Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)

d. Buster Keaton & Charles Reisner / USA / 71m.

It’s difficult to begin a discussion of Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. anywhere but the film’s famous shot, perhaps one of the most famous in all of cinema. The front facade of a house has broken free of its moorings during a cyclone on a Mississippi River port and falls onto Keaton, who’s saved only by the fact that he’s standing in the exact location of the second-story window’s course. It glides right over him, leaving him standing bewildered. The shot is brilliantly executed (more on that in a moment) and it never grows old to watch, but the reason to begin with it happens to be something else entirely. I like the shot in the larger context of Keaton scholarship because it symbolizes his approach to filmmaking: chaos and mayhem swirl around the stone-faced comedian, trying only to keep his footing in the world around him.

The idea behind Steamboat Bill, Jr. came from Charles Reisner, who had worked with Charles Chaplin on The Kid and The Gold Rush. (Producer Joseph Schenck hired Reisner as Keaton’s co-director.) It’s one of Keaton’s most domesticated plots, as it is not merely Willie’s pursuit for the girl and the approval of her family but also the pursuit for approval from his father, Bill Sr. (Ernest Torrence). It is the unseen mother’s idea that the two be reunited after Willie graduates from college, but with his striped-blazer, heavy suitcase, tiny mustache, and beret, Willie is nothing like his steamboat captain father. The mere sight of Willie sends the father into histrionics (implicitly suggesting the father do away with the preppy Willie, the first mate advises: “No jury would convict you”).

The father’s first order of business is to make Willie presentable, buying him a new hat and shaving the “barnacle on his lip,” and then teach him the ways of his steamboat, a rickety vessel named the Stonewall Jackson. Bill Sr. has been feuding with another steamboat entrepreneur, John James King (Tom McGuire, looking eerily similar to an elderly Robert Frost), who — because this is the world of silent movies — has a young and attractive daughter (Marion Byron) that the protagonist finds remarkably lovely.

The first part of the film runs on the standard Keatonian formulae: extracting humor from the moments when he can’t live up to society’s (or his father’s) expectations for masculinity; struggling to understand the complexities of riverboats; and his inability to shed the preppy air he’s acquired while away at university. There is nothing particularly barbarous about the humor here, and little requiring Keaton’s comic ingenuity. Instead, the appeal of the first half is subtle and what deserves closer inspection is Keaton’s directorial choices.

Keaton’s ability to successfully utilize spatial dimensions becomes apparent in the cyclone that closes the film, but he provides some sly reminders of spatial construction through his direction and framing. Willie arrives by train, promising he’d wear a white carnation in his lapel. What follows is some misdirection humor, where almost all the men aboard the train are wearing white carnations in their lapels, but the real reason the father cannot find Willie amongst the travelers is that Willie has gotten off at the wrong side of the depot, literally on the wrong side of the tracks for the whole scene. These unknown moments continue into the film, such as Willie’s visit to the barbershop, where we realize that the co-ed who he loves has been sitting the adjacent barber’s chair the entire time.

The spatial construction is nowhere near as nuanced as The General, which makes great use of small sets contrasted against larger environments, or The Navigator, where the boat must become a continually surprising and providing set. It might initially seem ironic that the steamboat plays such a minor role in the course of the film, but the decision is quite cunning. When Keaton does make use of the boat in this film, he occasionally retreads his previous work in The Navigator. By keeping the steamboat out of the film’s major plot points, he manages to avoid derivation, although the first half of the film is still plagued by a comparatively slow build-up.

The film takes a turn and improves above its ordinary beginnings following the arrest of Bill Sr. for attacking King in anger, and shortly after he’s put in jail, the cyclone arrives. Keaton wanted to end the film with a flood, but due to tragic floods in the United States shortly before and the prohibitive costs, Keaton substituted in the cyclone. It is the superior choice for numerous reasons, primarily because it reinforces what Roger Ebert calls “a universal stillness that comes of things functioning well, of having achieved occult harmony.” Keaton and his crew destroy an entire town. There are strong winds that prevent walking, creating a strange but metaphoric conflation of stillness and movement. There are flying boxes, collapsing walls, and swinging fence doors. He becomes caught in a bed that blows around the town. He latches onto a tree that is uprooted by the wind and blown into the river while he hangs onto the trunk. It is natural having its way with the short man who does everything he can to avoid being swept away.

The famous falling-wall shot wasn’t entirely new to Keaton, but it had never been attempted on that scale. He’d done a variation on it in his short film One Week, and the stunt actually repeats itself in different versions through the rest of the cyclone in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (More than once he opens a door and walks through while the entire wall collapses.) “The clearance of that window,” Keaton said later, “was exactly three inches over my head and past each shoulder. And the front of the building—I’m not kidding—weighed two tons. It had to be built heavy and rigid in order not to bend or twist in the wind.” Walter Kerr, in The Silent Clowns, notes that Keaton’s entire crew besought him not to go forward with the stunt. Reisner wouldn’t direct the scene and left the set. The story editor almost quit. The cameraman who eventually ran the film for the film ended up looking the other way in fear. Keaton, however, had it perfect in one take. Kerr:

It is stunning in a special way, Keaton’s way. It is not, for instance, frightening, as a similar shot of [Harold] Lloyd’s might have been frightening. When Lloyd stunted, he meant to terrify; and he increased the audience’s agitation by letting us see how agitated he was in the situation. Nothing of the sort here. Buster is placid. The wall falls impassively. When it has fallen, wall and Buster have arrived at an entirely equitable relationship. There is nothing to scream about.

At the end of it all, Willie encounters sort of the ultimate test of masculinity of a Keaton film, where not only the girl-in-distress requires rescuing but his own father and her father need saving as well. (And the ending, where a priest is saved from the river, is pure Keatonian magic.)

Synchronized sound came to Hollywood in 1927, but Keaton’s producer, Joseph Schenck, was not worried. “Talking pictures will never displace the silent drama from its supremacy. There will always be silent pictures,” he predicted, which we know now is certainly untrue. Steamboat Bill, Jr. was Keaton’s first film released after the popularization of sound, and fortunately it remained silent. (Sound would not have been available to Schenck’s independent studio, but nevertheless: sound would have distracted the spectacular cyclone sequence.) What would not remain for Keaton was independence. After the completion of Steamboat Bill, Jr., Schenck informed Keaton that he would close shop. Keaton, working as an independent auteur with Schenck’s financing for the last eight years, would have to find a new home and enter what would become a troubling stage in his career. Steamboat Bill, Jr. then marks the quasi-end to Keaton’s independence and filmmaking, and though not conceived to be such, it is a proper capstone. It’d be a masterpiece were it not for its slightly unoriginal first half, but the second half nudges it up in the ranks.

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College (1927)

d. James W. Horne & Buster Keaton / USA / 61m.

