His Favorite Pastime

1914
5| 0h12m| NR| en| More Info
Released: 16 March 1914 Released
Producted By: Keystone Film Company
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
Info

A very plastered fella follows a pretty woman home, and proceeds to make a nuisance of himself.

Genre

Comedy

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Director

George Nichols

Production Companies

Keystone Film Company

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His Favorite Pastime Videos and Images

His Favorite Pastime Audience Reviews

Hellen I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much
ThiefHott Too much of everything
Listonixio Fresh and Exciting
Fleur Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.
Jay Raskin This is Chaplin's eight film and the third one ("Mabel's Strange Predicament" and "Tango Tangled")where he did his famous drunk routine. It was his drunk routine that got him hired at Keystone in the first place, so it is not surprising to see it being used so frequently early in his film career. Chaplin continued to use his great drunk mimic ability throughout his whole career ("One A.M." and "City Lights" to name two other films). While the film does not really go anywhere beyond laughing at a drunk, there are a few memorable moments.The movie begins in a bar with Chaplin, drunk, mistaking a sausage for a cigar and trying to light it. It is the first use of food for something else that appears in a Chaplin film. The shoelace as spaghetti gag in "The Gold Rush" is perhaps the most famous. Immediately, we have a nice bit with Roscoe Arbuckle playing another drunk. Chaplin teases poor Arbuckle with the prospect of sharing his drink. Together Chaplin and Arbuckle improvise quite nicely. Unfortunately Arbuckle disappears from the film after two minutes. Surely, the improvisation should have continued with Arbuckle getting some revenge on Chaplin to balance things out.The funniest bit in the whole movie may be Chaplin battling with restroom swinging door. Drunk Chaplin loses the fight and ends up crawling under the door.Outside there's a quick beginning to a romance between Peggy Pearce and Chaplin. Pearce seems to have been chosen because of her resemblance to Mable Normand. Unfortunately, she's not really good at improve comedy as Normand was. As with the Arbuckle character, the budding romance plot just shuts.There are a couple of wonderful acrobatic moments. The first is Chaplin riding outside a streetcar, holding on with one hand. He goes flying off when the streetcar stops, but he makes a perfect landing. The second is a wonderful flop over the railing of a staircase onto a couch.The movie does have some unfortunate bits of racism. Helen Carruthers and Billy Gilbert play their small parts in black-face. Gilbert, waiting with palm out for a tip gets burnt by Chaplin's match and Chaplin registers shock when he discovers that the woman he thinks he has found is her black servant. Carruthers does give Chaplin a good thrashing.At the end, the entire family of Chaplin's would be love come and kick him literally out of the house. There's a scene in the movie "Chaplin" (1992) where Chaplin first puts on his tramp costume that appears to be based on this scene. However it is changed quite a bit and Henry Lehrman is directing. The director was actually George Nichols.This is Nichols second of four Chaplin films. He directed from 1908 to 1916, but only worked for Keystone for about seven months from late 1913 to April, 1914. It is interesting that Sennett gave Chaplin to Nichols. It may be a mark that after six weeks at Keystone, Sennett felt Chaplin was not making it as a top comedian and relegated him to second tier Keystone films.Again, the film certainly does not rank with Chaplin's best work at Keystone, but there are a few brief, very nice moments.
Michael DeZubiria In another disappointing short comedy, Charlie Chaplin once again plays the standard, belligerent drunk, drinking himself into oblivion and then stumbling around this run-of-the-mill slapstick comedy. There are some mildly interesting items, such as the fact that the altogether unamusing but watchable opening scene features Chaplin and Keystone colleague Fatty Arbuckle as fellow drinkers in the pub, taking beers away from each other and gradually getting drunker and drunker, as well as the fact that this is one of the earliest, maybe even the origin, of one of Chaplin's gags that he would later perfect and use with great success, the lighting of the match on the seat of his pants. Other than that, there is not much else of note here.The comedy of the film is really nonexistent, which is not to say that it is entirely bad, just a failed experiment. The obnoxious drunk has long since lost its appeal, if it ever had any, and I imagine even audiences back in 