Chaplin parodies the ballad form poem 'The Face Upon the Floor' by Hugh Antoine d’Arcy of the once prosperous painter who, having lost his beloved Madeleine (Cecile Arnold) to another man, becomes destitute in despair and is reduced to drawing her 'face on the bar room floor.' Charlie, as the heartbroken and inebriated artist, tells his tale of woe in a tavern as a series of flashbacks. The rendering of his beloved he produces at the film’s conclusion is such an amateurishly bad line drawing that it prompts the patrons of the bar to boot him out onto the street. One of the least interesting of the Chaplin Keystones in terms of entertainment value, it is nonetheless a valuable artifact as one of Hollywood’s early parodies of a literary work.
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