At this point, a pickpocket (Wesley Ruggles) holds up the Count, but instead of taking his money he agrees to join the caper to liberate Dr. Nutt of his invention.
Back at the flophouse, Charlie is prevented from settling down by a loud, singing drunk (James T. Kelley) whom he eventually—and somewhat affectionately—dispatches with a champagne bottle.
Pandemonium breaks out when the pickpocket enters the house, and amid the chaos, Colonel Nutt's explosive device is detonated, blowing all of the cops skyward.
On April 9, 1916 Essanay issued a re-edited version of Chaplin's completed film Burlesque on Carmen but padded with additional material to bring it to a four-reel length.
Essanay created Triple Trouble, their last "new" Chaplin comedy, by taking at least one—and perhaps two—sequences that had been intended for the unfinished Life, bridging them with outtakes from Police, and through borrowing the ending from Work (1915).
Evaluations of the finished film vary; even in 1918, The Moving Picture World called it an "atrocious patch quilt of ancient slapstick reels."
[7]" Walter Kerr, in his seminal 1975 book The Silent Clowns, stated that the film was "worthless, except for what it can tell us about the vein Chaplin was tempted to explore in his own kind of feature.
[8]" As it was, Chaplin did not make an actual feature until The Kid (1921), and he seemed to agree with that aspect of the inherent value of Triple Trouble through including the title in the filmography attached to his autobiography in 1964.
Burdened by the fallout from the loss of final appeals relating to the U.S. Government's anti-trust suit against former Motion Picture Patents Trust companies and an inability to compete in a market dominated by features, Triple Trouble was practically the last new film that Essanay produced.
There is considerable controversy as to whether the flophouse sequence in Triple Trouble was footage trimmed from Police or part of the uncompleted project Life.
The Essanay description of Police filed with the Library of Congress at the time of copyright on May 12, 1916 indicates a deleted scene similar to the content in Triple Trouble: "[Charlie] goes to a lodging house and in order to save his dollar from thieves puts it in his mouth, swallowing it while he sleeps.
As part of his television documentary The Chaplin Puzzle (1992), director Don McGlynn included a reconstruction of Police which attempted to re-incorporate the flophouse sequence from Triple Trouble into the earlier film.