100th anniversary of Charlie Chaplin’s “pay day” on April 2nd

In 1918 the First National Exhibitors Circuit hired Charlie Chaplin to make eight films for the unprecedented salary of $1,075,000 per year. Because he had produced twelve wildly popular short films the previous year for the Mutual company, First National assumed he would knock out the new ones in even less time. But because of the enormous popularity of his films Chaplin had the clout to work at his own pace, and he enraged the First National executives by taking five years to complete the series. Pay Day, the next-to-last, was released on April 2, 1922. In it Chaplin plays a henpecked construction worker who, after a long day at work, sneaks out for a night on the town. While the film was a return to the simple plots of his earliest films—Charlie bungles things at work and gets drunk at night—it reflected Chaplin’s growing mastery of the film medium. It’s particularly notable for a scene in which Charlie, on a scaffold, stacks bricks that are being tossed up to him from below. He does it with what seems to be superhuman agility. In reality, Chaplin is removing bricks from the stack and dropping them behind him, and then projecting the film in reverse. But his choreography is so skillful and the editing of the scene so deceptive that most viewers see it as simply another demonstration of Chaplin’s incredible physical prowess.

Pay Day was rapturously received by the public and critics. The reviewer for Photoplay said, “If we ever get to the point where Charles Chaplin fails to make us laugh, we are going right out and order a nice, large, beautifully engraved tombstone…Pay Day made even the ushers laugh.”

Written by Dan Kamin. Read more about Dan’s work at http://www.dankamin.com.