Spoilers herein.
The world's best filmmakers (to my mind: Welles, Tarkovsky, Kurosawa) thought Chaplin among the world's best. And usually we think they mean the films of 1925-40, over which he labored and in which he controlled nearly every aspect. But I think the earlier ones have tremendous cleverness and energy as well -- even genius that embodied more risk in the type of humor. That's because by 1925, he was already worrying over what was funny, but a decade earlier was just intuitively _being_ funny and in a sometimes more incisive manner.
Sure, this one has piethrowing. And lots of pratfalls. And the standard class commentary. But it has -- for the first time I know -- some fairly sophisticated humor about itself. After all, the thing that made Chaplin's later work so deep was its self-awareness and the trunk of that tree is self-reference. So I consider this film, right here, to be the birth of modern film humor.
Oddly, this film is accessible on DVD as an extra on the execrable `Cat's Meow,' whose story involves a Chaplin-like character. That film is the converse of self-reference: is supposed to be (in fact has all its value in) self-reference but is not.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 4: Worth watching.
The world's best filmmakers (to my mind: Welles, Tarkovsky, Kurosawa) thought Chaplin among the world's best. And usually we think they mean the films of 1925-40, over which he labored and in which he controlled nearly every aspect. But I think the earlier ones have tremendous cleverness and energy as well -- even genius that embodied more risk in the type of humor. That's because by 1925, he was already worrying over what was funny, but a decade earlier was just intuitively _being_ funny and in a sometimes more incisive manner.
Sure, this one has piethrowing. And lots of pratfalls. And the standard class commentary. But it has -- for the first time I know -- some fairly sophisticated humor about itself. After all, the thing that made Chaplin's later work so deep was its self-awareness and the trunk of that tree is self-reference. So I consider this film, right here, to be the birth of modern film humor.
Oddly, this film is accessible on DVD as an extra on the execrable `Cat's Meow,' whose story involves a Chaplin-like character. That film is the converse of self-reference: is supposed to be (in fact has all its value in) self-reference but is not.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 4: Worth watching.