Forget the Marie Dressler main plot, elephantine and lumbering as the star (on this occasion: she was great when movies finally allowed her to talk and properly preserve her theatrical identity). Throw out almost everything else, especially the usual Mack Sennett hash joint/beanery-with-continental-pretensions which holds the action and us captive for roughly half the running time, tricking the film out to feature length.
The claustrophobia and boredom these stage-bound scenes induce have the positive effect of making us fully appreciate everything that happens outdoors in lovely underdeveloped 1914 Southern California. The scenes with rascal Chaplin and his lovely accomplice Normand (a beautiful team) hiding out together from the rest of the movie in real locations provide delicious escape and a very different, carefree, style of acting and film-making, which can be reduced to the one wonderful scene (throw the rest away if only five minutes can be preserved) where Charlie and Mabel go to the movies only to find an on screen version of the very scam they've haplessly set into motion and have ducked into the dark to escape. It's valuable documentation of what movie-going looked like in 1914, fascinating in itself, but the comedy raises it higher. Mabel is the kind of audience member who emotes and comments as she watches. The fellow sitting next to her is the stern sort who gets annoyed and says "Shush!" As Chaplin and girlfriend watch further they realize they're seeing themselves, and Mabel can't help but notice and say it out loud (yet silently). As she does so, she and Chaplin, increasingly self-conscious about talking in the theater, notice that the shush-er beside them reveals a sheriff's star as he adjusts his waistcoat. Paranoia sets in and from this moment on klassic Keystone Kops seem to be lurking in the edges of everywhere they dream of transgressing. A lovely vignette and accompanying good bits and pieces.
