Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914)

Keystone Film Corporation produced what is reputed to be the world’s first feature-length comedy motion picture in 1914 with Tillie’s Punctured Romance, starring Marie Dressler, Charles Chaplin and Mabel Normand.

The film was a combination of stage-play adaptation and Keystone slapstick, with more punches and slaps thrown perhaps than in any other silent comedy.

Tillie, a simple farm girl, is enticed to run away to the city with her father’s money by Charlie, a city slicker con man. In the city, Tillie’s money is taken by Charlie until he reads of her impending inheritance of her uncle’s three-million dollar estate.

— Carl Bennett

This quality DVD edition has been mastered from the 35mm restoration positive of the 2004 cooperative restoration project between the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the British Film Institute, with additional digital restoration by Lobster Films, Paris. Conflated from incomplete prints held by world film archives, the resulting restoration print is good to excellent (mostly excellent), with numerous examples of frames missing from the very-good to excellent 35mm key source print now restored from other prints. On monitors that display the entire picture content on the DVD, edge to edge, the restored footage can often be spotted by differing framelines at the edges of the picture and a slight to significant difference in image quality. A spectacular job was performed by the UCLA restoration staff of digitally matching the geometry of the differing prints to minimize the potentially jarring transition from one print to another, to achieve as seamless (as possible) a presentation of the film’s total surviving footage.

The film is accompanied by an original music score performed by Ken Winokur (of The Alloy Orchestra) with the Tillie’s Nightmare, a five musician ensemble.

Now viewable with nearly all of its original footage, we highly recommend this presentation as the best available edition of Tillie’s Punctured Romance on home video.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
This Region 0 NTSC DVD edition is also available directly from . . .

This early DVD edition appears to have been mastered from a conflation of 35mm and 16mm reduction print materials.

The films are accompanied by music scores performed by Gaylord Carter and John Muri.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
This Region 0 NTSC DVD edition has been discontinued and is . . .

For this early DVD edition, LaserLight utilized a very contrasty 16mm reduction print prepared by RAS Films in the 1960s. The reduction print was prepared from at least two different source materials, and features three different typefaces for the intertitles.

Highlights are blasted out much of the time and shadow detail lost in this substandard 16mm print. The transfer itself seems to have been adequately done and runs at the original camera speed of approximately 15-16 frames per second (FPS). What greytones remain in the image are grainy (the fault of the print) and are replete with compression artifacts (very difficult not to get with grainy, low-quality prints). The cropping of the picture image is tight (probably, again, the fault of the print), with heads sometimes cropped off at the top and proportionately more of the picture lost at the left. The film is a strain to watch much of the time. The print also features a soundtrack with hokey music and sound effects, and with a persistent narration of the story.

This edition is not worth the less-than-ten-dollars it can be had for.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
LASERLIGHT DIGITAL has discontinued business and this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition is . . .

This low-budget DVD edition is nothing more than a 2002 Delta Entertainment repackaging of the remaining, unsold stock of the 1999 Laserlight edition. Since the only thing new about this Delta edition is its cardboard slipcover, its content is the exactly same as the Laserlight edition reviewed above.

This one isn’t recommended either.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
DELTA ENTERTAINMENT has discontinued business and this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition is . . .

We have no indication as to the quality of this edition of the film, and cannot recommend it at this time.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
This Region 0 NTSC DVD edition has been discontinued and is . . .

The film is likely accompanied by a soundtrack compiled from preexisting recordings.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
This Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition is also available directly from . . .

The film is likely accompanied by prerecorded music.

This Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition has been discontinued and is . . .

Don’t count on the quality of the film prints being very high.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
This Region 0 NTSC DVD edition has been discontinued and is . . .

Other MABEL NORMAND films available on home video.