1914 must have been getting tired of it. The film features some of the most blatant racism of any of his films, although certainly not the last (remember the three minds with but a single thought from A Day's Pleasure?). At one point late in the film, Charlie follows a woman right into her home and hits on her, and is then horrified when he realizes that she is black. He also drops a lighted match into a black man's hand when he holds it out for a tip, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes this drunken character so dislikable.Most of the rest of the film is composed of people pushing and shoving other people around and hitting each other, and ultimately it seems that Chaplin simply uses drunkenness in the film to serve as a reason to stagger around and hit people and get in fights with swinging doors and fall over stairway banisters and such. The plot outline on the IMDb says "A very plastered fella follows a pretty woman home, and proceeds to make a nuisance of himself." And sadly, there's not much difference between watching the film and reading that one line.
23skidoo-4 His Favorite Pastime is only about 16 minutes long, yet I found it so boring I nearly fell asleep. The plot makes even less sense than usual, and Chaplin seems to be sleepwalking through the comedy. There are a few interesting gags, such as The Tramp vs. a pair of saloon doors, and later, the Tramp riding the front of a streetcar, but nothing really gels in this early silent Chaplin. His drunk act was starting to get old by this point, and in fact the character he plays here is little different than the character he played in his previous film, Tango Tangles, except that the comedy in the earlier short is far superior.My advice: unless you have a desire to see every film Chaplin made, good or bad, skip this one.
wmorrow59 Just as Babe Ruth struck out now and then, and George Gershwin hit the occasional sour note, Charlie Chaplin made a few comedies during his apprenticeship at Keystone that don't hold up all that well. In the better efforts we can detect a great talent struggling to emerge from the chaos, and there are good moments scattered about, while a couple of them (I'm thinking of The New Janitor and Caught in a Cabaret) are quite satisfying: nicely constructed films with funny gags and a story to tell. However, several of the Keystones -- and I say this as a lifelong Chaplin fan -- are a chore to sit through. Too many of them are burdened with an overload of silly histrionics and painful-looking slapstick violence, and those good moments are hard to find.Well, I'd say the good moments are scarce indeed in His Favorite Pastime. The main problem is that Chaplin's character is so obnoxious: he looks like the Little Tramp, but sure doesn't act like him. Most of this film is set in a pub, and once Charlie's had a few shots he turns into a mean drunk. There's a vigorous workout involving a swinging door, and it's mildly amusing, but the routine lacks the finesse Chaplin would bring to such business later on, in far better comedies such as The Cure. Moreover, in his later work the characters taking the brunt of the violence usually deserved it. Here, by contrast, when an inoffensive washroom attendant (a white actor wearing black-face makeup) holds out his hand for a tip, Charlie drops a lighted match instead of a coin and burns the man's hand. Ouch! Later, thoroughly blotto, Charlie follows a pretty woman home, walks right into her house, and makes a pass at her. Actually, on his first attempt, he accidentally makes the pass at her 'colored' maid (again a white performer in black-face), and is horrified when he realizes his mistake -- a very unusual racial gag in Chaplin's work, and another strike against this film. Really the only worthwhile moment is a nice demonstration of physical dexterity, when Charlie falls over a banister, lands on a sofa, and then casually lights a cigarette.There are a couple points of minor interest in His Favorite Pastime concerning the cast: the opening sequence in the saloon features Chaplin's Keystone colleague Roscoe Arbuckle, so heavily disguised as a shabby drunk that he's barely recognizable. Where laughs are concerned nothing much comes of the scene, but it's interesting to note Arbuckle's resemblance to Orson Welles in his grizzled makeup for A Touch of Evil, made many years later. Also, the society lady Charlie follows home is played by an actress variously known as Peggy Pearce and Viola Barry, who reportedly was romantically involved with Chaplin for a brief time during his stint at Keystone. Here she isn't given much to do, but she can be seen to better advantage opposite Lillian Gish in D. W. Griffith's Biograph drama of 1913, The Mothering Heart. That short drama, by the way, holds up considerably better than this comedy.