"A Thief Catcher" is nowadays best known as one of Charlie Chaplin's early movies. It was thought lost for many years until a copy got found at a Michigan antique sale in 2010. The movie itself is OK, not great. Chaplin has a small role as a cop in the midst of a theft. He doesn't have the bowler hat and notched cane, so he might not be that easy to spot. Also starring is Mack Swain, who later played Big Jim in "The Gold Rush". As expected, there's no shortage of physical humor; the early one-reelers always knew how to make great use of that. These relics of early cinema are, more than anything, a look at how people had to figure out how to act without words (it was still over a decade before they figured out how to align sound with film). People's faces have to do a lot of the acting. It's a fun way to spend seven minutes.