College, Buster Keaton’s ninth feature, is not exactly a bad film, but it demonstrates how wildly sporadic genius can be. It is, at its core, Keaton on auto-pilot — and by most historical accounts, consciously so. Biographer Marion Meade introduces the film in her book Cut to the Chase by noting Keaton set out to do a film that required as little ingenuity as possible, and on that standard you could say he fulfilled the small expectation he set for himself.

Released in the same year of The General — what many consider to be his, or perhaps the, high-water mark in silent comedy — College plays instead like a less mature offering from earlier in his career. The comparison might be unfair, because few films are counted among the caliber of The General, but College is not even among Keaton’s upper-tier work. It is minimally inventive and largely predictable, hindered in part an episodic gag structure reminiscent of his shorts or an awkwardly assembled film like Three Ages.

Now—yes, it is something akin to a cinematic truth that a Buster Keaton misfire still lands within a reasonable distance of the target. College isn’t a pain to sit through, but its treats and creative flourishes are few and far between. (As Walter Kerr says in his essential volume, The Silent Clowns: “College is weak Keaton because —for the most part—it could have been just as well done by Harold Lloyd.”) The film is hindered by a plot that is go-go-go-for-the-girl and not much else, not even a gargantuan gag that swoops in to save the film as there is at the end of Keaton’s Seven Chances. The story here is of bookworm Ronald (Keaton) who must take up athletics to impress a girl named Mary (Anne Cornwall) for whom book smarts isn’t nearly as appealing as the triumphalism of sports. Many of the jokes involve the trials and failures and ultimate successes as Ronald attempts to win Mary. A few, like a bit with a javelin, succeed. Most others, like an uncomfortable and unfortunate race-based humor with Keaton in blackface, don’t.

Keaton can be an exhausting figure to watch on-screen. Thirty-two at the time and still in excellent physical condition, Keaton performed all his own runs, dives, leaps, and falls. However, for the first and only time in his silent career, for College Keaton used one stunt double — a U.S. Olympic pole vaulter who performed a gag Keaton chose to sit out. Later Keaton said, “I could not do the scene, because I am no pole vaulter and I didn’t want to spend months in training to do the stunt myself.” I certainly can’t, and won’t, blame him, but it is a historical fact that looms heavy over a film that embodies mediocrity. Keaton was in fact known to devote months to perfecting a desired sequence or action, and the failure to do so here speaks volumes about the actor-director’s lukewarm attitude toward the film.

If College is remembered for anything today, it may be its final moments. Not surprisingly, most critical scholarship on the film is devoted to what might be the era’s bleakest “happy ending”: after Keaton has spent the entire film attempting to woo the girl of the dreams, he wins and weds her. Immediately following this joyous occasion, however, is a series of quick fades, each showing the couple as they grow older and older and then: a tombstone. Kerr asks:

What is this abrupt slap in the face doing at the end of an otherwise unquestioning love story? It takes no more than eleven seconds of playing time to deliver its chill, and yet it undoes on the spot all the yearning, the struggle and the victory, of the narrative. The bitter candor—and it is bitter—is not prepared for; it not only takes us by surprise, it seems to take Keaton by surprise, as though a truth too long suppressed had turned to bile and erupted with volcanic force. It’s still funny, because there is truth in it; but it is bleak indeed.

Bleak, perhaps, to leave some sort of unique stamp on the film. Halfway through the 1920s, Keaton had begun to realize audiences would only tolerate so much ingenuity; when it strayed too far from the plot or become focused too exclusively on Keaton instead of both he and his love interest, it didn’t play well during screenings. And because the plots were always about a boy pursuing a girl (either to save her or win her), it imposed some restrictions on the personal touches Keaton could put onto a film. It was the first external force to mainstream Keaton, and a film like College suffers for it. The ending here is outside the box and shocking in its wit: if you want matrimony and ‘til death do us part, then part we shall by death.

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Blackmail (1929)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / UK / 84 mins.


With Blackmail in 1929, Alfred Hitchcock ushered in the sound-era of cinema to Great Britain. Alongside The Lodger, it is the best of Hitchcock's films before he hit his stride with the espionage thrillers that would become his trademark genre in Britain (beginning in 1934 with The Man Who Knew Too Much, including The 39 Steps, and running through The Lady Vanishes in 1938).

Stories abound regarding Hitchcock's habit of meticulously planning a film. His most famous shots were storyboarded to perfection and hardly deviated from: the shower scene in Psycho, the Statue of Liberty scene in Saboteur, the crop-duster sequence in North by Northwest. But Blackmail, with its revolutionary inclusion of sound, might top them all, because when production began in early 1929, everyone involved thought the film was going to be silent. The producer – John Maxwell, at British International Pictures in London – had seen the explosion of interest in sound when The Jazz Singer premiered in England in 1928, and he was ready to begin incrementally including sound in films. When Maxwell gave Hitchcock the green light to include small amounts of sound in Blackmail, Ronald Neame – the assistant cameraman – noted that Hitchcock had already become fascinated by the potential of sound and "was way ahead of the game." According to Hitchcock biographer Patrick McGilligan, Hitchcock had already been filming Blackmail twice – producing potential negatives for it as a silent picture and potential negatives for it as a sound picture. (It was released as both, in sound for those theaters that could play it and also silent for the rest of Great Britain.)

The screenplay, based on a play of the same name by Charles Bennett, was adapted by Hitchcock and Benn Levv, with help from Garnett Weston and a young Michael Powell (yes, that Michael Powell). Alice White (Anny Ondra) is a young London girl socializing with two men, a Scotland Yard detective (John Longden) and a lascivious artist (Cyril Ritchard). When Alice and the artist go back to his apartment, they flirt but ultimately she refuses his rather violent sexual advances, she kills him in self-defense. The detective wants to cover for her, but soon they both find themselves tortured and blackmailed by a petty criminal (Donald Calthrop) who witnessed her at the scene of the crime.

Aside from sound, Blackmail proved to be a landmark film in a different way. Furthering what he already accomplished thematically in The Lodger, Hitchcock centralized many more of the elements that would cycle through his films for the rest of his career: the dazzling blonde woman, an act of violent committed in a trance, the incorporation of a well-known and public locale (the British Museum), an extended chase sequence, and highly sophisticated and overtly artistic, detail-oriented filmmaking devices. He had done some of this exceptionally well in The Lodger, of course, including the blonde girl and the emphasis on technical superiority to tell a story in a visually compelling way. In the beginning of Blackmail, however, we are given a preview of how artistic the film will be. It opens on a scene where the police quietly enter the apartment of a wanted man who is the reading the newspaper. He looks off to his side and the camera zooms in to a small mirror, in which he (and we) can see the reflection of the officers in the doorway. Most memorably, we pause the quick pacing of the film to observe the obsessive task of cleaning a crime scene and escaping. Afterward, as Alice walks the streets of London, Hitchcock is adept at the physical manifestation of guilt through montages of repeated imagery and a brilliant fadeout where a neon-light martini shaker going up and down turns into a neon-light of a hand holding a knife, stabbing up and down.

