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1928: The Circus
Topic Started: Jul 2 2010, 08:31 AM (428 Views)
Laughing Gravy
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I didn’t want to get out of the silent era without just one more chance to spend some time with its greatest star, Charles Spencer Chaplin.

The circus has come to town, and a wandering Tramp wanders onto its midway, where he has a run-in with a pickpocket, leading to an incident with several policemen, resulting in a chase through the Fun House and across the Big Top. The Tramp turns out to be funnier than the clowns, so he’s hired. He meets and falls in love with the beautiful young equestrienne, the stepdaughter of the circus owner/ringmaster, who beats her and shoves her around. She falls in love with the tightrope walker, so the Tramp tries his hand at that particular daredevil novelty. Poignancy ensues.

Okay, first of all, while this film has never had the reputation of The Gold Rush, City Lights, or Modern Times, it holds its own, both as a side-splitting comedy and as a thoughtful, beautifully rendered work. Three sequences in particular stand out; in the first, Chaplin hides from the pursuing police officers, first in the Fun House hall of mirrors, then by pretending to be a mechanical man aboard the Noah’s Ark attraction (filmed in Venice Beach). Chaplin’s pantomime skills have never been greater. Then, Charlie accidentally locks himself in the cage with a snoozing lion, and nature conspires to make as much noise as possible as he tries to tiptoe around and find a way out. Finally, in the film’s highlight, Chaplin is far above the ground attempting to do tricks on the tightrope; he’s secretly using a safety belt and performing amazing feats, but little does he know the belt has broken and he’s actually on his own. Screamingly funny, especially when he’s attacked by monkeys!

Chaplin threw himself into this picture at a difficult time in his life, and the resulting craftsmanship shows. But what a load of problems! Filming began in December of 1925, shortly after the release of The Gold Rush, with the filming of the tightrope sequence. The processing laboratory ruined the first three weeks of filming, and everything had to be re-shot. New sequences were added throughout the spring and summer, but in September of 1927, the set and all the props were destroyed in a fire and had to be rebuilt. Chaplin wrote a lengthy new sequence, to be filmed in a restaurant, so they had something to do while everything was being rebuilt, but the entire scene was later discarded. In November of 1926, Charlie’s wife Lita left him and filed for divorce; he was forced to hide the negative of all the footage and shut down his studio until the following August to prevent her seizing it. Main shooting was completed and titles added in October, followed by four months of previews, editing, and film scoring. The Circus finally opened – to great success – in January, 1928. At the first Academy Awards, Chaplin was presented with a special award “For versatility and genius in acting, writing, directing and producing The Circus.” It should also be mentioned that the score for The Circus is one of the loveliest I’ve ever heard in a movie, and it was also composed by Chaplin.

20-year-old Merna Kennedy, who plays The Girl, makes her film debut here, and she’s lovely. She had a brief but memorable career, including such pictures as Wonder Bar with Al Jolson; she was married to Busby Berkeley.

After the phenomenal success of The Jazz Singer in late 1927, movies went into what is today called the “transition period”, in which movie theatres wired themselves up for sound and studios added recording equipment to their sets. Some films were made part-talkie, part silent; silent films were dusted off and talking sequences added; films already in production were scrapped and redone as talking pictures; actors were forced to speak lines in foreign languages, written phonetically on off-camera chalkboards, for foreign releases of films; movies were produced and released in both silent and sound versions to accommodate all movie theatres; careers were ended for stars who had poor speaking voices, while new careers were created for stage and radio performers who could speak well. It was a crazy time, but by 1930, silent pictures were dead and buried and talkies reigned. Well, not QUITE dead and buried: Chaplin’s City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936) were both silent. He didn’t make his sound debut until The Great Dictator (1940), after which he retired his Little Tramp character.

I have The Circus from the Image Entertainment DVD, and it’s a gorgeous print, and includes a great deal of bonus material, including a lengthy look at the deleted restaurant scene, and all the multiple takes Chaplin experimented with to maximize its humor and heart. Highly, highly recommended.
Edited by Laughing Gravy, Jul 2 2010, 09:55 AM.
"I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley
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Mouth Breather
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Next time you do this, I hope you check out Doug Fairbanks. Wild and Wooley, Robin Hood or The Thief of Baghdad would work.

William S. Hart is another icon. The Toll Gate is the best restoration so far. Hart's gritty, realistic westerns are like no others.

And of course there's Mary Pickford. The two best I've seen are Amarilly of Clothesline Alley and Sparrows. I showed Sparrows to a bunch of kids and they were actually yelling at the screen: "Don't do it, Mary!" and all like that.
Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious...
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Laughing Gravy
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Thanks for the suggestions, Mr. P. Do this AGAIN?!? I'm not certain how th' heck I'm gonna get through THIS time; I'm only up to 1928 as it is! As I move into the 1930s, I have many, many more DVDs in my collection from which to choose, keeping in mind my credo to only watch films I've never seen before and that I already own. Alas, that means Hitchcock, Keaton, Laurel & Hardy, and other faves are going to get short-changed.

I'm tryin' to mix 'em up between well-known films and little-known oddities; between studio productions and little low-budget cheapies; between still-known stars, forgotten stars, and no stars; and of course represent a variety of genres, studios, directors, and DVD releasing companies. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to include foreign-language films, more short subject marathons (as I did with the Out of the Inkwell series), or what. Some years are tougher than others: 1929 (tomorrow!) and 1932, looking ahead, were particularly tough ones with some excellent choices from which to opt. In that case, it becomes a matter of choosing the one that I'm most interested in writing about.

Incidentally, I watched The Circus twice so far and am thinking about showing it tonight for FNF since I haven't announced a feature yet. That's how much I loved it. I think it's the last Chaplin starring feature that I had never seen. You folks out there in Balconyland, if you've never seen it, do yourself a favor...
"I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley
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I couldn't agree more. It may or may not be the best Chaplin feature, but it's always been my favorite. For one thing, six reels is the perfect length for a silent comedy, and for another thing, the ending is sad and sweet at the same time, like some of the best songs.

What I wonder is how you plan to do the Eighties. I could count the movies I saw in that decade on two hands, and six of those were reissues (The Leopard, Derzu Usala, and the four Hitchcocks). I owned a restaurant in those years and had no time for movies; but going by what I've seen on TV, I don't think I missed much.
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Laughing Gravy
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I watched this again as part of my chronological viewing of silent feature comedies. It was released in early 1928, two and a half years after The Gold Rush. In that span, there had been five Harry Langdon releases, four Buster Keatons, and three Harold Lloyds. Of those 12 films, I loved a few and liked nearly all, but if you total my "laugh out loud" moments from all 12 it probably is about equal to how often I laugh during The Circus.

I don't have much to add to my brilliant, provocative review above. I've always pegged Modern Times as my favorite Chaplin but this grows on me every time I see it, and this time, I imagined watching it with a theatre full of kids. They'd scream in delight at this thing. If I hosted a children's matinee, I'd show this and one of the early, feisty Mickey Mouse cartoons. It was, as you may recall me relating, a school field trip to see Chaplin on the big screen that made me the quotable film expert you see before you today.

For those of you keeping score, this is the 34th offering in this retrospective; I have five more silent comedy features and a handful of shorts before we say goodbye to silent slapstick and start in on the early talkie comedy features.

"I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley
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I've always liked this one the best of all the silent comedies. It's so funny, and so sad.
Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious...
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