Triple Trouble (1918 Film) - Legacy and Preservation

Legacy and Preservation

Evaluations of the finished film vary; even in 1918, The Moving Picture World called it an "atrocious patch quilt of ancient slapstick reels." A review on the imdb refers to it as "Chaplin's worst film. The story doesn't make any sense" and indeed, the continuity in Triple Trouble is very difficult to follow; the pickpocket knows where the house is as the Count has already directed him towards it, yet he is still looking for a place to rob later in the film, and Charlie directs him towards the house again, presumably double-crossing his employer in the process. In Police, the scene is taken from the opposite angle.

Nevertheless, some have found value in Triple Trouble; in their 1965 book The Films of Charlie Chaplin, Gerald D. McDonald, Michael Conway and Mark Ricci stated that the film "has remarkable continuity and the pieces fit together, almost miraculously." Walter Kerr, in his seminal 1975 book The Silent Clowns, stated that the film was "worthless, except for what it can tell us about the vein Chaplin was tempted to explore in his own kind of feature." As it was, Chaplin did not make an actual feature until The Kid (1921), and he seemed to agree with that aspect of the inherent value of Triple Trouble through including the title in the filmography attached to his autobiography in 1964.

For Essanay, however, that Triple Trouble "would be worth many times its weight in gold" apparently didn't pan out. Burdened by the fallout from the loss of final appeals relating to the U.S. Government's anti-trust suit against former Motion Picture Patents Trust companies and an inability to compete in a market dominated by features, Triple Trouble was practically the last new film that Essanay produced. It was followed by a trickle of reissues of older titles that finally petered out in 1920.

As a Chaplin film in the public domain, sources for Triple Trouble are numerous, and it circulated in 8 and 16mm in the era of home film collecting. The Images DVD version on Chaplin's Essanay Comedies Volume 3 has been adjudged the best available in that—for the most part—it is derived from a 35mm print, and includes one shot that does not appear in other versions.