A silent version of Blackmail exists, although the talking version is the one most commonly available. Critics have written that the silent version is a better film overall, and I'd certainly be interested in doing a comparison. (And no, you just can't mute the sound version and re-create the effect.) As it is, Blackmail isn't completely a "talkie" film, and large scenes of it (including the first ten minutes) are presented as a silent film, with little to no sound effects and only a roaring score to accompany the audience. Although I can't speak to the silent version's success or quality, one of the reasons I'm sure it must come across as cleaner is that, in silence, the trouble with Ondra is eliminated. Because the film takes place in England, and Ondra was Eastern European with a heavy accent, her lines were dubbed by a British actress named Joan Barry. However, while that sounds simple enough today, dubbing technology as we know it did not exist in 1929 and, according to the British Film Institute, Barry had to recite and record the lines standing immediately off-camera while Ondra lip-synched the words in front of the camera. The performance is nowhere near airtight, but it functions. (It is the film's most obvious "trick" on the audience, but not the only trick. During the climactic chase sequence at the British Museum, Hitchcock utilized camera tricks developed in Germany by Eugen Shüfftan, in which photographs would be taken of a setting then reflected into a mirror and filmed to create the illusion that a person was actually inside the museum.)

So the silent version might win the hearts of critics (like I said, I can't speak to it, having not seen it myself), but think of all the brilliant experimentation you would lose in a purely silent version of Blackmail. There's little doubt in my mind that Hitchcock considered sound as anything less than a legitimate and expressive cinematic device. As he did with camerawork in silent films and as he would do for color and other technical innovations later in his career, he ingeniously incorporates sound into Blackmail as an artistic element in ways that make our brains dance with delight. Hardly a decibel is spent on something that is unworthy. The sounds present themselves chillingly (like the metal of a knife clanging against a porcelain plate) or psychologically, as a way to advance the plot. After the murder, Alice returns and boils over her guilt as they talk the news without knowing she has had anything to do with it; stunned and in a trance, she sits at a table, the words of her family and friends' conversation blurring into the background by Hitchcock who suddenly allows the word knife to become crystal clear whenever it is said. All we can hear is a baseline of static, overlaid with knife ... knife... knife... knife. Hitchcock also uses sound in a brilliantly correlative way. In another scene, Alice discovers a homeless man lying in the street that she as a double for the murdered artist; just as she begins screaming, the film suddenly cuts to the landlord of the apartment complex where the artist lives, screaming as she discovers his body. (These sorts of cognitive cues would be played to an extreme in Citizen Kane years later.)

Today we see Blackmail as neither as tight nor as clean as Hitchcock's stylish, high-budget Hollywood productions. The print itself has hardly survived time, and many versions are full of dust, scratches, and static. But it is easily one of the most important films from Hitchcock's early years, and to a stunning degree, still manages to provide a great deal of entertainment to those willing to experience it.

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The Manxman (1929)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / UK / 116 mins.


Although the title makes it sound like it could be an early werewolf movie, Alfred Hitchcock's final silent film is an insufferable and predictable soap opera, not only a low point from his early career but a low point from his entire career.

Two friends – an ambitious but poor fisherman (Carl Brisson) and a shy lawyer (Malcolm Keen) – are both in love with Kate (Anny Ondra). The poor fisherman realizes there is no way he will be able to woo Kate unless he is successful, so he takes off for Africa and tells her to wait for him. She obliges, but then there's the lawyer. Kate and the lawyer fall in love when it appears the fisherman has died in Africa, but – gasp! – he isn't dead and his return creates a tense and melodramatic love triangle that will end the way you imagine it will and takes entirely too long to resolve.

I consider myself a judicious man, so let me note that there's one really brilliant shot (there's one in every Hitchcock film, no matter how bad it is). It is near the end of the film, and one of the characters dramatically jumps into deep water. The shot of the dark bubbling water dissolves into another scene and another liquid, and when the camera pulls back, the new liquid remains ambiguous until we see a quill dip into it and immediately it is recognizable as an inkwell. There, now I've said something nice.
The Manxman was cinematographer Jack Cox's fourth collaboration with Hitchcock, and he also must be given credit for helping capture some beautiful landscape shots at Cornwall, substituting for the Isle of Man, where the film is set. (A "Manxman," if you're curious, is the descriptor for an ethnic group from the Isle who frequently lumped in with the Gaels.) The script would be Eliot Stannard's final collaboration with Hitchcock, with whom he had worked since The Mountain Eagle (now a lost film) in 1926.

What is continually amazing about Hitchcock's career is not necessarily that it ebbed and flowed between great films and bad films, but how he could produce a bomb and a masterpiece back to back. After The Manxman, he began production on what might truly constitute his first fully realized Hitchcockian production, Blackmail. Later he would go from the atrocious Jamaica Inn in Britain to Rebecca, his American debut which won Best Picture of 1940. I don't think you have to see the clunkers to realize how great his other films are, but it certainly is illuminating. That said, please stay as far away from The Manxman as possible.

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The Farmer's Wife (1928)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / UK / 129 mins.


The Farmer's Wife is a silent comedy from the formative years of Alfred Hitchcock, which I know might seem very interesting, but regrettably it is not.

The plot feels stale and formulaic, even for something from the early days of cinema. After his wife dies, a farmer named Samuel Sweetland (Jameson Thomas) begins his search for a new lady of the house. He instructs his loyal maid to Minta (Lillian Hall Davis) to set him up with woman after woman so he may audition and woo them. The maid fulfills her duty to the farmer, but we can see that she secretly loves him.

Hitchcock's name is hardly ever associated with full-blown comedy; witticisms, innuendo, toilet humor, and mockery, yes – but hardly actual comedy. The rare exceptions tend not to be important films in his canon (Mr. & Mrs. Smith from 1941, The Trouble With Harry from 1955). The greatest problem with The Farmer's Wife is that the humor toggles back and forth between good, polished, urbane jokes (" 'Tis almost indecent to see 'em all on one bit of paper," the farmer notes when he examines the maid's list of potential wives) and bad, adolescent jokes (a woman, in slight hysterics, shakes with emotion and causes the plate of gelatin she is holding to wiggle and wobble), falling mostly on the latter to get us through.

There are many worn punch-lines about the rigors of marriage ("The next best thing to no wife be a good one," one character says), none of them particularly good. Some of the humor is only worthy of a chuckle because of the incredulity of the oafish farmer's dialogue. He has plenty of biting things to say, including one scene where he scoffs at a woman who calls herself a "girl." He insists a better description is "full blown and a bit over," which causes her to collapse in hysterics and cry out, "Is this a nightmare?" His response: "Your hat is!"

