The 82nd Chaplin Film Found At Antiques Fair!

Long lost Charlie Chaplin film found at antiques fair
A long lost Hollywood silent film featuring Charlie Chaplin is to be screened for the first time in nearly a century after being discovered at an antiques fair.

The comedy called A Thief Catcher was made in 1914 and was missing for so many years that Chaplin's appearance in it as a buffoon policeman had been forgotten.

The 10-minute movie was discovered by the American cinema historian, Paul Gierucki, who bought a can of old film marked "Keystone" at an antiques sale in Michigan.
He assumed it was just another Keystone Cops movie and didn't watch the 16mm reel for months.

When he finally looked at the film, which is in good condition, he was amazed to see what looked like Chaplin emerging from the bushes in a police uniform, several sizes too big, armed with a nightstick.

Mr Gierucki couldn't tell immediately but the actor's distinctive twitches seemed to confirm that it was Chaplin playing a minor role in one of his earliest films.

He showed it to a fellow film collector, Richard Roberts, who said: "I looked at it two seconds and said 'Yep, it's Chaplin.' Even though he's dressed as a cop, the rest of the character is still there – the moustache, the walk, the mannerism. This is a character he'd been doing for quite a while."
In the film Chaplin, who had yet to become famous, uses physical gestures that he would later employ for his most memorable, bumbling character The Tramp. After wiggling and shrugging in a way familiar to millions of filmgoers he delivers some instant slapstick justice by knocking around a group of hooligans.

The movie was made by Mack Sennett for his Keystone film company which produced a series of films about a group of incompetent policemen, the Keystone Cops, between 1912 and 1917.
Many other future stars including Gloria Swanson and Fatty Arbuckle, also began their Hollywood careers at the Keystone studio in Edendale, California.

Sennett had hired Chaplin, then a vaudeville star, in 1913 to make silent movies and A Thief Catcher is thought to have been the second or third film he made for Keystone. The film was shot from January 5 to 26.

It starred Ford Sterling, famous as the chief of the Keystone Cops, and he also directed.
The film also starred the now less famous names of Mack Swain and Edgar Kennedy, with Chaplin appearing on screen for three minutes.

It will be shown publicly this weekend at the annual Slapsticon film festival in Arlington, Virginia.
Organisers believe it is the first time the film has been shown since soon after its release on the eve of the First World War in 1914.

Chaplin made dozens of films between 1914 and 1967 but A Thief Catcher was never listed in his filmography, either by himself or the British Film Institute. It is the first title added to the list in 60 years and becomes the 82nd Chaplin film.

The London-born actor recalled in his autobiography that, apart from his starring role in Keystone comedies, he had also played bit parts as a "Keystone cop" in several films, but he did not give the titles and they were thought to be lost.

More than half of all silent films ever made are thought to no longer exist but A Thief Catcher is not the first to be rediscovered.

A trove of 75 missing Hollywood works, including the 1927 romance Upstream by Oscar-winning director John Ford, were recently found in a film archive vault in New Zealand.

( Telegraph.co.uk )