Easy Street (1917)

It's been a while since I've watched a silent comedy short, so here's another one. After all, all of them are well out of copyright and many if not all of them can just be watched on YouTube or similar.

This is a another fairly early Chaplin short, although it's very good indeed, with the visual comedy being truly first class and Chaplin himself being extraordinary- the mannerisms, the walk, the facial expressions. He's every bit as good as his reputation.

As ever, with silent films and especially with comedy shorts, you really have to focus on what's going on visually. I'll admit that there are bits of the plot I only really grasped after reading a synopsis. It just goes to show how the experience of watching a film is so fundamentally different if everything has to be communicated visually in a world where cinema-goers were all used to that level of concentration as a matter of course. The rise of sound would fundamentally change that.

Yet the humour absolutely works, a hundred and five years later, despite coming from a time when Russia had a czar and the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires were still a thing. In many ways, the world as seen in this comedy is a very different one from ours. But slapstick is timeless. And this is some of the very finest slapstick known to humanity.