Chaplin is groomed like the tramp and he looks like the tramp but he could be anybody in this disjointed tale about three mashers, a puddle, and an umbrella.The editing is poor enough to lose the plot from time to time, if there is a plot that extends beyond the individual slapstick-filled scenes.The film has a certain slight charm as an historical curiosity. Here it is -- 1914 in Los Angeles, and what looks like Echo Park might have looked in 1914 Los Angeles.A dog wanders innocently in and out of a scene but nobody cares. The pratfalls are backward somersaults. It's all very casual and lacks poetry.

In 1914, Charlie Chaplin began making pictures. These were made for Mack Sennett (also known as "Keystone Studios") and were literally churned out in very rapid succession. The short comedies had very little structure and were completely ad libbed. As a result, the films, though popular in their day, were just awful by today's standards. Many of them bear a strong similarity to home movies featuring obnoxious relatives mugging for the camera. Many others show the characters wander in front of the camera and do pretty much nothing. And, regardless of the outcome, Keystone sent them straight to theaters. My assumption is that all movies at this time must have been pretty bad, as the Keystone films with Chaplin were very successful.The Charlie Chaplin we know and love today only began to evolve later in Chaplin's career with Keystone. By 1915, he signed a new lucrative contract with Essenay Studios and the films improved dramatically with Chaplin as director. However, at times these films were still very rough and not especially memorable. No, Chaplin as the cute Little Tramp was still evolving. In 1916, when he switched to Mutual Studios, his films once again improved and he became the more recognizable nice guy--in many of the previous films he was just a jerk (either getting drunk a lot, beating up women, provoking fights with innocent people, etc.). The final evolution of his Little Tramp to classic status occurred in the 1920s as a result of his full-length films.Apart from one or two moments, this film has little to offer other than guys slugging each other and mistreating women. No laughs--just amateurish crap by today's standards.

Although Chaplin still had many kinks to work out of his Little Tramp character by the time he made this, his fourth movie, Between Showers nonetheless shows tremendous improvement over his first attempts at developing a screen persona. In the first, Making a Living, he played a rich villain. In Kid Races at Venice and Mabel's Strange Predicament, the Tramp made his debut, but was portrayed as a rather mean-spirited, and in the Mabel Normand film, almost lecherous, jerk.But Between Showers, for the first time, presents the Little Tramp as a somewhat noble, almost heroic character, who comes to the aid of a damsel in distress (here portrayed by an Edna Purviance prototype). He still has rough edges, but Chaplin was starting to flesh out the character.The plot of Between Showers is an illustration of how delightfully simple and high concept early silent comedies could be. A man steals an umbrella -- that's pretty much the plot, with a little (attempted) romance tossed in for good measure. It's a fun little film, and fascinating to watch from the perspective of observing how Chaplin is slowly crafting his most famous character.

Chaplin's fourth short, appearing less than a month after his debut, is good fun. A rival tramp steals an umbrella from a policeman, then sets about seducing a woman with it. Charlie also has his eye on the femme, and soon a battle for both the brolly and the girl ensues. Even though it's so early in his career, Chaplin has most of the Little Tramp mannerisms and tics down pat in this effort (except for the pathos, which would come later), and it's fascinating to see the beginnings of the expressions and gags which he'd be exploring for the rest of his life. Not as polished or imaginative as his later films, but a very early gem.