A Dog's Life
About A Dog's Life
The tramp cannot get work. He steals food from a lunch wagon run by Syd Chaplin and rolls under a fence to dodge a policeman. He pulls a mongrel, Scraps, out of a dogfight, and the two scrounge together. In a cabaret he hides Scraps in his trousers and tries to cheer a singer, Edna Purviance, who is broke and fed up. Crooks bury a stolen wallet in the vacant lot where he sleeps. Scraps digs it up. The thieves take it back, a chase ends with their arrest, and the tramp uses the money to buy a farm. The last shot is a cradle: Scraps, a female, and her puppies.
Cast & crew
More about A Dog's Life
Chaplin's first film under a 1917 First National contract for eight three-reel shorts, at a reported $1,000,000 for the package, which also left him owning the negatives. Charles Lapworth, a newspaperman who had interviewed him, worked on the picture as a consultant. Charles D. Hall was the art director.
Themes
Background
First National opened the short on 14 April 1918, while American troops were in France and Chaplin was starting production at the studio he had just built on La Brea.
Making
For years the picture circulated in the cut Chaplin assembled for The Chaplin Revue after the camera negative had deteriorated, with replacement shots taken from outtakes. A Museum of Modern Art reconstruction, drawn from prints made off the original negative, puts back his 1918 choices and the original intertitles.
Look
Roland Totheroh shot the three reels, following the tramp and Scraps through employment lines, a vacant lot, and the cabaret.
Music
The 1918 release was silent. Chaplin composed a score when he included the film in The Chaplin Revue (1959).
Preservation
Silent Era lists a surviving 35mm positive. The film is in the public domain in the United States.
Notes
- Scraps was played by a mongrel billed as Mut.
- Syd Chaplin's lunch-wagon owner was the first time the brothers appeared on screen together.
- Granville Redmond, the deaf California painter and a Chaplin friend, plays the dance-hall owner.
- Pathé Exchange reissued the short in the United States on 22 November 1925.
- Albert Austin and Bud Jamison play the thieves. Tom Wilson is the policeman. Henry Bergman doubles as an unemployed man and a woman in the dance hall.
Scenes
- The tramp rolls back and forth under a fence while a policeman waits on the other side.
- Scraps's tail sticks out of the seat of his trousers in the cabaret.
- Scraps digs a stolen wallet out of the lot where the tramp sleeps.
- The cradle at the farm holds Scraps and a litter of puppies.
Influenced
- The Kid (1921)