Well, alright.

Still, The Farmer's Wife is an expressive film in many ways. Hitchcock was still expanding his bag of tricks. Dissolves are particularly important, and Hitchcock uses them quite effectively, such as when his late wife's empty rocking chair becomes theatrically important as the farmer tries to imagine potential wives sitting in it as he sits in his. Hitchcock worked his loyal British-era cinematographer Jack Cox, who commanded the photographer for eight of Hitchcock's films (second only to Robert Birks, who did twelve). The camerawork and editing are not quite as inventive as Easy Virtue from the same year, or even Rich and Strange from 1931, but it also not stagnant in the least. As Cox would show in Hitchcock's next film, The Manxman, he had quite the eye for capturing beautiful pastoral and bucolic imagery.

Like most of his films (but not all) released before The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934, The Farmer's Wife is only really for Hitchcock completists, and even then, it's still not the worst of the bunch. It might pique your interest because it's a comedy, but you should prepare yourself for the long haul.

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Easy Virtue (1928)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / UK / 89 mins.


Found by a court to be of "easy virtue" for marauding with a passionate artist instead of her drunken husband, Larita Filton (Isabel Jones) runs away from her past to the more open-minded coast of the Mediterranean in Alfred Hitchcock's Easy Virtue, an occasionally plodding silent drama that doesn't have much of a reason to stand out in his canon. When Larita marries a new beau, her groom's family is determined to figure out where they've seen her before. (Hint: Apparently petty marital disputes are reported in newspapers all across Europe, and Larita's socializing with the artist made front-page news in multiple languages.)

Noel Coward's script pokes holes in the stuffy standards of English society – a fact which must have made Hitchcock giggle with delight – but I wouldn't necessarily call the script, or the film, compellingly sharp. (Sample dialogue: "I'm certain she wants to conceal something from us!" the groom's mother says of his new bride. Another: "Now that you have quite exhausted your venom, I shall go to my room," the bride snaps.)

On a technical level, the film has noteworthy elements. The staging in the courtroom during the first twenty minutes is smooth and original (you can tell it was probably Hitchcock's favorite part of making the movie), and throughout the film there are evident signs of the director expanding on his already impressive knowledge of working a camera. (In one scene, the master shot begins with a tennis racket positioned in front of the lens, which pulls out to reveal an entire tennis court.) Hitchcock's sense of pacing has matured as well, and the swift and lively editing occasionally counteracts the sluggishness of the plot.

With the exception of The Lodger, Hitchcock never made a silent film that was able to fuse a good story with his experimentation behind the camera. What's worse is that he had a horrible cinematic poker face; the filmmaking seems to soar when he's interested but becomes bogged down when he's not. Easy Virtue is fairly indicative of a typical Hitchcock silent picture: never particularly compelling, but stylistically difficult to ignore.

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The Ring (1927)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / UK / 116 mins.


Alfred Hitchcock rarely received credit for his role in the drafting of screenplays. He was highly selective of his material, and was later known to be intricately involved in the editing and revision process, working either as lead adapter or participating in extensive late-night brainstorming sessions with different writers.

However, he rarely received actual on-screen credit. One of the only exceptions is The Ring from 1927. It was his sixth film overall, but the one that was immediately released after The Lodger. He co-wrote the screenplay with his wife Alma, who went uncredited. (In one way or another, for as long as her health allowed, she would be involved behind the scenes of many of his films. Frequently she would be listed as a continuity adviser for many of his films, but her duties ranged from helping Hitchcock select screenplays and polish the ones that weren't yet perfect.)

The film is a silent boxing melodrama that is typical of many of Hitchcock's early British films: neither particularly bad nor particularly good, spontaneously brought alive with moments of sheer brilliance amidst widespread mediocrity. The plot follows Jack (Carl Brisson), who is earning money and fame as an amateur fighter. His defeat to a heavyweight fighter named Bob (Ian Hunter) is at first humiliating, but then opens the door to legitimate training for Jack; however, the door is also open for Bob to Jack's girlfriend-turned-wife (Lillian Hall Davis).

As a director and a writer, Hitchcock succeeds at the former and stumbles at the latter. The script is a little lame, and the love triangle admittedly makes the film somewhat of a bore. What is surprisingly good are the fledgling visuals of Hitchcock's signature style that are on full display. Due credit goes to Jack Cox, the cinematographer who would work with Hitchcock on eleven of the director's films (all British). The Ring was their first collaboration, and as Patrick McGilligan writes in his biography of the director, Cox was an "effects" cameraman with years of experience, and while the Hitchcock didn't desire any advice in composing his frame, he "wanted a cameraman who would take a dare." In many ways the physical reach of the camera in The Ring is the best the duo would create during their time together: sophisticated point-of-view shots, jarring close-ups, expert montages, askew angles – all of which take particular effect during the fighting scenes and had an undoubted influence on boxing films for generations to come.

As a film it might not be great, but The Ring takes on greater significance as proof that the director's mind was actively engaged in the physical construction of his films very early in his career, eager to establish his own vision and his own thumbprint.

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The Lodger (1927)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / UK / 75 mins.
Alt: "The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog."


After a false start in 1922 and a two finished films in 1925 and 1926, Alfred Hitchcock made his first "Hitchcockian" film in 1927: The Lodger.

In his book-length interview with François Truffaut, it was the film he said he preferred to think of as his debut, and in hindsight, it is not difficult to understand why Hitchcock connected so well with the material. Marie Belloc Lowndes's 1913 novel concerns a series of killings by a masked man dubbed "The Avenger," whose Jack-the-Ripper-style murders of blonde women are terrifying families across the city. Meanwhile, and seemingly unrelated, an extraordinarily bizarre man (Ivor Novello) with a scarf draped strategically around his face, shows up at a London household and seeks to rent a room they have to let. It's not long before this lodger takes an interest in the landlady's blonde daughter, Daisy (June Tripp), and the family's suspicions of the killings turn toward this mysterious man.

Only a few years prior, Hitchcock had returned to England after visiting Germany, where he saw first-hand the talents and techniques of F.W. Muranu and Fritz Lang, masters of expressionism on the European continent in the 1920s. That influence is undoubtedly seen in The Lodger, which occurs in the shadows and the nighttime streets of London. (Its official subtitle is "A Story of the London Fog.") Ostensibly, The Lodger is a murder mystery, but it soon transforms into a meditation on the dangers of mob mentality and an allegory of society-versus-the-individual (a general theme for Hitchcock). The director's sly humor is there, too: knowing that the Avenger is seeking blondes, Daisy's friend stuffs her blonde hair under a cap and allows faux black strands to poke out, noting, "Safety first, my dearie." The suspense reaches moments of obvious intensity (such as when the lodger holds a knife or handles a wrought-iron fireplace poker), but Hitchcock releases the audience's tension in a shockingly humorous way.

