His New Profession

Written and directed by Chaplin himself, midway through his Keystone year. Released 31 August 1914 and shot on the Venice and Ocean Park piers, it stars the Tramp as a man hired by Charley Chase — still billed as Charles Parrott — to wheel a gouty uncle (Jess Dandy) around a seaside park. Chaplin hangs a "Help a cripple" sign and a tin cup on the sleeping invalid, pockets the donations, and drinks them at a pier saloon where Roscoe Arbuckle tends bar. Crude by the standards of the later Mutuals, it already shows Chaplin treating a one-reeler as a chain of cause and effect rather than a pile of gags — and it rehearses the gout-and-wheelchair business he would perfect in The Cure (1917).