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Reviews of silent film releases on home video.
Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett
and the Silent Era Company.
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Chaplin’s
Essanay Comedies
Volume 3
(1915-1918)

Contents: Shanghaied (1915), A Night in the Show (1915), Carmen (1916), Police! (1916) and Triple Trouble (1918).

Film Preservation Associates
1999 DVD edition

Chaplin’s Essanay Comedies Volume 3 (1915-1918), black & white and color-toned black & white, 131 minutes total, not rated,
including Shanghaied (1915), color-toned black & white, 27 minutes, not rated, A Night in the Show (1915), black & white, 23 minutes, not rated, Carmen (1916), color-toned black & white, 31 minutes, not rated, Police! (1916), black & white and color-toned black & white, 26 minutes, not rated, and Triple Trouble (1918), black & white, 23 minutes, not rated.

Film Preservation Associates, distributed by Image Entertainment, ID5415DSDVD, UPC 0-14381-54152-6.
One single-sided, dual-layered, Region 0 NTSC DVD disc, 1.20:1 and 1.33:1 aspect ratio image in full-frame and windowboxed 4:3 (720 x 480 pixels) interlaced scan MPEG-2 format, SDR (standard dynamic range), 6.5 Mbps average video bit rate, 192 Kbps audio bit rate, Dolby Digital 48 kHz 8-bit 2.0 stereo sound, English language intertitles (released in keep case), no foreign language subtitles, chapter stops; snapper DVD case (reissued in standard DVD keepcase); $24.99.
Release date: 28 September 1999.
Country of origin: USA

This DVD collection has been mastered from archival print materials. On our first viewing of the first two volumes in this series, we were impressed immediately by the fact that each of the Essanay comedies on the DVDs included footage we had never seen before — not on videotape or laserdisc. Each film showed moderate to fantastic improvement in picture quality over the previously available best home video versions. Video producer David Shepard has done it again by locating some of the best surviving prints worldwide and bringing them together on home video. Based on our initial impression of these DVDs, we recommend them without reservation.

Read our reviews of Volume 1 and Volume 2 from this series.