Between Showers

One-Day-Bad-Weather-Century-Smile

Between Showers by Henry Lehrman, 1914:



There's a person sitting (in one spot (one shot)), and another standing (in another space (one shot)) which might as well be Venezuela — / Retake this quickly: There's a gentleman-thief lurking on the fringe of the gentleman-cop's house with naught but a barren umbrella blitzed into spokes like the instrument a doctor employs for bladder exams — whilst the Keystone cop nearby wields an intact, eminently phallic parasol and dreams the panpan cucul w/r/t the girl at his right, — and that's the umbrella, the would-be thief, must have! / The damsel rejects the cop after detecting his 'brella (once the thief swaps the two accessories out)... happens not to be as cracked-up as it could be... or once was... / LA having "weather" is 90% of the time bullshit / By this point in 1914 (mere weeks out from Chaplin's debut in Making a Living; from the Tramp's debut in Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal.), the Tramp would only have been perceived by audiences as 'a recurring character, this guy who shows up' across films... / Between Showers, Lehrman by association, leaves a happy trace upon picture history in having first recorded "the Charlie smile"... which is what? — hand to mouth

Between Showers by Henry Lehrman, 1914:





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Previous pieces on Chaplin at Cinemasparagus:

Making a Living [Lehrman, 1914] / Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. [Lehrman, 1914] / Mabel's Strange Predicament [Normand, 1914]

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