Directed by: Charlie Chaplin
Starring: Charlie Chaplin, Chester Conklin, Fritz Schade, Norma Nichols, Cecile Arnold, Vivian Edwards

STORY

Charlie Chaplin and Chester Conklin are waiters in a busy bakery and restaurant where keeping customers happy is already difficult enough. But when the bakery workers go on strike, the two hapless waiters are suddenly promoted from carrying plates to making the bread themselves.
There is only one tiny problem:
They have absolutely no idea what they're doing.
Soon dough is flying, customers are complaining, tempers are rising, and the bakery becomes a battlefield of flour, food, and frantic physical comedy. Meanwhile, the striking bakers have plans of their own—and when a loaf containing a decidedly unexpected ingredient enters the bakery, Chaplin's ordinary workday becomes explosively complicated.
Dough and Dynamite is classic Keystone-era Chaplin: fast, physical, gloriously chaotic—and considerably sharper beneath the slapstick than it first appears.

AIN BACKSTAGE SECRETS & AINTOIDS
AINtoid: Yes, There Really Is Dynamite in the Dough!
The title isn't merely a clever play on words.
The striking bakery workers decide to hide dynamite inside a loaf of bread and send it back into the bakery.
That gives Chaplin one of silent comedy's favorite ingredients: an audience that knows danger is coming while the characters remain blissfully unaware.
Suddenly every loaf looks suspicious.

AINtoid: Chaplin Goes to Work
Long before Modern Times turned industrial labor into one of Chaplin's greatest subjects, Dough and Dynamite placed him squarely in the middle of a workplace.
Bosses, employees, exhausting work, unhappy customers, striking laborers and replacement workers all become part of the comedy.
It's an early glimpse of Chaplin's lifelong fascination with ordinary working people trying to survive systems considerably bigger than they are.

AINtoid: There's a Labor Strike Underneath the Slapstick
The striking bakers aren't simply an excuse for comedy. Labor disputes were an extremely recognizable part of American life when the film was released in 1914.
Chaplin turns that contemporary tension into farce: once the skilled workers leave, two completely unqualified waiters are expected to take their places.
Predictably, management's brilliant solution does not go particularly well.

AINtoid: Chaplin Actually Wrestles With the Dough
One of the delights of the film is watching Chaplin and Chester Conklin attempt to become bakers.
Dough is almost the perfect silent-comedy prop. It stretches. It sticks. It collapses. It refuses to cooperate.
In Chaplin's hands, making bread becomes less a culinary skill and more a full-contact sport.

AINtoid: Chaplin Was Given Extra Time—and Used It
Dough and Dynamite became one of Chaplin's more ambitious Keystone productions. Rather than simply knocking out another quick comedy, he spent considerably more time developing and filming it than was typical for the studio's rapid production schedule.
The result was a two-reel comedy—longer and more elaborate than many of Chaplin's earlier Keystone shorts.
His growing insistence on time to develop comedy was an early sign of the perfectionism that would eventually become legendary.

AINtoid: A Big Chaplin Success
The extra effort paid off.
Dough and Dynamite became one of Chaplin's notable successes during his Keystone year, demonstrating that audiences were willing to follow him into longer and increasingly elaborate stories.
Chaplin had entered motion pictures only months earlier.
By late 1914, he was already becoming one of the industry's hottest attractions.

AINtoid: Charlie and Chester Make a Formidable Disaster Team
Chester Conklin was already a popular Keystone comedian, famous for his enormous walrus mustache.
Pairing him with Chaplin gave the film two very different comic personalities. Their attempts to handle customers, food, and bakery work allow the performers to bounce gags off each other rather than leaving Chaplin to generate all the chaos alone.
Keep watching Conklin even when Charlie is onscreen.
There's often another joke happening beside the main one.

AINtoid: Keystone Chaos—With Chaplin Taking Control
Chaplin's earliest films often followed Keystone's established formula: move quickly, create a misunderstanding, start a fight, and eventually let everyone chase everyone else.
But Dough and Dynamite shows Chaplin beginning to stretch that formula.
The comedy develops from the situation itself. One problem causes another, which causes another, until the entire bakery seems destined for catastrophe.
That's no longer simply a collection of gags.
That's Chaplin learning how to build a comedy.

AIN CURATOR'S NOTE
Only Charlie Chaplin could look at a bakery and think:
You know what this needs? Labor unrest and explosives.
Dough and Dynamite is wonderfully ridiculous on the surface—flying flour, unruly dough, angry customers, incompetent replacement bakers and one extremely dangerous loaf of bread.
But underneath all that madness is something we're going to see again and again throughout Chaplin's career:
the working man.

Chaplin understood the indignities of working life. He had grown up in severe poverty and knew what it meant to live without financial security. Perhaps that's why factories, restaurants, department stores, construction sites and other workplaces would become such fertile territory for his comedy.
And here, in 1914, we can already see the beginnings of it.

Watch the dough.
Watch Chester Conklin.
Watch the increasingly desperate workers.
And definitely watch that loaf of bread.

Because in Charlie Chaplin's bakery, the pastries aren't merely fresh.
Some of them are explosive.