the silent period and gaining greater autonomy was his specific aim. He accomplished this goal and then looked to comic features as the direction in which he wished to take his art. For Chaplin himself the feature signified the opportunity for greater progress and maturity.
Features were desirable, for one reason, because they were where the economic future of films lay. But they were also desirable because a longer format allowed the filmmakers to develop more complex ideas. As McCaffrey notes, however, Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. (1921) had a "clever, intricate, smoothly unified story line" that made Chaplin's The Kid look "primitive" in comparison (85). And only a year later Harold Lloyd's first feature, Grandma's Boy (1922), also showed "far greater skill in story construction" (McCaffrey 85). Yet neither director was interested in developing the kinds of ideas that fascinated Chaplin. He, for example, was interested in the conflict between opposing views of the relationship between human beings and society, which was either "an unfortunate human necessity" or a fortunate one--the crux of the problem often faced by Chaplin's Little Tramp, whose plots often depicted him as torn, at least briefly, between freedom and the respectability of a lawful, conventional existence (Mast 96).
Like Keaton and Lloyd, Chaplin was involved in the development of the comedian-centered comedy feature. Coming from "performance contexts" such as burlesque, vaudeville, and English music halls, where the acts were "similar in length to the comedy short--from eight to twelve minutes," all these early stars were engaged in a "major and difficult step" as they tried to bridge the gap between gag-based
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