Charlot y la sonámbula
1914 · 13m · Estados Unidos
Directed by Charles Chaplin
Charlot flirts with a lady in a park, clashes with her husband, and at their hotel mistakes doors until the wife, a sleepwalker, appears in his room, causing uproar with the husband and the whole hotel.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a Chaplin, so obviously it's technically brilliant, but come on—mistaken doors and sleepwalking wives? This is the template every hack has been xeroxing for a century; there's nothing here that makes me say 'wait, WHAT?' just 'oh, right, THAT again.'
Chaplin's geometric mastery of space and timing here is exactly the kind of formal precision that defines the lineage—every door, every glance, every collision is sculpted to the frame, and you can trace a direct line from this to every chase comedy that followed; it's the primer.
The brilliance is in how economically Chaplin uses the hotel hallway as a labyrinth—no set decoration wasted, just architectural rhythm and the single choice to keep the camera static while bodies ricochet through doorways, which somehow makes the chaos feel inevitable rather than frantic.