That night when Charlie returns home tipsy he believes the dummy is Swain, and has a hard time ejecting him while Mabel watches in amusement.Charlie's encounter with the dummy is the comic highlight, but Mabel has some nice moments, too. Whenever I see this film I always enjoy her disgusted impersonation of her husband's waddling walk, and she has her own lively confrontation with the dummy before Charlie returns home. When we watch Chaplin's early films we tend to compare them to his mature work, so of course they tend to come up short, but Mabel's Married Life stands as one of the better comedies he made for Mack Sennett during his apprenticeship.P.S. I was lucky enough to acquire a Super-8 print of this comedy from Blackhawk Films in the '70s, and when I screened it again recently I appreciated the quality of the musical score they provided, a series of peppy themes played on a Wurlitzer organ. Sometimes I find organ music inappropriate for comedies, but this score really works, and definitely enhances the impact of the film. Many thanks, Blackhawk!