Charlie Butts In

Not a new Chaplin film so much as a piece of industrial salvage. After Chaplin left Essanay, the studio still had unused takes from his 1915 two-reeler A Night Out, and anything with him in it was a sure sale. This one-reel abridgment is assembled largely from alternate takes and padded with footage of Chaplin conducting a band. The Tramp, dead drunk on a Saturday night, tries to get home, then into his room, then into bed, and fails at each stage. Ben Turpin turns up among the leftovers. Chaplin despised these unauthorized recuts, and the seams show. A document of how fiercely the industry mined a star who had already moved on.