Between his first two feature films, and in his final days with First National studios, Charlie Chaplin kept on producing a handful of short pictures to keep things ticking over with the studio bosses. Reeling off a quickie such as Pay Day was now a simple affair for the professional comic, but the fact that they were no longer his main focus is often evident.
Like a few of the First National shorts, Pay Day seems to have been cobbled together from a number of ideas, none of which was substantial enough to be fleshed out into a picture in its own right. So we have the day at the building site, followed by the drunken stagger home, tentatively linked by the idea of it being a payday binge. However both parts yield a fair number of gags, even if the lack of running gags or recurring characters never allows anything to build.
Unusually, the only other significant character of this little short is Phyllis Allen playing Charlie's wife. At the age of sixty-one, she is a bit old for Chaplin – about 45 years too old if you consider his choice in real-life wives – but considering he had recently been through his divorce from Wife Number 1 Mildred Harris, the appearance of a frumpy, bossy trouble-and-strife has some explanation. As it is though, her inclusion adds little, and is the kind of cheap characterisation one would expect from the early Keystone pictures. Speaking of which, Pay Day also features ex-Keystone Cop Mack Swain, who in a roundabout way had now ended up as part of the Chaplin stock company. It's good to see Swain, nicely filling in the large burly hole left by the legendary Eric Campbell.
As with his previous short The Idle Class, Chaplin seems to be doing a little experimenting with his technique as well, possibly with an eye to using things in his features. There are some very elaborate gags based around split-second timing, something which was already starting to become the domain of Buster Keaton and thus perhaps not advisable for Chaplin to get too much into. Then there is the business with the bricks being thrown up to Charlie, which relies on camera trickery. Again, this is not something which he would have been wise to pursue, as it could soon get gimmicky. Finally there are some close-ups, one of them revealing the obvious falseness of Loyal Underwood's beard, exploring the possibilities of silly faces. These fail simply because they aren't very funny.
All in all a bit of a mediocre Chaplin short, providing laughs only because it seems Chaplin could now real off jokes and pratfalls with minimal effort, but lacking in the dedication to make it anything more than a time-filler.
Like a few of the First National shorts, Pay Day seems to have been cobbled together from a number of ideas, none of which was substantial enough to be fleshed out into a picture in its own right. So we have the day at the building site, followed by the drunken stagger home, tentatively linked by the idea of it being a payday binge. However both parts yield a fair number of gags, even if the lack of running gags or recurring characters never allows anything to build.
Unusually, the only other significant character of this little short is Phyllis Allen playing Charlie's wife. At the age of sixty-one, she is a bit old for Chaplin – about 45 years too old if you consider his choice in real-life wives – but considering he had recently been through his divorce from Wife Number 1 Mildred Harris, the appearance of a frumpy, bossy trouble-and-strife has some explanation. As it is though, her inclusion adds little, and is the kind of cheap characterisation one would expect from the early Keystone pictures. Speaking of which, Pay Day also features ex-Keystone Cop Mack Swain, who in a roundabout way had now ended up as part of the Chaplin stock company. It's good to see Swain, nicely filling in the large burly hole left by the legendary Eric Campbell.
As with his previous short The Idle Class, Chaplin seems to be doing a little experimenting with his technique as well, possibly with an eye to using things in his features. There are some very elaborate gags based around split-second timing, something which was already starting to become the domain of Buster Keaton and thus perhaps not advisable for Chaplin to get too much into. Then there is the business with the bricks being thrown up to Charlie, which relies on camera trickery. Again, this is not something which he would have been wise to pursue, as it could soon get gimmicky. Finally there are some close-ups, one of them revealing the obvious falseness of Loyal Underwood's beard, exploring the possibilities of silly faces. These fail simply because they aren't very funny.
All in all a bit of a mediocre Chaplin short, providing laughs only because it seems Chaplin could now real off jokes and pratfalls with minimal effort, but lacking in the dedication to make it anything more than a time-filler.