As long as we're discussing Hitchcock trends, too, I would be remiss not to mention his subversive take on popular actors can be traced back to The Lodger. Just as later in his career he relished undercutting of Cary Grant's squeaky clean image in the Hollywood, the director ran amok in 1920s England by transforming Novello, a Welsh matinee idol, into a possible serial killer. (Novello was one of the reasons the film drew many audiences, and ironically, one could argue today that Novello might not be known for much else, if anything, other than his work with Hitchcock in The Lodger.)

At this point in time, The Lodger is the earliest-made Hitchcock film I've seen. (One more possibility exists, his 1925 debut The Pleasure Garden; his other earlier, The Mountain Eagle, is lost.) What might – or might not be – surprising is that the director was already experimenting behind the camera, and the film is scattered with brilliant shots and angles. In one, the lodger is drawn to a picture on the wall that we see reflected in the mirror, and as he moves toward the object he too comes into view in the mirror. (Later, in a rather disturbing act, he will turn all the pictures on the wall around, leaving blank white canvasses to adorn the room so he doesn't have to look at their visuals.) His firm and quick pacing in the upstairs bedroom shakes the chandelier on the ground-floor ceiling below, and as the host family looks up nervously in a cowering low-angle shot, the ceiling suddenly fades into transparency, allowing us to see the lodger from underneath as he walks.

The Lodger was remade – or, more accurately, the source material was re-adapted – as a sound film in 1932 by Maurice Elvey, and starred Novello again in the same role. (There have been other remakes, including a new one, directed by David Ondaatje, that is scheduled to appear next year.) And yet the one person who never was able to remake the film was its original director. As soon as he moved to Hollywood, Hitchcock frequently pitched the idea of a remake, first to producer David O. Selznick and then to others, but as passionately as Hitchcock promoted the idea, few were ever interested. The unrealized project is depressing in hindsight; with a magnificent budget at his disposal, he was able to transform The Man Who Knew Too Much (his only remake) into a grander and darker project in 1956, a film that in many serves as compelling complement to the 1934 original. As an unrepentant Hitchcock fan, I think it would have been wondrous to see what kind of work Hitchcock could have done with the source material for The Lodger again.

Still, The Lodger is valuable and entertaining after all these years. It is fitting too that Hitchcock would find his voice in the year recognized as one of the greatest the movies had ever seen (Sunrise, Metropolis, The General, and The Jazz Singer, among others). The director would find himself stuck with many projects later in his career that failed to interest him, so The Lodger is even more important to scholars and Hitchcock devotees because it occurs so early in his career and he was so committed to its success. And he pulled it off. Upon its completion, he was only 26 years old, and in all respects just getting started.

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The Circus (1928)

d. Charles Chaplin / USA / 69 mins.


If you have a favorite director, or a few favorites, then odds are you have the answer to this question forever resting on the tip of your tongue: What is his or her most underrated film?

With regards to Charles Chaplin, one of my favorite directors, the answer is his 1928 film The Circus. Perpetually underrated in ways I've never quite seemed to fathom, The Circus contains some of the biggest laughs in any of Chaplin's films – more laughs, I'd argue, than City Lights (although the latter is superior overall) and nearly as many as Modern Times. In fact, there might be more laughs packed into the first twenty minutes of The Circus than the first twenty minutes of any other film I've ever seen, and I like to think I've seen my fair share of comedies.

Perhaps The Circus is lost in the shuffle because it came three years after The Gold Rush and three years before City Lights. When something quite good is stuck between two somethings that are always bandied about in the discussion of greatest motion pictures, it is inevitable that it might become lost or passed over. The Circus is hardly mentioned in official discussions of Chaplin, and Chaplin himself failed to mention it in his autobiography (it was made during one of the many tumultuous times in his life). Again, let me say that this is a shame. Although it can't compete with the charm of his more romantic and heartbreaking films, and it doesn't possess the famous set-pieces of dancing dinner rolls or a factory worker spooling through machinery, that doesn't mean it's worth brushing aside.

Possessing one of his sturdier plots, The Circus opens with the penniless Tramp, who is accused of pickpocketing and runs under the local big top to escape. His manic evasion of the police inadvertently breathes new life into a failing circus, particularly ruining a lousy magician's routine in a spectacularly funny way. The audience wakes up and suddenly starts laughing, and the sound of laughter might as well be the ringing of a cashier's machine for the stern ringmaster (Allan Garcia). Convinced the Tramp must join the show, he hires him on the spot only to realize when the Tramp attempts to be funny, it's painfully not. The ringmaster keeps him on anyway, hoping chaos will ensue as long as the Tramp is somewhere near the circus. The ringmaster's step-daughter (Merna Kennedy) steals the Tramp's heart, and all seems well until a tight-rope walker (Harry Crocker), who also has eyes for the step-daughter, butts into the Tramp's life.

The jokes are priceless: the ruined magic show, the botched session where the Tramp tries to learn how scripted clowns work, becoming caught in the lion's cage, battling monkeys on the high-wire. The drama however, especially toward the end, is not as effective. The Circus reminds me a great deal of The Kid, which used drama more effectively than humor and is admirable for doing so. The inverse is true for The Circus. It and The Kid are both second-tier Chaplin, precipitously close to hitting the bull's-eye but still missing one or two elements. As has been said many times and many ways though, a second-tier work from a great director is a hell of a lot better than a first-tier work from an average director.

When discussing Chaplin there is a running motif of what-went-wrong-behind-the-scenes, and I think it's so interesting because he had an uncanny knack of looking remarkably graceful on-stage while his off-stage world fell apart – the crying clown literally personified. The Circus might be his most disastrous experience making movies, including fires that burned down sets, development laboratories that accidentally destroyed negatives, and the onslaught of his second divorce, this time from Lita Grey. (Having learned his lesson during The Kid about what divorcing wives might try to take from him, he hid the negatives of The Circus.) The parallels are haunting; as Combustible Celluloid writer Jeffrey M. Anderson notes, the film was "perhaps more personal than anyone might have suspected at the time." A distraught funny man forced to be funny – are we talking about the Tramp in The Circus or Chaplin making The Circus?

Although he is better known and more highly praised for other films, The Circus was one of two films that garnered Chaplin an Oscar. Originally nominated for Best Actor and the defunct Best Director of a Comedy, the Academy ended up giving him an honorary award "for versatility and genius in acting, writing, directing and producing." It was his only Oscar for quite some time. Chaplin openly disdained the Academy Awards, not unjustifiably I believe, and according to his son he reportedly used his statuette for The Circus as a doorstop. Needless to say, it didn't sit too well with the Academy, which was apparently as hoity-toity in 1929 as they are today. City Lights and Modern Times were not nominated for a single award. He wouldn't win again until 1972, when he was given an honorary award for his entire career, and then one more in 1973, for the score of Limelight, finally given a U.S. release.

