Behind the Screen stars
Charlie Chaplin as a stagehand on a movie set. Chaplin is overworked and
underappreciated and his boss (Eric Campbell) spends most of the time asleep,
leaving Chaplin to do the heavy lifting. Meanwhile a young woman (Edna
Purviance) is trying to get her big break as an actress but is turned down so
dresses up as a male stagehand in order to have at least some involvement in
the movies. At the same time the fellow stagehands go on strike for being woken
up by a studio boss and plot their revenge…
This isn’t one of the funniest Mutual shorts but it
certainly has one of the better plots up to this point. It’s multilayered and features side plot
as well as the main narrative. It is also an opportunity to see behind the
scenes of an early movie set in much the same way as His New Job, Chaplin’s first film for Essanay a year earlier. What
the film is most famous for now though is its forthright joke about
homosexuality, a subject which was barely mentioned in cinema for another fifty
years.
