Charlie Chaplin.

A lost Charlie Chaplin film has been discovered in a can of nitrate film bought on eBay for £3.20, the Daily Telegraph reports.

Morale Park from Henham, Essex, purchased the tin simply because he liked the look of it. He was amazed to discover its fragile contents: a previously unknown seven-minute film Chaplin film called Zepped.

His interest was piqued, he said, when he could not find any mention of it on the internet.

The film features footage of Zeppelin airships flying over England during the First World War, and out-takes from three pictures that Chaplin shot with the film company Essanay, with whom the entertainer had a contract in 1914, before falling out.

An animated scene shows Chaplin wishing he could leave America to join his British countrymen in the war, before being taken on a cloud and deposited on an English church spire. It also shows him sending up the Zeppelin, and an animated sequence of Kaiser Wilhelm popping out of a German sausage. There is a certification from Egypt, dating the film to December 1916.

David Robinson, author of Chaplin: His Life and Art, believed the film could be worth anything from £3,000 to £40,000.

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