I will probably find myself for the rest of my days as a Chaplin-loving film-goer giving the "Rah-rah-rah!" to The Circus. You're more likely to see his better known movies, and those are better than no Chaplin in your life. But if you haven't seen it already, I urge you to dig a little deeper into the man's work because a gem like The Circus lies right below the surface.

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The Gold Rush (1925)

d. Charles Chaplin. United States. 94 mins.


What impresses me most about The Gold Rush is how it maintains a precise equilibrium of comedy and pathos. Of Charles Chaplin's three agreed upon masterpieces (all of which I love equally), this is the one that seems to do this the best. City Lights tilts more toward the pathos and Modern Times tilts more toward the comedy, but The Gold Rush gently and seamlessly slides back and forth between hilarity and touching romance.

Released in 1925, The Gold Rush kicked off what would become Chaplin's most sustained period of brilliance (which would run through Limelight in 1952). He said this was the film for which he wanted to be remembered, and arguably it has become that film. Even those with a passing interest in the movies can recognize Chaplin's work in The Gold Rush from the brief clips they've either seen or from the comic reverberations that have affected innumerable comedies. There's the Tramp serving up stewed leather boot to a starving fellow prospector and twirling a boiled shoelace like a piece of spaghetti. Then there's the Tramp charmingly using forks and dinner rolls to create an impromptu dance for the woman he loves. Chaplin's take on the humor of cannibalism – where one starved man sees the other as a gigantic chicken – has been repeated endlessly. The climactic set-piece of a cabin teetering off the edge of a cliff might seem familiar, but watching Chaplin choreograph it, you can't help but sense its total uniqueness in its execution.

There's not much to speak of in terms of a plot, but that is the reality for so many of Chaplin's movies. Plots are merely ropes, strung from point A to point B and upon which the comedian could hang his entertainment. For The Gold Rush, Chaplin's standard Tramp character is off in the snow-topped mountains of Alaska and seeking his portion of nature's fortune, billed only as the Lone Prospector – a.k.a., the Tramp with a backpack. All the other characters are bundled in parkas and hiking boots, but the Lone Prospector is decked in the Tramp's standard apparel, from the oversized pants and shoes to the shortened jacket and well-placed derby, even carrying his cane (useless in the snow). A snowstorm traps the prospector up in the mountains and he becomes forced to share a paltry cabin with fugitive named Black Larsen (Tom Murray) and hardened explorer named Big Jim McKay (Mack Swain), leading to, what is in my mind, the most underrated joke in the entire film: as Larsen and McKay duel for dominance of the cabin with Larsen's shotgun between them, the barrel follows the Prospector, who is unable to escape it no matter he tries to hide.

The film comes to establish a pattern that the genuine humor will be most firmly rooted in the desolate cabin, while the pathos and romance finds itself directly correlated with a neighboring small town. After eventually leaving the cabin, the Prospector finds himself pining after Georgia (Georgia Hale), a dance hall girl whose affections are accidental but nonetheless warm the Prospector. The romance is familiar, but not cliched; Georgia and her friends look down on the Prospector with amusement and transform his sincerity into their own cheap giggles. Georgia has her own beau, too, whom the Prospector must go up against (as if the blistering elements of the Klondike and his already neglected heart weren't enough hindrances). From even these brief plot descriptions, it's possible to sense how The Gold Rush is rooted firmly in the Chaplinesque tradition of powerful themes disguised with ribbons and bows as entertainment. Two of his most common themes – the pain of unrequited love and the damage of arrogance and greed – are nestled at the base of the film's rich spring.

It's been said of Chaplin that he was never much interested in expanding physical ways movies were made – that he had no particular value for innovative cinematography and all that was required was that the camera simply be pointed in his direction and he'd fill up the frame with his antics. I'll admit that this is relatively consistent across many of his films, but I find one particular shot in The Gold Rush brimming with excellence in construction and excellence in its powerful outpouring of emotion. It occurs about halfway through, when the Prospector has left the remote cabin and come into town, and he has entered the dance hall. Dozens of people are drinking, singing, laughing, and dancing, but the Prospector – steady but unsure – stands outside the action, perfectly staged in the middle of the frame and filmed from behind so his black wardrobe pops against the lights and merriment of the dance hall. Chaplin's masterpieces all have an affecting shot like this (in City Lights and Modern Times, the emotionally charged sequences come at the end), but it's notable in The Gold Rush for coming in the middle and encapsulating the outsider nature of the Tramp, a man who represents all that is good with society and stuck perpetually in its periphery.

Like many of Chaplin's films, the behind-the-scenes story is almost as interesting as what's on-screen. Chaplin acknowledged that the film was inspired in part by the story of ill-fated Donner Party, and while the fifteen-month shoot didn't end nearly as disastrously as the Donner Party, production was still beleaguered with a multitude of problems. Chaplin had taken all of the crew to Northern California and the Sierra Nevada mountains (where, without mere coincidence, the Donner Party had come to its end) and shot reels and reels of footage until the original leading lady (Chaplin's 16-year-old girlfriend-quicky-turned wife, Lita Grey) became pregnant. Everything was relocated back to Hollywood for re-shoots on man-made sets, Hale was cast in Grey's role, and very little of the Sierras ended up in the film.

Few filmmakers would be blessed enough to produce a film as good as The Gold Rush, but Chaplin is among the pantheon of artists who left us many masterworks. There are even two versions of The Gold Rush available – the original 1925 version and Chaplin's 1942 "revival" of the film for audiences accustomed to sound. The differences are none too subtle. The revival is twenty-seven minutes shorter – shorter because of cut title cards but also missing some of the more romantic passages – and the revival includes an Oscar-nominated score Chaplin composed and a narration he provides (not only of the action, but dubbing in words into character's mouths). As far as DVD releases and television broadcasts are concerned, the 1942 revival seems to be recognized as the canonical and Chaplin-preferred version of the film, and for many years it was the only copy of the film available on DVD. But when MK2 and Warner Bros. released the "Chaplin Collection" editions of his films, their release of The Gold Rush wisely includes both versions of the film, restored with great care. I find the 1925 silent version to be a more satisfying and pure experience (not to mention less distracting), but honestly, don't let availability stop you one way or the other. See one, see the other, see both, see them once or see them a hundred times – just see The Gold Rush because it's certainly among the best films ever made.

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Nosferatu (1922)

d. F.W. Murnau / Germany / 94 mins.
Alt. "Nosferatu, eien Symphonie des Grauens."


