A Busy Day (1914)
Chaplin plays a jealous wife, in one of his rare drag roles, who spots her husband flirting with another woman at a military parade. Her attempts to break it up wreck a newsreel crew's shoot before her husband shoves her into the harbor.
Released under the title A Busy Day, this half-reel Keystone gag was also distributed as The Militant Suffragette and trades on the era’s anxieties about suffrage agitators, with Chaplin’s jealous-wife caricature played for the same knockabout chaos as any of his male tramp roles.
Background
Chaplin made A Busy Day for Keystone in 1914, a half-reel gag film in which he plays a jealous wife in drag. The comedy is set against the suffrage debates of the period, and the film is also known under the alternate title The Militant Suffragette. Chaplin’s character disrupts a military parade and then a newsreel crew’s filming, with knockabout chaos typical of Keystone’s short comedies. The film is a useful early example of Chaplin working outside the tramp costume that would soon define him, and it shows how quickly he was experimenting with character comedy at the studio.
What to watch for
The gags depend on the wife’s mistaken assumptions. She charges the parade and the film crew in pursuit of her husband, and each collision makes the mess larger. Chaplin’s performance, with its exaggerated hat, skirt and mannerisms, is physical rather than character-driven, which makes it worth comparing with the tramp work he was developing at the same studio. The ending in the harbor is brisk and abrupt, as was typical of one-reel comedies that had to finish their story in minutes.
