Should of thought of that:
Short: The Tramp (1915)
Cartoon:
Steamboat Wilie (1928)
Little Nemo (1917) Is a neat cartoon but too short.
Color:
The Wizard of Oz (1938)
Probably the original King Kong.
The Kid was his first extended piece (6 Reels of Joy) . Tillies is someone else’s film.
You’re right that he doesn’t have anything pre 1914, but the quality is so high when he got up to speed, he has to be a default for early film for many viewers even not remembering the titles.
A lot of the Keystone stuff is directed by someone else aswell but it’s still part of his filmography.
Shoulder Arms and The Adventurer are his best shorts for me, but Melies was doing enjoyable shorts long before Chaplin.
The building climb is supposed to be the highlight of the film, but I enjoy more the goings on in the department store. And the overcoat way Harold and his roommate dodge the landlady. That gets me every time.
Another vote for The General.
Thanks for the warning . 
Love when his ditzy girlfriend throws out a piece of firewood because it has a hole in it 
After he was at it for only a few months he directed everything he ever did again for the rest of his life, from June 1914 til 1967.
My point was that for maybe 90% of the world it would be a chaplin film, maybe not for everyone.
My vote is for the too-late-to-be-propaganda 1919 movie Yankee Doodle in Berlin. It’s a Mack Sennett comedy starring cross-dresser Bothwell Browne in his only film
appearance. Bothwell plays an American flyer who dresses up as a woman to cuddle up with Kaiser Wilhelm to snag some secret papers for the allies in WWI.
I watched it on TCM, and found it hilarious, especially watching it with my Mom who could explain some of the references. She’s a little too young for WWI, having been born in 1926, but her parents constantly harped on the Great War, so she knows a lot about it.
She thought it was hilarious too.
I’ve seen a lot of the above mentioned, mostly bits and pieces. I loved The Wind, but Greed (1924) is utterly mesmerizing, with an unforgettable ending. It was cut down from 8 hours of film, the extra film lost forever. Even so, it is a great great movie.
And another. Saw it at the Fox Theatre, with accompaniement by the historic “Mighty Mo” Möller organ.
Some humor is dated and doesn’t age well. Slapstick, however, is always funny.
Just remembered King Vidor’s*** The Crowd*** (1928). The only other full-length silent feature (besides The General) I can remember seeing.
[nitpick] To give proper credit where it’s mainly due, the restoration of Napoleon has been the life’s work of Kevin Brownlow (who received an honorary Oscar for this and other work back in 2010). Brownlow’s then-version of the restoration played in various places in the Seventies, which led to Coppola becoming interested. Essentially in parallel, independent orchestral scores were written by Carl Davis and Coppola’s father Carmine. The first was premiered - three screens, full live orchestra - in 1980 in London. Coppola then premiered a somewhat cut - for practical, rather than aesthetic reasons - version of Brownlow’s restoration in New York a couple of months later. Both events were huge successes.
In the decades since, Brownlow’s continued to locate new and better footage and has expanded it, with the support of Davis, whose score he regards as the much superior. Since Coppola retains the US rights and insists on using his father’s score, this has led to some tension over the years. I think the Brownlow-Davis version has been screened in the US exactly once - though full screenings anywhere are sufficiently rare as to be an event anyway.
Aside from seeing the 2000 screening in London, we were lucky enough to see Brownlow speak about the film at the BFI Southbank a couple of years ago, where he spent an evening taking the audience through different versions of scenes as they’ve evolved over the half-century he’s worked on it. It’s running time is now nearly half-as-long-again as the version Coppola holds the rights to. He took the occasion to explicitly denounce whatever version the BFI were selling in the shop outside and I suspect this led directly to the major UK re-release and DVD that the BFI has announced for later this year.
The bottom line is that it wasn’t “Coppola who had it restored”. He certainly helped bring it to prominence in 1980-1, but that was only possible because Brownlow had already spent several decades doing the restoration. If it weren’t for him, hardly anyone would have heard of Napoleon, never mind seen a good copy. [/nitpick]
Another vote for The General and also Our Hospitality. When watching The General, remember the engine is real, the armies are huge, Keaton did all his own stunts (as in Our Hospitality) . Also watch Sherlock Junior with special effects done decades before they became commonplace. The effects are common today but the techniques used are all abandoned (and some are unknown)?
I watched The Jazz Singer (1927) out of curiosity and ended up enjoying on its own merits. THe songs were and dddly even the blackface worked as a metaphor in the movie.
I just remembered to Melies films I liked from the late 1800’s or early 1900’s. One was about a guy chasing a cheese wheel down the street, the other a stop action animated film of a car being put together.
And when the gun barrel tilts down. For some reason I love the relatively simple gag of him sitting dejectedly on the engine drive rod.
Haxan from 1922.
“1 AM” is my favorite short.