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.

Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914)

I have some time to kill but don't want to wake up the lovely Mrs Llamastrangler, who is now several days past her due date and fast asleep. So I watched a short Charlie Chaplin film to fill in some of my time during the interminable wait for fatherhood. I was hoping that it would cheer me up a bit as today has been spent digesting some very sad news.

Anyway... this is the first ever film to feature Chaplin's "Tramp" character. I'm vaguely familiar with Chaplin, but mainly because of Paul Merton's splendid television evangelising. I'm well aware of how the humour hasn't dated, but the racing cars certainly have- they look so flimsy, like old-fashioned prams. And the whole set-up looks incredibly dangerous for both participants and spectators. It's Health and Safety gone mad. 

What really surprised was, well, is that it? I've enjoyed Charlie Chaplin films in the past, but this one consists of not a lot more than the Tramp annoying people by getting in the way. That's it. I'd expected a lot more. I know it's a short, but I've seen plenty of funny ones. I suspect the problem lies in the fact that this is an early short from the Keystone Cops crowd.

Still, there are plenty of other silent comedies out there...