Her rambunctious willingness to hurl herself about became the hallmark
of her slapstick screen persona, Madcap Mabel.“There was no cliff so
high that Mabel was afraid of it,” as Mary Pickford put it; “no bucking
bronco too wild for her to ride; as for dodging Keystone pies, there was
no one ever on the screen who could do it more gracefully and with as
much poise as Mabel.”Normand not only played the damsel in distress (in Barney Oldfield’s Race for a Life,
she was the first gal to be tied to the railroad tracks), she also
flipped a stereotype only a few years in the forging, by frequently
rescuing the leading man instead. “It was new to see women doing this,”
says Ally Acker, Author of Reel Women: The First Hundred Years. “Pearl
White also did her own stunts, but no one else was spoofing the serials
and turning them into comedy.”Films such as Mabel’s Dramatic Career and Mabel’s New Hero made her one of the first actors to
have their own name in the title; she also directed many of them, too.
Such multitasking was unusual, but, in the lawless land of early cinema,
says Acker, “all kinds of people could and did move easily between
roles … there were no rules.”…
Others have gone further. Film historian Raymond Lee says Chaplin owes
Normand his “greatest debt”. “A study of her films, made before Chaplin
came to this country, shows entire routines, gestures, reactions,
expressions, that were later a part of Chaplin’s characteristics.”
Eyes on the pies: how Mabel Normand, Chaplin’s mentor, changed cinema
Steel Phoenix Studios 