DREAMY DUD SEES CHARLIE CHAPLIN (1915)

The just-concluded Essanay Retrospective at the Niles Essanay
Silent Film Museum wasn't exactly awash in Chaplin material, but HIS
NEW JOB, A NIGHT OUT and THE TRAMP were all screened, and there were a
few other highlights for Chaplin buffs. Here's an excerpt of a review
I posted to the silents newsgroup:

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It seems to me that Charlie Chaplin must not have found the
Essanay actresses very appealing: his first film for the company
doesn't really have a leading lady in it. He then left the Chicago
studio, taking with him a few of its most talented comic players (Ben
Turpin, Leo White), but no actresses, and started anew at Niles. And
rather than use one of the Niles actresses, he put an ad in the
newspaper ("WANTED -- THE PRETTIEST GIRL IN CALIFORNIA").

Speaking of Chaplin, a last-minute substitution to the film
program gave us DREAMY DUD SEES CHARLIE CHAPLIN (August 1915), an
animated film I'd been wanting to see for thirty years. I always
wondered if there might be some unique live-action footage of Chaplin
in it. (After all, Essanay saved a lot of scraps that ultimately ended
up in TRIPLE TROUBLE.) The material here isn't quite complete, but it
was all straight animation. Essanay's Wallace Carlson created a series
of cartoons about a kid named Dreamy Dud, and the surviving films of
the series all close Little Nemo-style, with Dud's adventures ending
as he's shaken out of a deep sleep. In this film, the extent of the
adventure is Dud and his dog sitting in a cinema, watching a Chaplin
movie. The animated Tramp has some trouble with a mule, and a rubbery
lamppost, before flirting with a curvy woman whose back is turned to
us. What follows would be repeated in films like SEVEN CHANCES and
HOLLYWOOD SAND-WITCHES for the next decade: the woman turns around,
the comedian is chagrined to discover she's black, and modern
audiences squirm uncomfortably in their seats. Another Dreamy Dud
cartoon we saw, DREAMY DUD: HE RESOLVES NOT TO SMOKE (June 1915), was
superior to this one in every way.

Another Essanay comedy series is nearly forgotten, because hardly
anything survives of it today: the George Ade Fables. If the one we
saw, THREE BOILED-DOWN FABLES (November 1914) was representative, this
was a very witty series, with a gentle sense of humor. Happily, this
one-reeler was packed with familiar faces, including Leo White and
Charlotte Mineau (soon to appear with Chaplin) and Wallace Beery,
already overbearing in 1914. The funniest vignette of the three mini-
fables was a sketch called "The Household Comedian" featuring Harry
Dunkinson and Gerda Holmes, about a wife who puts up with her
husband's endlessly unfunny jokes only up to a point. We never got to
see the resolution of the final vignette, the Wallace Beery one:
decomposition had devoured the entire end of the reel, so the film
just mottles and splotches its way to oblivion, as in LYRICAL NITRATE.