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The Floorwalker

The Floorwalker, Chaplin’s first film under his landmark contract with Lone Star-Mutual, has embezzlement as its subject. Chaplin’s inspiration for the film came while he and his brother Sydney were in New York City negotiating his contract with M...

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The Fireman

In Chaplin’s second effort for Mutual, he portrays an inept firefighter at Fire Station 23. Charlie, still asleep, mistakes a drill bell for a fire alarm and single-handedly drives out the horse-drawn fire engine. When he discovers his error, he s...


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The Vagabond

The Vagabond, Chaplin’s third Mutual film, was an important step in Chaplin’s career, in which he interweaves pathos as an integral part of the comedy. Indeed, The Vagabond is the prototype of The Kid (1921) and The Circus (1928). Chaplin employs...

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One A.M

One A.M., Chaplin’s fourth Mutual, is an impressive piece of virtuosity, a solo performance except for a brief appearance by Albert Austin as a taxi driver. The film is a tour de force of Chaplin’s superb pantomime and comic creativity performed ...


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The Count

The fifth film in the Mutual series, The Count, further develops the situations of Caught in a Cabaret (1914) and A Jitney Elopement (1915) and anticipates the future Chaplin films The Rink, The Idle Class (1921), and City Lights (1931), films in ...

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The Pawnshop

In the sixth Mutual film, Charlie is a pawnbroker’s assistant in a pawnshop that evokes the London of Chaplin’s childhood. The film is rich in comic transposition, a key element to Chaplin’s genius. The apex of such work in the Mutuals is the cele...


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Behind the Screen

A refinement of his earlier comedies set in a film studio (A Film Johnnie and The Masquerader for Keystone in 1914 and His New Job for Essanay in 1915), Behind the Screen, Chaplin’s seventh film for Mutual, lampoons the unmotivated slapstick of th...

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The Rink

Chaplin’s eighth film for Mutual, The Rink, is one of his most popular comedies. Charlie is an inept waiter who prepares the bill of Mr. Stout (Eric Campbell) by examining the soup, spaghetti, melon stains and other remnants on the sloppy eater’s ...


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Easy Street

Chaplin’s last four Mutual-Chaplin Specials are among his finest work. While each of the preceding Mutual comedies took approximately one month each to make, Chaplin took more time with the last four (ten months in total), which extended his twelv...

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The Cure

The Cure, the tenth film in the series, is perhaps the funniest of the Mutuals. It was partly inspired in its setting by the Fred Karno sketch, The Hydro, which was set in a hydrotherapy clinic. Further inspiration for the film was drawn from the ...


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The Immigrant

The Immigrant, which contains elements of satire, irony, and romance as well as cinematic poetry, endures in the twenty-first century as a comic masterpiece. The film, Chaplin’s eleventh in the Mutual series, is the best-constructed of his two-ree...

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The Adventurer

Chaplin and his brother Sydney went to San Francisco for a vacation after completing The Immigrant. Chaplin was growing tired from the hectic pace of the series; four months passed before the last film, The Adventurer, was released—the longest in...