page_title: A Burlesque on Carmen
section_title: Cast
hierarchical_section_title: A Burlesque on Carmen / Cast
caption_attribution_description: Español: Fotografía de la película A Burlesque on Carmen, de 1915.
context_page_description: A Burlesque on Carmen is Charlie Chaplin's thirteenth film for Essanay Studios, originally released as Carmen on December 18, 1915. Chaplin played the leading man and Edna Purviance played Carmen. The film is a parody of Cecil B. DeMille's Carmen 1915, which was itself an interpretation of the popular novella Carmen by Prosper Mérimée.
  Chaplin's original version was a tightly paced two-reeler, but in 1916 after he had moved to Mutual, Essanay reworked the film into a four-reel version called A Burlesque on Carmen, or Charlie Chaplin's Burlesque on Carmen, adding discarded footage and new scenes involving a subplot about a gypsy character played by Ben Turpin. This longer version was deeply flawed in pacing and continuity, and not representative of Chaplin's initial conception. Chaplin sued Essanay but failed to stop the distribution of the longer version; Essanay's tampering with this and other of his films contributed significantly to Chaplin's bitterness about his time there. The presence of Essanay's badly redone version is likely the reason that A Burlesque on Carmen is among the least known of Chaplin's early works.
context_section_description: Charles Chaplin - Darn Hosiery
  Edna Purviance - Carmen
  Jack Henderson - Lillas Pastia
  Leo White - Morales, Officer of the Guard
  John Rand - Escamillo the Toreador
  May White - Frasquita
  Bud Jamison - Soldier of the Guard
  Lawrence A. Bowes - Gypsy
  Frank J. Coleman - Soldier
caption: Purviance and Chaplin
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