Da: Blackhawk Collection

The Count was a long time in the making. Presumably Chaplin began working on it after completing The Vagabond but had to shelve it temporarily to respect the terms of delivery agreed with Mutual. Despite the lack of an actual screenplay, correspondence kept by the Chaplin archive allows us an inside look at the creative process of this film. On July 31, 1916 Chaplin sent a telegram to his brother Sydney in New York: “Have you any suggestions for scenes? Have dining room and ballroom I am playing a count but an imposter to win heiress but cannot get story straight wire me some gags if possible playing in Chaplin make-up in fancy dress ball. Charlie”. The ideas were quick to arrive. Using a tried and proven cast, including exceptional Eric Campbell, and taking advantage of the mechanism of mistaken identity already explored in Her Friend the Bandit two years earlier (used again in The Adventurer and again, later still), Chaplin creates an exhilarating satire of high society and its idiosyncrasies, finding its greatest expression in two key scenes, those not surprisingly mentioned by Chaplin in his telegram: the dining room and the ballroom. The Count was certainly one of the most demanding films for Chaplin up to that moment. There are three entirely different sets, and the ballroom sequence took over two weeks to shoot, during which Chaplin hired an orchestra to perform during rehearsals. Chester Courtney, a former colleague of Chaplin from his Karno days, recalls that in between takes Chaplin learned to play a number of different instruments, and at the end of the shooting, he performed a little concert for the cast and crew.