Of all the facts and fables surrounding Nosferatu, none is more important than to say it was first film adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. This gives it a chronological place, yes, but more importantly it places the film in a proper context of its horror ratio. The tropes of vampirism – particularly the mythos as defined by Stoker – have been copied, imitated, and parodied almost compulsively in the last century. But how would these tropes have played with audiences unfamiliar with the text in 1922 Germany or 1929 America? The minor chills we feel today are surely just the weak echoes from their nightmares.

By today's standards, Nosferatu (or as it is formally known in English, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror) is occasionally guilty of silliness as it explores these tropes. When a young real estate agent drops a picture of his wife on a table, the vampire's eyes widen, cuing this nugget of foreshadowing: "Your wife has a beautiful neck." Admittedly, it's difficult not to chuckle. But some of the film's imagery constructed by director F.W. Murnau retains surprising degrees of horror and power: the expressionist and haunting shadows that were staples of early German cinema; the coffins full of cursed soil and diseased rats; the chamber doors that open and close with near sentience; the ghostly horse-drawn carriage that picks up the hero and delivers him to the vampire's castle; the stiff-as-a-board count rising in a perfect ninety-degree arc out of his crypt; the procession of coffins, full of victims, down a cobblestone street.

Today we're lucky we even have the film, and the story of its survival is infamous. Murnau and his screenwriter, Henrik Galeen, were denied permission from Stoker's widow to adapt the novel, but they went ahead and did it anyway, changing the names – Harker to Hutter, Mina to Ellen, Dracula to Orlok – and altering a few of the situations but rather audaciously lifting the plot. Not surprisingly, the ploy is as transparent on-screen as I make it sound, and Stoker's widow won a lawsuit that called for all copies of the film to be destroyed, which obviously didn't happen. (More interesting, I think, is that by violating the terms of the lawsuit, ironically Nosferatu has gone on to be considered by many the finest adaptation of Stoker's text.)

In many ways it is a great film. It was perhaps inevitable that Stoker's novel would see adaptation, and lovers of cinema can rejoice that such a talented director arrived at it first. (I'm no fan of copyright infringement; I'm just looking at it purely in hindsight.) We begin with Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim), a real estate agent sent into the spooky countryside at the behest of his boss (named Knock, played by Alexander Granach) to finalize the purchase of an abandoned town house. This normal act is imbued with suspicious elements: Hutter's wife Ellen (Greta Schroeder) does not want him to go; the letter Knock receives about the property is written in runes, and oddly understands them; and the carriage originally meant to carry Hutter to the castle of Count Orlok (Max Shreck) will not venture past a certain point. When we first see Orlok – his pale skin, his sharp ears, his hungry eyes, his elongated front teeth – immediately we know why.

All of the actors are competent, but none reach the level of Shreck, who plays Orlok with unsettling focus and inhuman removal. His disturbing performance would inspire one big wink of a film, Shadow of the Vampire (2000), in which Shreck's eeriness is "explained" by the fact that he is an actual vampire. (Of course it's fiction, but what flattering fiction it is.) Shreck can be commended for his own bizarreness in the role, but the real power comes in the differences between Orlok as a visual character and Stoker's written descriptions of Count Dracula. Orlok is stripped of Dracula's stated debonair and urbane manner and given the hybridized characteristics of both rats and bats, not to mention a physically manifested pestilence that makes him more than a tad off-putting. You can at least understand why, in the novel, Jonathan Harker might have been charmed by Dracula; in Nosferatu, you want Hutter to turn around and run away at the mere sight of Orlok.

Yet the brilliance of the film is that while there's nothing seductive about Orlok, when he's onscreen it's difficult to look away. Such can be said too for the film as a whole. Murnau's acute directorial sense gives Nosferatu an unmistakable visual appeal, even compared against other examples of German expressionism. The shadows are used liberally and the special effects (or rather, the elementary effects of fading and dissolving) are used minimally. The world of Nosferatu feels real, and Orlok's otherworldly presence makes him, and the fear, all the more disconcerting.

It is worth noting that it has become more important than ever to do your best and try to find the most traditional copy of a film that you can in order to appreciate it for its initial artistic merits. Nosferatu is one of the most famous films in public domain, which has made it susceptible to DVD releases that want to play around with the title cards and the score. The best copy available to the public at my local library is a DVD release from a few years ago, given comically green title cards (it looks like something from an amateurish pulp magazine) and a score performed on a synthesizer that electronically imitates the cries, gasps, and pleas. Another version has a jazz fusion score, and still others exist. It's sad; the ordeal of trying to make a silent movie "hip" by adding contemporary sounds is really embarrassing for the companies and insulting to the viewers.

Nosferatu should be enjoyed as Murnau meant for it to be enjoyed, and fortunately last year Kino released a stellar DVD that uses the original German title cards (with caption translations) and a recording of the Hans Erdmann score that accompanied the film in its initial releases. I strongly recommend going with that DVD if at all possible, but let me say too that even if the lovingly prepared authentic release is not a possibility for you, Nosferatu is still very much worth your time. It's arguably Murnau's most famous film, although certainly not his best (see: Sunrise), and also one of the great films of the horror genre. Just do yourself and Murnau a favor: the moment you hear a ridiculous synthesizer, hit the mute button.

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A Woman of Paris (1923)

d. Charles Chaplin / USA / 78 mins.


TO THE PUBLIC:
In order to avoid any misunderstanding, I wish to announce that I do not appear in this picture. It is the first serious drama written and directed by myself.
- CHARLES CHAPLIN

So says the first title card of Chaplin's A Woman of Paris, for better or for worse. Conceived as a film to showcase the talents and appeal of his frequent leading lady Edna Purviance, A Woman of Paris is a unique entry in Chaplin's catalogue of films. By 1923 he had made many wonderful comedies (with his best still to come) and even films that dabbled in the dramatic and sentimental, but nothing fully realized as a drama. The result is a film without much resounding emotion and one of Chaplin's weaker productions.

Purviance's relationship with Chaplin began in 1915, and the two appeared on-screen together in thirty-three of his productions, including all but one of his films with Essanay Studios and all of his films with Mutual Studios and First National. Chaplin undeniably saw something in her (the two were romantically linked for a couple of years), but as an actress I've always found her performances relatively flat. Perhaps it's because she's continually cast as the straight-woman against his slapstick shenanigans and she never had much of an opportunity to stand out. Her best role was in Chaplin's The Kid (1921), but even then she doesn't steal anything away from Chaplin (arguably Jackie Coogan was the one who did that). In A Woman of Paris she plays Marie, a girl from a small French town who loves an artist named Jean (Carl Miller). Their engagement is ill-fated (he has an unhealthy attachment to his parents) and she ends up as a mistress to a wealthy man in Paris. When Marie and Jean cross paths again, their romance is rekindled but obstacles still stand in their way.

A Woman of Paris was Chaplin's first film for United Artists, which Mary Pickford, D.W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, and he founded together. He was a true renaissance man, and as with all of his films, he directed it, wrote it, produced it, and composed its score. (And contrary to the title card, although he does not star, he does appear on-screen in a cameo at a train station.)

