- Year :
- 1914
- Cast :
- Production :
- Keystone
- Description :
- Charlie is a janitor in an office building who blunders his tasks and eventually fired. As he is about to leave, the stenographer rings for help. He returns to stop a robbery; saving the pretty stenographer and capturing the thieving office employee. Charlie the hero is rewarded and all ends well. The New Janitor is one of Chaplin’s most finely crafted and important works for Keystone. In most of the Keystone comedies Chaplin directed, one can glimpse his experimenting with film technique. The New Janitor demonstrates a marked progression in narrative and the emergence of his use of sentiment with comedy. He would expand and remake The New Janitor as The Bank (1915) the following year. In addition to his use of sentiment, Chaplin employs “thrill” comedy (Charlie on the edge of the window sill and in one shot hanging out of the Marsh-Strong Building at 9th and Main in Los Angeles) a couple of years before “high and dizzy” became popular in film comedy. However, whereas Chaplin pioneered the use of comedy and sentiment in slapstick comedy, he only returned to “thrill” comedy sequences in The Gold Rush (1925) and The Circus (1928) as the result of the popular use of “thrill” comedy in the films of Harold Lloyd. Finished and shipped: September 3, 1914 Released: September 24, 1914 Scenario: Charles Chaplin Producer: Mack Sennett Director: Charles Chaplin Length: One reel
- DVD & Blu-ray :