I've read a variety of negative comments on this film. Nevertheless, in my eyes it's a small masterpiece, one of Chaplin's best films. The Mutual shorts are generally of high quality, with The Immigrant, The Adventurer, the Pawnshop, and Easy Street often being singled out for praise: It's easy to see why, as they are all outstanding, often in different ways. While these films do not have the kind of meticulous artfulness of the famous longer films, they have a charm that is all their own, particularly because they are not as clearly morally centered as the later films (I am not complaining about that quality of the later films, but rather saying that each way of telling a story has its own value). As such, the shorts have the feeling of giving free play to the comic imagination, which is somewhat amoral, or loosely moral, contradictory, and unbounded. Behind the Screen is a great study in that: more than that, like the other great Chaplin shorts, there is a lot of care put into the film to keep the chaos going in interesting ways, terrific gags, acting, filming, and story telling. These films really show the excitement of a new creative medium being explored: the resulting art is fresh, inspired, and confounded in a way that maybe only happens when something is still beginning.
As for the film itself, I think I like it so much because of the interesting way the plot devices are tied together and serve as a vehicle for extremely zesty comic scenes. Comic reversals are the technique and the theme here, with the scene in which Charlie catches his immediate boss's head in the trap door being a great example of reversals being worked out in extremely well done, lunatic routines. The Elizabethan conceit of a young woman dressing as a boy is played against the modern situation of a workers' strike (as her subversion of the union is the way in which a woman manages to find her way into an untraditional role). This situation in turn is set against the very funny scene in which the high-strung director of a comic film (who seems to have a conception of himself as a serious comic artist) pulls his beard in frustration as his actors hurl pies across the studio nailing the bishop, king, queen, and so on who are trying to act a tragic scene on the opposite side of the studio and throwing them into a state of confusion. In the end, Charlie and his new sweetheart (the woman dressed as a boy) appear to thwart the striking workers, but in fact it is too late and the workers do succeed in blowing up the studio. The artificial world the studio represents is thus brought down, but only of course within the confines of its own lens.
Personally, I am fully in sympathy with many of the moral tales Chaplin tells in such great films as Modern Times. However, amoral tales like this one are good in another way. They keep things open and unsettled. Comic stories only get going when things go wrong. In this film, they keep on going wrong all the way to the end.
As for the film itself, I think I like it so much because of the interesting way the plot devices are tied together and serve as a vehicle for extremely zesty comic scenes. Comic reversals are the technique and the theme here, with the scene in which Charlie catches his immediate boss's head in the trap door being a great example of reversals being worked out in extremely well done, lunatic routines. The Elizabethan conceit of a young woman dressing as a boy is played against the modern situation of a workers' strike (as her subversion of the union is the way in which a woman manages to find her way into an untraditional role). This situation in turn is set against the very funny scene in which the high-strung director of a comic film (who seems to have a conception of himself as a serious comic artist) pulls his beard in frustration as his actors hurl pies across the studio nailing the bishop, king, queen, and so on who are trying to act a tragic scene on the opposite side of the studio and throwing them into a state of confusion. In the end, Charlie and his new sweetheart (the woman dressed as a boy) appear to thwart the striking workers, but in fact it is too late and the workers do succeed in blowing up the studio. The artificial world the studio represents is thus brought down, but only of course within the confines of its own lens.
Personally, I am fully in sympathy with many of the moral tales Chaplin tells in such great films as Modern Times. However, amoral tales like this one are good in another way. They keep things open and unsettled. Comic stories only get going when things go wrong. In this film, they keep on going wrong all the way to the end.