Mabel’s Strange Predicament
Overview
A tramp gets drunk in a hotel lobby and, upstairs, causes some misunderstandings between Mabel, two hotel guests across the hall from her room, and Mabel's visiting sweetheart.
A tramp gets drunk in a hotel lobby and, upstairs, causes some misunderstandings between Mabel, two hotel guests across the hall from her room, and Mabel's visiting sweetheart.
This early Chaplin film has him playing a character quite different from the Tramp for which he would become famous. He is a rich, upper-class gentleman whose romance is endangered when his girlfriend oversees him being embraced by a maid. Chaplin's romantic interest in this film, Minta Durfee, was the wife of fellow Keystone actor, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle.
On his way to a restaurant, Ambrose, a happily married man, obliges to mail a letter for a woman in the apartment lobby. Unbeknownst to him, the letter is about a rendezvous with her own lover at their "trysting place". Elsewhere, after some domestic frustration, Charlie runs an errand to buy a baby bottle before stopping at the same restaurant. After a confrontation there, they both inadvertently leave with each other's coats. Later, their wives independently discover what appears to be incriminating evidence of extramarital affairs from the pockets of the swapped garments. It all comes to a head when all four of them find themselves at the "trysting place" in the park.
Set mostly in the Stone Age, a prehistoric king, with a harem of wives, rules a beach. Charlie arrives and falls for the king's favorite wife. In the end, it turns out to have been a dream; Charlie was asleep in the park.