A Burlesque on Carmen (1916)

A Burlesque on Carmen is Charlie Chaplin's thirteenth and final film for Essanay Studios, released as Carmen on December 18, 1915. Chaplin played the leading man and Edna Purviance played Carmen. The film is a parody of the overacted Cecil B. DeMille Carmen of 1915 which was itself an interpretation of the popular novella Carmen by Prosper Mérimée. Composer Hugo Riesenfeld wrote the music for both the DeMille and the Chaplin films, based on George Bizet's opera Carmen.

Chaplin's original version was a tightly paced two-reeler, but in 1916 after Chaplin had moved to Mutual, Essanay reworked the film into a four-reel version called A Burlesque on Carmen, or Burlesque on 'Carmen', adding discarded footage and new scenes involving a subplot about a gypsy character played by Ben Turpin. This longer version was deeply flawed in pacing and continuity, not representative of Chaplin's initial conception. Chaplin sued Essanay but failed to stop the distribution of the longer version; Essanay's tampering with this and other of his films contributed significantly to Chaplin's bitterness about his time there. The presence of Essanay's badly redone version is likely the reason that Burlesque on Carmen is among the least known of Chaplin's works. Historian Ted Okuda calls the two-reel original version the best film of Chaplin's Essanay period, but derides the longer version as the worst.

A third version was released as a partial sound film in 1928 by Quality Amusement Corporation, comprising three reels based on the 1916 Essanay version, but reduced in length to accommodate a newly shot introduction spoken by newspaper columnist Duke Bakrak. The musical score was again by Riesenfeld. This version, with rewritten title cards, poor sequencing, and "fuzzy" in appearance from generation loss, can be found today on some home video releases. In 1999, Kino produced a version based on the work of film preservationist David Shepard, who studied Chaplin's court transcripts and other evidence to more closely reproduce the original Chaplin cut. The highly regarded Kino release is accompanied by a Robert Israel score.

Synopsis

Carmen, a gypsy seductress is sent to convince Darn Hosiery, the goofy officer in charge of guarding one of the entrances to the city of Sevilla, to allow a smuggling run. She first tries to bribe him but he takes the money and refused to let the smuggled goods in.

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