Director: Charlie Chaplin
Year: 1928
Country: US
Language: English
I first saw Chaplin's The Circus on TCM (Turner Classic Movies) a few years ago. I first heard of this film because of the infamous "time traveling" woman controversy that spread like wildfire across the internet back in October 2010. Around that date George Clarke, an Irish filmmaker, uploaded a video on youtube which showed a woman walks past holding her left hand to the side of her face while moving her lips. The clip has not been tampered with and is subject to great interpretation. A lot of people thought the woman was carrying a cell phone. The problem? Cell phones weren't invented yet! Though neither were cell phone towers so it's unlikely the woman travelled through time and used her phone. The more logical solution is that she war wearing an old timey hearing aid.
Charlie Chaplin's The Circus stars Chaplin's comic persona The Tramp as a man who finds himself at a circus because he's trying to escape the police who think he's a notorious pick pocketer. The Tramp is an accedental sensation due to the fact that his attempts to evade the police are absolutely hilarious. The owner hires him immediately but soon realizes that The Tramp can't be funny on purpose so he hires him as a Janitor who just so happend to always be at the big top during showtime. The Tramp is blissfully unaware of this, he also happen's to fall in love with the owner's daughter. He has a great chance to win her over, but alas he has a rival and must compete for her heart.
While this film is not as funny or socially and politically important as Modern Times, City Lights, Gold Rush, The Kid or Great Dictator it still is a pretty decent film. I also admire Chaplin for making this film when his personal life was in shambles. First the film was made a year after sound was introduced to the cinema, silent actors were already being put on the unemployment line, he was under great pressure. He also married a 16 year old girl named Lita Grey. He found out she was pregnant during filming and then she sued him and threatened to tell the public about her age. Unfortunately they agreed on $600,000, while the IRS claimed he owed them over a million dollars in taxes.
The cinematography in this film is rather good, hiding Chaplin's real distance from the ground and creating the illusion that he is actually on a tightrope suspended many feet above the ground. His demand for perfectionism required over 200 takes for that one scene, a rival for Kubrick. The other sight gags are well made, as are all in his film, but easily forgettable compared to the sight gags his other films. There is a remarkable scene with Chaplin in a lion's cage. Sure there were efforts made to ensure his safety, but there were still of lot of great risks. Co-ordinating that scene must have been extremely difficult and took a lot of guts.
In conclusion, it was really hard for me to write a review about this because there's not much to say about The Circus. It's a mediocre Chaplin film, a man with such a political mind could have made something much better. Though it's still admirable that he made it under such extreme pressure from both his personal life and the cinema and it's still pretty well made and decently funny. Unfortunately while I've seen his greater films an upwards of ten times each, I wouldn't watch this film again. 3/5
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