Big Chief Little Pimple

Big Chief Little Pimple – English title

A 1914 British production [Folly Films, Phoenix (London)]
Producer:
Director: Fred Evans, Joe Evans
Screenplay: Joe Evans
Cinematography: [black & white]
Running time: 680’

Cast:
Pimple/Flivver Fred Evans
with; Tommy Collet


Silent film comedy short featuring British comedy actor Fred Evans as ‘Pimple’ who was billed in the U.S.A. as ‘Flivver’.


*”Fred Evans (1889-1951) was second only in popularity to Chaplin in Britain at the height of his career. He was the nephew of a well-known music hall comedian, Will Evans, and trod the boards himself before entering films in 1910 for Cricks and Martin, with the character Charley Smiler. The films were crudely-constructed affairs, but two years later Evans came up with the character of Pimple, a white-faced clown, perpetually accident-prone. Hundreds and hundreds of Pimple films were made, most of them routine knockabouts, but he also developed a taste of parodies, and in films like Pimple’s Battle of Waterloo (1913) he displays a proto-Pythonesque humour of the absurd while sending up the British epic film The Battle of Waterloo. In many of them he collaborated with his brother Joe. His comedy is sometimes held up by a weakness for punning intertitles, and few of his surviving films raise much a laugh nowadays, but at his best his comic inventiveness does indeed point the way to Python, The Young Ones, The Fast Show and a long British tradition of the gleefully absurd. He continued to make many films through the war years, and ended his film career as an extra in the 1930s.” –The Bioscope