It's said audiences expected a traditional Chaplin comedy and their poor reaction to this drama disappointed him. I sympathize, yet must admit the film is a disappointment not for its lack of comedy (Chaplin was capable of great drama; for example: Limelight) but for its lack of core emotion. There are touches of Chaplin's regular satire on the bourgeois class, but none of the emotions or sentiments go very far – most problematically, you never really believe Marie and Jean love each other as much as the film would like you to believe they do.

Although the idea behind the film was to launch a career for Purviance independent of Chaplin's, she starred in only two more films after A Woman of Paris – A Woman of the Sea, an unreleased and now-considered-lost film directed by Josef von Sternberg and produced by Chaplin; and Education de Prince, a French film totally unaffiliated with Chaplin. She retired from acting in 1928 but remained on Chaplin's payroll until her death in 1958, and Chaplin would not venture into straight drama again for decades.

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The Pilgrim (1923)

d. Charles Chaplin / USA / 40 mins.


The irreverent humor of Charles Chaplin is best displayed in his 1940 masterpiece, The Great Dictator, which mercilessly mocked the Nazis, and Monsieur Verdoux, his 1947 black comedy that shines a smile on a poor banker who makes a killing ... well, killing.

But The Pilgrim from 1923 – his final film with First National Studios – is a close third in terms of its irreverent bite. Chaplin stars as an escaped convict masquerading as the new priest in a small town church, giving the audience the opportunity for laughs at his character's ignorance of the church's customs but also numerous jabs at the uptight behavior of the parishioners.

The first half of The Pilgrim is considerably stronger than the second half, which devolves from a sharp-toothed satire into a gummy comedy of manners as a little boy at a parishioner's house harasses the convict-as-priest. The ending moments – which I won't dispel here – are some of Chaplin's most philosophically moving scenes in all of his films, but the middle of the film droops below his normal skill.

It's been said the film's weakness (and his 1922 short Pay Day, for those who don't like it) is due to Chaplin's impatience to finish up his time at First National; he was at the end of his contract with them but was obligated to give them this one last picture. Such frustration isn't unprecedented. Alfred Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn is arguably his worst movie, and it was made at the tail-end of his time in England before he came to the United States to work for David O. Selznick. I don't think it's fair to say, however, that The Pilgrim is one of Chaplin's worst; for much of the early scenes it's quite funny and in the last moments it's tremendously emotional. If only there weren't that pesky middle part.

The Pilgrim was re-released in 1959 by Chaplin alongside A Dog's Life (1918) and Shoulder Arms (1918) as "The Chaplin Revue," with interlocking segments linking the films together. Both of those films are stronger – and consistently funnier – than this one, but if watching "The Chapline Revue" is your only shot at seeing any of the three, you should take it.

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Pay Day (1922)

d. Charles Chaplin / USA / 21 mins.


Pay Day is one of Charles Chaplin's funniest short films, which in turn makes it one of his best short films period. It is tightly wound and expertly paced. Its jokes are wonderfully choreographed and hardly a single one falls flat; that might be its most impressive aspect.

Chaplin is not the Tramp in Pay Day, but an everyman married to a stern woman who inspires bouts of fear in his heart. (And anyway, the differences between the Tramp and Chaplin's generic everyman are largely negligible.) The everyman in Pay Day is a construction worker who butts heads with his tyrannical boss at the work site. At night, unwilling to go home and with a poker-hot paycheck burning a hole in his pocket, he goes out for celebratory drinks and shenanigans.

Pay Day was Chaplin's final short film and his penultimate film with First National before embarking on what was arguably his biggest commercial venture – forming United Artists with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D.W. Griffith. Pay Day is often lumped together with The Pilgrim (1923) as a film Chaplin made quickly to finish his contract and begin producing only features at United Artists. If that is indeed the case, it certainly doesn't show (unlike The Pilgrim, a longer quasi-feature-length film which really does feel more hurried and less organized than most of his films).

The humor works on two levels: the highly stylized and the silly slapstick. Consider the adroitness of two sequences on the construction site. The first is a series of gags that revolve around an elevator built into the scaffolding of a building, where the elevator moves up and down, bringing food away from men who are on lunch and pulling out seats from underneath people. The second is a brilliantly staged sequence that is run backwards in which Chaplin tosses, juggles, balances, and catches the bricks he is laying; it is so well done it demands to be watched numerous times, and might be some of the finest constructed humor in Chaplin's filmography.

The first half of Pay Day focuses on the stylized humor, but the slapstick in the second half is still quite effective; most of the slapstick involves a drunk Chaplin, particularly as he struggles to board a streetcar. (I'm always amazed at how effective Chaplin's alcohol humor is, even 80 years later. It is a rare comedian indeed who could turn inebriation into sophistication.)

Chaplin is one of my favorite directors, and certainly one of the most talented auteurs in cinema. His towering achievements – The Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times, The Great Dictator – are achievements of pure cinema, not merely of comedy or of his own career. As such, they should seen by all, regardless of any interest in Chaplin as a man or as a performer. But aside from those, if asked to recommend only two of the his early works, I'd say The Kid for its pathos and Pay Day for its comedy.

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The Idle Class (1921)

d. Charles Chaplin / USA / 31 mins.


The Idle Class is a tale of two fools – one rich, one poor, both played by Charles Chaplin with exacting physical humor. The richer fool is a man with a drinking problem and a neglected wife (Edna Purviance) who has stopped tolerating it. The poorer fool is his standard Tramp, hitching a joyride on a train and ending up at a golf course where he gets into predictably funny trouble. The two fools eventually find themselves crossing paths at the rich wife's costume party.

It's a highly effective short film in terms of its humor, a great example of Chaplin unmistakably firing on all cylinders. Made toward the end of Chaplin's time with First National, per usual Chaplin performs the roles of star, director, writer, producer, editor, and composer. The gags are quite funny, particularly one which I would love to share but would be remiss to spoil. (All I'll say is that it involves some crying and the mixing of a martini.) Drinking is center stage for humor, as are numerous gags involving golf, which I've always found to be the sport most singularly susceptible to jokes and mockery.

The Idle Class circles back to familiar themes for Chaplin: look-a-likes and the disparity between the classes. Many of his films involve characters who pose as someone they are not (The Pilgrim and arguably City Lights) or look so much like another character they are involved in a bit of mistaken identity (Shoulder Arms and The Great Dictator). An equal emphasis is placed upon the utterly foolish ways the rich can behave and the utterly foolish antics that can occur when someone from the lower class is allowed to infiltrate the bourgeoisie (as at least one of his shorts at Mutual Studios shows, too). In either case, the boon goes to the audience, who is able to sit back and let the laughs flow from watching Chaplin perform with the smoothness of a dry martini.

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