Tillie’s Punctured Romance, released in
1914, marks Mack Sennett’s first feature length film and his biggest Keystone
project. Bringing together all the talent on the Sennett lot—and then some—the movie
is also notable as Marie Dressler’s first screen appearance. An adaptation of
the stage success “Tillie’s Nightmare,” which also starred Dressler, the film
tells a conventional tale of a simple country gal (Dressler) who gets swindled
by a shark from the big city (played by
Charlie Chaplin). “The fetid atmosphere of the wicked city” and the country’s
“pure breath of open spaces” are placed in sharp and comedic opposition, while
the straight-forward, uncomplicated plot—essentially the material of any one of
the director’s shorts stretched out for over an hour—becomes simply a pretext
for a series of gags, mounting in rhythm and intensity to a speedy culmination;
Sennett, parodying both the melodramas of the time (shades of Griffith’s Way Down East) and a gaggle of intellectual
pretensions, lofty sentiments and noble virtues, demonstrates once again that
tense melodrama and comedic farce are not that far apart; all it takes is an
alteration or exaggeration of character personalities, a scrambling of editing
rhythms, and a distortion of events, and seriousness dissolves into laughter.
