CitizenCaine Caught In A Cabaret explores a couple of Chaplin's ongoing themes in his films while still incorporating many of the familiar elements the public had come to expect from him. Mabel Normand is listed as the writer/director of this film, but Chaplin is known to have contributed his direction as well. Chaplin is a waiter in a drinking establishment who later poses as someone of importance while saving a lady from a masher, as it was called in those days. Chaplin attends a high-hat party and then later on the lady and her friends decide to go slumming in Charlie's establishment. Chaplin has to quickly revert to a slummer himself so as not to give things away. Instead of choosing to end the film by making a point about classicism, Chaplin simply ends it with a pie fight. He stuck to the familiar and was not ready to become a more "serious" comedian yet. ** of 4 stars.

Michael_Elliott Caught in a Cabaret (1914) *** (out of 4) Chaplin is mistaken as a Greek Ambassador and must keep a girl's family from finding out. This one here is a real riot with some wonderfully funny fight scenes but the real highlights are the title cards, which feature some very funny one-liners. Also of note is that this storyline would play a big part in future Chaplin films.A Busy Day (1914) ** (out of 4) Chaplin plays a woman(!) who gets tired of her husbands and decides to fight with him in public. This here really doesn't have a single funny moment but it's still interesting to see Chaplin playing a woman.Fatal Mallet, The (1914) *** (out of 4) Chaplin, along with two other guys, fights for the affection of a woman. Instead of using their fist the guys instead throw bricks at one another. This is a very funny film that has some outrageous violence that makes for a good time.Knockout, The (1914) *** (out of 4) To show off his braveness, Fatty Arbuckle challenged a professional boxer to a fight. Fatty is funny as usually and like the above film, this one here gets the laughs from violence ranging from punches to items being thrown. Chaplin has a small but funny cameo as the referee.

MartinHafer 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.This film is atypical of early Chaplin work in that it features a real plot and is much more coherent and watchable than other Keystone efforts. Charlie works as a waiter in a cabaret. He later meets a rich woman and lies to her about himself--pretending to be rich, too. She has no idea that he is just a lowly waiter. However, later in the film she and her friends decide to go "slumming" and Charlie's ruse is uncovered. Instead, however, on relying on pathos at this moment (something that surely would have happened in later Chaplin shorts), a pie fight breaks out and the film concludes. Not great but a MAJOR improvement over his other early Keystone films.

Michael DeZubiria Unfortunately, Caught In A Cabaret, being one of Chaplin's earliest films, has deteriorated pretty badly over the last nine decades or so, and this deterioration seems to have affected the film's continuity, making it look like the editing is botched. As is the case with most of Chaplin's films, the action in Caught In A Cabaret runs slightly faster than real life, which enhances much of the slapstick comedy but also makes several short clips in the film go by so fast that they are virtually incomprehensible. (spoilers) The main theme of Caught In A Cabaret deals with rich vs. poor, a theme that Chaplin later became famous for and which he made use of so often because of his own poverty stricken childhood. This film concerns a working man who pretends to be someone else in order to get accepted into a group of wealthy people. It is not expected that at the end he does not get the girl and winds up walking down a dirt road alone, but his activities throughout the film make his point clear. As he is at a party with the rich people, he gets drunk and makes something of a fool of himself, but when he is working as a waiter, he is fairly heroic, ridding the place of unwanted ruffians and whatnot. Caught In A Cabaret has not survived too well physically, but it is an excellent example of the type of early work Chaplin did as he became famous as one of the most loveable characters in cinematic history.