Review: Chaplin's Vintage Year: The History of the Mutual-Chaplin Specials

Chaplin's Vintage Year: The History of the Mutual-Chaplin Specials by Michael J. Hayde
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not quite what I expected. I assumed this was a critical review of some of Chaplin's silent movies, or a kind of movie biography. The book does cover the art in these Chaplin movies, as well as others done around the same time, but that wasn't the main purpose. Instead, we get the business behind these movies. The author provides a well-researched history of the early film industry, including the film creators/studios, but also the distributors and the theaters. These different groups of companies interact in different ways over the early years of the industry, with power moving back and forth over time as new contract terms are developed and spread throughout the industries, and as companies combined through mergers or investments or other agreements. This book follows the flow of ownership of these movies, as well as showing how the money flowed. If you are looking for something like this, it is well done. I was also impressed that the book didn't stop at the end of the silent movie era, but continues to near the present day. I grew up in the Quad Cities area, where there was a company that sold copies of silent movies including these Chaplin Mutual films, Blackhawk Films. I still have a couple of their catalogs from the 70s. I was surprised and happy to see Blackhawk covered in some depth near the end of this book as holders of many of the original copies of Chaplin's silent movies. Overall, I found this enjoyable as a business history revolving around early films. And I appreciated the descriptions of Chaplin's early silent films, including those by Mutual Chaplin.

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