Directed by: Charlie Chaplin

Starring: Charlie Chaplin, Chester Conklin, Cecile Arnold, Vivian Edwards, Helen Carruthers

Also known as Those Love Pangs

STORY

Charlie has a problem.

So does Chester.

They both like women.

Unfortunately, they keep liking the same women.

Charlie Chaplin and Chester Conklin play two hopelessly competitive roommates who seem incapable of seeing an attractive woman without immediately turning romance into a full-scale contest.

Their first battlefield is home, where both men are interested in their landlady. Chester makes his move, Charlie interferes. Charlie makes his move, Chester retaliates. Before either man has accomplished much of anything, they've managed to irritate the woman they're supposedly trying to impress.

And they're just getting started.

Out in the park, the romantic rivalry begins all over again. Charlie sees Chester enjoying the company of two attractive women and decides that this situation clearly requires his immediate intervention.

Charlie tries to steal the ladies.

Chester tries to keep them.

Charlie fights back.

And soon courtship has once again become combat.

For one brief, melodramatic moment, Charlie becomes so miserable over his romantic failures that he decides to throw himself into the lake. Even that doesn't go according to plan. A policeman intervenes, Charlie rapidly recovers from his despair, and he's soon right back in the hunt.

Eventually Charlie manages to knock Chester out and escape with both women to a nickelodeon.

Victory!

Or so Charlie thinks.

Inside the little movie theater, Charlie settles happily between his two new companions and proceeds to flirt with both of them at once. His arms are occupied. His feet join the operation. Charlie has apparently achieved romantic paradise.

Then Chester catches up with him.

What follows is exactly the sort of ending Keystone audiences came to see: jealousy, fighting, chaos and Charlie being physically launched through the movie screen itself.

The Rival Mashers is Charlie Chaplin in the middle of his astonishing first year in motion pictures — mischievous, selfish, physical and still discovering all the possibilities of the Little Tramp.

The tenderness would come.

The pathos would come.

The masterpieces would come.

But first Charlie had to survive Chester Conklin.

AIN BACKSTAGE SECRETS & AINTOIDS
THE RIVAL MASHERS HAS ANOTHER NAME

If you've encountered this movie under the title Those Love Pangs, you've found the same film.

Those Love Pangs is the original title used in the official Chaplin filmography, while The Rival Mashers became one of the film's alternate titles.

Early silent films frequently circulated under different titles through rereleases and different distributors, which is why the same Chaplin comedy can sometimes appear under several names.

For AIN viewers searching for either one:

The Rival Mashers = Those Love Pangs.

THIS ONE IS CHARLIE'S

By this point in 1914, Chaplin wasn't merely standing in front of the camera.

He was directing it.

Charlie Chaplin receives both the scenario and directing credit for Those Love Pangs. Mack Sennett produced the picture for Keystone.

That makes this little comedy another fascinating stop in Chaplin's rapid transformation from newly hired screen performer into filmmaker.

IT STARTED WITH ONE SIMPLE IDEA

According to Mack Sennett's recollection, Chaplin began the picture with little more than one basic comic situation:

Charlie and Chester competing for their landlady.

That was enough.

Chaplin began developing the rivalry and at one stage considered having the two characters working in a café or bakery.

But that idea became too good for one little comedy.

THE LEFTOVERS HELPED CREATE ANOTHER MOVIE

The café/bakery material Chaplin was developing offered so many comic possibilities that it grew into something much bigger.

Chaplin separated it from Those Love Pangs and developed it into his celebrated two-reel Keystone comedy Dough and Dynamite.

So hidden inside the development of this one-reel romantic battle were the beginnings of another Chaplin film.

CHARLIE AND CHESTER

Chester Conklin was one of Keystone's familiar comic performers and a wonderful physical opponent for Chaplin.

Here the two men are essentially trapped in an endless competition.

If Chester likes a woman, Charlie wants her.

If Charlie gets ahead, Chester interferes.

If Chester has two women...

Charlie apparently considers that an emergency.

Their rivalry provides the engine for the entire film.

THAT CANE IS ALREADY BECOMING PART OF CHARLIE

Watch what Chaplin does with his walking stick.

It isn't simply a costume accessory.

He hooks Chester with it. He uses it to pull people around. At another point the cane becomes a grooming instrument as Charlie uses it while tending to his nails and teeth.

Chaplin was beginning to discover something that would become fundamental to his comedy: almost any ordinary object could become funny once Charlie started interacting with it.

AINTOID: WATCH THE CIGARETTE

There's a tiny piece of Chaplin business worth watching for.

Charlie uses the bottom of his shoe to flip a cigarette upward.

It's exactly the kind of seemingly insignificant physical flourish that distinguishes Chaplin from the chaos happening around him.

The gag doesn't need a title card.

It doesn't advance the plot.

It's simply Charlie being Charlie.

AINTOID: CHARLIE TRIES TO END IT ALL — BRIEFLY

After yet another romantic defeat, Charlie becomes so despondent that he prepares to throw himself into the lake.

A policeman stops him.

And Charlie's despair disappears remarkably quickly once there are women to pursue again.

The sequence is an early glimpse of Chaplin experimenting with something he would later master: moving suddenly between sadness and comedy.

Here, however, sentiment doesn't get much time to breathe.

There are girls nearby.

AINTOID: A NICKELODEON INSIDE A MOVIE

The climax takes place inside a nickelodeon — one of the inexpensive storefront theaters where early audiences watched motion pictures.

That gives us something especially delightful today:

We're watching a 1914 movie about people going to the movies in 1914.

Charlie sits between his two female companions while another film plays on the screen behind them.

For modern audiences, that little setting has become a miniature time capsule of early moviegoing.

AINTOID: CHARLIE FLIRTS WITH HIS WHOLE BODY

One of Chaplin historian Jeffrey Vance's favorite moments in the picture comes inside the nickelodeon.

Charlie has one woman on either side of him.

His arms are around them.

So how does he continue flirting?

With his feet.

It's an early example of the extraordinary physical imagination that would become one of Chaplin's signatures. His entire body could participate in a joke.

AINTOID: RIGHT THROUGH THE MOVIE SCREEN

Charlie's romantic triumph doesn't last.

Chester and another angry man eventually catch up with him inside the nickelodeon.

The confrontation escalates until Charlie is sent crashing through the screen on which the movie is being projected.

A movie star being thrown through a movie screen.

In 1914.

That's a pretty wonderful final gag.

ONE REEL OF CHARLIE

The Rival Mashers was a one-reel comedy, reflecting the extraordinary speed at which Keystone produced films.

Chaplin wasn't spending months making these pictures.

He was creating, performing and directing film after film during a single astonishing year.

That rapid production schedule gave him something enormously valuable:

A laboratory.

Every short gave Charlie another opportunity to test a walk, a prop, a gesture, a character relationship or a new way to make an audience laugh.

AINTOID: FINISHED SEPTEMBER 19, 1914

The official Chaplin archive records that Those Love Pangs was finished and shipped on September 19, 1914.

Less than a month later, audiences could see it in theaters.

AINTOID: RELEASED OCTOBER 10, 1914

Those Love Pangs — the film later also known as The Rival Mashers — was officially released in the United States on October 10, 1914.

By then, Charlie Chaplin had been appearing in motion pictures for only months.

Yet audiences were already watching one of cinema's most important comic artists rapidly invent himself on screen.

And in this particular experiment?

Charlie wants the girl.

Then another girl.

Then both girls.

And eventually he gets thrown through a movie screen.

Nobody ever said becoming a legend had to be dignified.

DATE RELEASED

October 10, 1914

COUNTRY RELEASED

United States