The Star Boarder (1914)

This is one of Mack Sennett's farcical comedies which causes hearty laughter all through the action. It is certainly rapid-fire and has been well photographed. - The Moving Picture World, April 18, 1914

This is Chaplin's 10th film and the fourth and last one that George Nichols directed. Only Mack Sennett directed Chaplin in more movies.This is also the fourth film where he appears drunk ("Mable's Strange Predicament," "Tango, Tangled," and "His Favorite Pasttime" are the other three). It is the third film that he has Minta Durfee as a love interest ("Making a Living," and Cruel, Cruel Love) and the third film he fights with an enraged Edgar Kennedy ("A Film Johnie" and "Cruel, Cruel Love"). Both Durfee and Kennedy are excellent in their roles.This is the first film in which Chaplin holds a pie. What is interesting is that nobody gets hit by the pie. Instead Chaplin just sits on it. This indicates that pie throwing in March of 1914 had not yet become a standard device in silent film comedies.The film does not go for big laughs, but it does have a steady stream of small ones. Especially good is Gordon Griffith as a boy with a big, hysterical laugh who snaps naughty pictures of Durfee and Kennedy with different partners.The film sets up some nice characters in a rooming house, but it does not go any where. It it is pleasantly more restrained and gentler than most Keystone Films. There is, however, the obligatory raucous ending.Chaplin had done ten films in about ten weeks at Keystone at this point in time. He would take a small break and the following month come back with the two-reeler "Mable At The Wheel."

Star Boarder, The (1914) ** (out of 4) Lower Keystone short features Charles Chaplin playing the landlady's pet, which doesn't sit too well with the other tenants and it certainly doesn't go over well with the woman's jealous husband. While this film doesn't really work it at least features a couple funny sequences with Chaplin doing his magic. Even though we still don't see the Chaplin the world would end up loving, these early shorts at least show him growing as an artist. One of the better scenes in the film is when Chaplin is trying to learn how to play tennis. The facial expressions of anger are quite funny as is another scene where Chaplin notices the woman's husband is standing behind him yet he tries to play dumb as if he didn't see the husband. The rest of the film is pretty weak without too many laughs, although the ending is a pretty nice kicker.

For about the first two thirds of The Landlady's Pet ( that's the real title, by the way - The Star Boarder was the former title, but ultimately it was changed) it seems that it is going to come across as three distinctly separate parts - the first third, where Charlie is the "star boarder," the landlady's favorite lodger to the chagrin of her jealous husband, the drunken scene, and the obnoxious son's disruptive magic lantern show.But as soon as the lantern show begins it becomes clear that it is going to tie the rest of the film together, which is something that Chaplin wasn't doing much during that first year making Keystone short comedies for Mack Sennett. The drunken scene is sort of a straggler, it doesn't seem to have any reason for being there other than that Chaplin can do it so well (so well, in fact, that Robert Downey Jr. included it as part of his performance in the phenomenal 1992 film about Chaplin's life), the conclusion of the film and the tying up of loose ends is a welcome surprise.Watch for Gordon Griffith, a mainstay in Chaplin's earliest films, stealing the show as the landlady and her husband's obnoxious son. It's easy to see why Chaplin kept casting him in his films!