I don’t know if this is a stupid question, but did they just talk quicker back then? Or was it the type of cameras they were filming with that made it seem like everything was sped up? Thanks!
It's a pretty simple question. The films ( like Chaplin's) were often shot at around 17-19 frames per second . That's not a precise number, because the camera was being hand-cranked with the camerman trying to count slowly to himself to keep it even. Chaplin and the other makers knew that , in theaters, that would be sped up to 24 fps. That really perked things up: it's obvious when people are talking , flicking their arms around, but also really obvious in those horseback chase scenes, where the horses seem to be moving at around 40 mph. There sometimes have been modern efforts to make those films a little more natural : Peter Jackson's recent They Shall Not Grow Old is a pretty astonishing example, if you have not seen it .
With the advent of talkies, and a sound track on the film, film speeds became standardized- they had to be, to keep the sound track from making people sound unnatural. So, obviously it's OK to watch Douglas Fairbanks moving twice normal speed through a swordfight, but weird to hear him talking like Alvin the Chipmunk.
You can read more on the subject here, and those articles link to a discussion on the subject of sound tracks within the movie industry, in the 1927 Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers here, on the Internet Archive.
I hope linking to the question being answered previously is acceptable. It is because it used to played at a slower speed / less frames per second.
www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1qphaz/why_does_old_film_seem_sped_up/