Before watching the movie:
It seems strange that works entering the public domain is now an annual thing, as it’s been frozen for most of the part of my life I was aware of such matters. Is this really the sixth year of welcoming new works into common ownership? It seems like only the third, but I distinctly remember being inspired to cover Safety Last! because its copyright was expiring and that was indeed 2019. I’m going to be exploring the Public Domain Class of 2024 this month. Not every movie will itself be owned by the commons, but there will be a connection in every case.
I remember enjoying Modern Times, The Great Dictator, and to a lesser extent, City Lights (which I remember more as good cinema than good comedy), but I’m not sure I’ve ever really considered Charlie Chaplin a favorite, aside from the speech at the end of “Dictator”. As he’s one of the early film personalities that were bigger than their films, all of his works seem to blur together for me, and I’m not as motivated to see a Chaplin film as some others, so I didn’t even know this existed before it came up as among the most celebrated works whose copyright expires this year. I don’t even know what to expect other than “probably Tramp antics.”
After watching the movie:
While being charming and hungry at the circus midway, a Tramp fails to notice a pickpocket hiding a wallet in his pocket until the thief is caught trying to retrieve it. While taking full advantage of the money that has literally fallen into his pocket, the Tramp is caught by the actual owner of the wallet and the police chase him into the center ring of the circus, where his bumbling escape is funnier than anything the clowns have ever been able to do. The owner of the circus hires the Tramp to enliven the clowns’ act, but he knows nothing about how to be funny on command and instead the owner hires him as an assistant property man that can be tricked into going out and stumbling around the performances. Meanwhile Merna, the owner’s daughter, is even more abused by her father than the rest of his employees, but befriends the Tramp when she sees his kindness. Merna soon tells the Tramp that he’s the real star and should be paid accordingly, and the Tramp uses this leverage to get himself $100 a day ($1800 now) and better treatment for Merna as well. At the peak of his success, the Tramp overhears the fortune teller telling Merna that she will soon marry “a dark handsome man who is near you now” and excitedly goes to buy a ring, only to see Merna completely charmed by the new tightrope walker Rex.
As ever, silent films are the most likely to be in some way tampered with in a way that renews the copyright. Somewhere out there, there’s probably a copy of the original 1928 version, but what’s more readily available is a later restoration that uses Chaplin’s own 1967 new musical score. I was shocked to hear a voice singing over the credits (Chaplin himself), but I thought it was plausible that since it wasn’t synced to action on the screen it might have been part of the original, but that’s also from the 1967 version. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a public domain film in the version that is actually outside of copyright.
I was surprised at how much I was actually laughing at the first half of the movie. Most of the time slapstick comedy comes off as too broad and obvious to be all that amusing to me, because the gags they were pioneering have become beyond cliché now. But the sequence of the Tramp trying to escape the police through the funhouse and into the ring had me laughing out loud more often than not. The performance, especially hiding among the clockwork figures, sells this bit. As the plot took shape, the comedy was less exciting, but the plot was there to maintain attention, even if it was more predictable.
Some physical comedy with a long shelf life doesn’t fully elevate this movie to a cinematic classic for me. A critic I saw commented that the legacy of this movie isn’t anything inherent to itself, but in drawing the connection between Chaplin’s art as the clown of cinema and circus clowning, and I don’t think it’s much of an endorsement to say that the most notable thing about a movie is the comparison with the star’s career. This is often quite good, and overall well done, but I have to just be missing something from the context it was created in to find true greatness in it.
Yesterday's Movies 