A Burlesque On Carmen (1915)
As smuggler's moll Carmen, Edna Purviance tries to seduce a hapless border guard played by Chaplin into letting contraband through the lines, touching off a mock-tragic love triangle that spoofs Bizet's opera scene for scene, down to its fatal duel.
Chaplin cut A Burlesque on Carmen as a tight two-reel parody timed to needle Cecil B. DeMille’s straight-faced Carmen, released the same season; after Chaplin left Essanay for Mutual, the studio padded his original with discarded footage into a four-reel version he publicly disowned.
Background
Chaplin made A Burlesque on Carmen as his thirteenth film for Essanay, a two-reel parody of Cecil B. DeMille’s solemn feature Carmen, released that same season and itself drawn from Prosper Mérimée’s novella. Chaplin wrote and directed the film and played the border guard opposite Edna Purviance’s scheming Carmen, with the script following DeMille’s plot closely enough to mock it beat for beat. After Chaplin left Essanay for Mutual in early 1916, the studio recut his tight two-reeler into a four-reel version, padding it with discarded footage and a new subplot involving a gypsy character played by Ben Turpin. Chaplin sued to block the longer cut but lost.
What to watch for
The comedy works scene by scene against DeMille’s film, turning the opera’s fatal love triangle, the smuggling plot, and the climactic duel into slapstick without losing track of the shape of the original story. Ben Turpin’s scenes, absent from Chaplin’s own cut, stand out as noticeably looser in tone and pacing from the rest of the picture, a useful marker for telling the two versions apart. The padded four-reel version is the one that circulated for decades and the one most public-domain prints derive from, so the simpler, meaner satire Chaplin intended is easy to lose sight of.
