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DVD The Circus (2 Disc Special Edition)
Made in 1928 while he was in the middle of a painful divorce case, Charlie Chaplin's The Circus was so associated with bad memories for its maker that he refused even to mention it in his 1964 autobiography. Consequently, it has enjoyed less of a reputation than such films as The Gold Rush (1925) and City Lights (1931). However, while it's not quite in their league, The Circus undoubtedly deserves to be rescued from relative obscurity.
Here, Chaplin's Tramp is taken on as a clown at the circus, having been chased into the big tent by a policeman wrongly suspected of theft and wowing the audience with his pratfalls. He falls in love with the ill-treated ringmaster's daughter (Merna Kennedy) but is swiftly rivaled by a new addition to the circus, a handsome tightrope walker. To try to win back her affections, the Tramp himself attempts the same act, culminating in the best sequence of the film, when he is assailed by monkeys as he totters amateurishly and precariously along a rope suspended high in the tent. Although The Circus is marred by the rather hackneyed and (even in 1928) stale melodramatic device of the cruel father and imploring daughter, it scores high on its slapstick content, with routines involving a hall of mirrors and a mishap with a magician's equipment demonstrating Chaplin's dazzling ability to choreograph apparently improvised mayhem. --David Stubbs
Review(s): DVD The Circus (2 Disc Special Edition)
Unknown Chaplin
The Circus is the story of a little tramp who stumbles upon a circus when he gets mixed up with the police. He becomes the hit of the show, so the boss hires him but does not let him know he is such a success so he does not have to pay him the proper amount. The lonely man befriends another outcast in the troupe, the boss's daughter. However, although the tramp obviously feels deeply for the girl, she marries a tightrope walker. A bittersweet scene at the end shows the tramp enthusiastically accompanying them on their wedding day.
However, the simple story really is not what is important. Really, the valuable part of The Circus are the comedic elements. There is an extremely cute and clever sequence in a fun house that Chaplin perfected. There is a running gag with an aggressive mule that is always funny. Even when the tramp is trying to be funny but the others do not think he is, he is funny! The comedy seems somehow different from Chaplin's normal strain, but it is very good nonetheless.
There are also some artistically shot dramatic scenes in the film, a staple of Charlie Chaplin's genius.
Chaplin wrote this music score, and as a result it is reminiscent of some of the scores he wrote for his other films, but it is highly effective in the various scenes.
This is one of the least known Chaplin films; it was made between The Gold Rush and City Lights, two highly successful and important films. Perhaps audiences thought this film paled in comparison, or perhaps it was overshadowed by the problems Chaplin was having with his wife at the time, Lita Grey. In fact, co-star Merna Kennedy was Grey's best friend.
A Day's Pleasure accompanies The Circus on this VHS. It was made in 1919, a film about a Model T Ford with an excellent bit aboard a ship.
A Great Chaplin Film
I don't pretend to be an expert on Chaplin's history, but I do own the Chaplin Collection (both sets) and I have also seen other Chaplin shorts.
I read other reviews stating that this movie was mediocre...I strongly disagree.
This movie is just as funny as the other films. The main difference is that the story is not as complex as most of his other films.
Everyone talks about how wonderful the ending to City Lights was. I loved City Lights (especially the boxing scene) but I find the ending of The Circus a heck of a lot more moving than that of City Lights. As is the case with just about every other Chaplin film, the social commentary is evident, but the message at the end of The Circus will really hits home.
Again, I highly recommend this movie for a good laugh, which does NOT get boring toward the middle, and a very emotional ending.
Good but not Chaplin's best...
A very entertaining and well made comedy. The story is pretty simple with The Tramp (Charlie Chaplin) this time taking a stage hand job at a circus where he unwittingly becomes the star of the show with his antics. The best moments of the film are the expertly choreographed comic routines. The climactic tightrope walk is a bit of a letdown next to the earlier, funnier bits (like the opening funhouse chase), but that is a small detraction. The unrequited love story adds some much needed depth to the film, giving it that bittersweet quality that any good comedy needs to be effective. Chaplin here gives us just a peak at that serious side of The Tramp that we would see more of in his last two films. Beautiful ending.
City Lights is a film to pick for the time capsule, a film that best represents the many aspects of director-writer-star Charlie Chaplin at the peak of his powers: Chaplin the actor, the sentimentalist, the knockabout clown, the ballet dancer, the athlete, the lover, the tragedian, the fool. It's all contained in Chaplin's simple story of a tramp who falls in love with a blind flower girl (Virginia Cherrill). Chaplin elevates the Victorian contrivances of the plot to something glorious with his inventive use of pantomime and his sure grasp of how the Tramp relates to the audience. In 1931, it was a gamble for Chaplin to stick with silence after talking pictures had killed off the art form that had made him famous, but audiences flocked to City Lights anyway. (Chaplin would... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Charles Chaplin - Virginia Cherrill Director(s): Charles Chaplin DVD Release Date: Released the 02 March 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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The Kid is one of the purest expressions of Charlie Chaplin's art on film. It unites Chaplin with a boy he had spotted in a vaudeville act, 6-year-old Jackie Coogan--whose life would lead to the child-protective Coogan Act and a role as Uncle Fester on TV. The story has the Tramp adopting an abandoned waif and teaching him streetwise survival skills. The gags are flawless, but for Chaplin the huge advance (other than a running time longer than his two-reelers) was the exploration of a rich vein of sentiment; the emotionally wrenching separation of the Tramp and the Kid is probably the most Dickensian sequence ever captured on film. Chaplin drew on his own rough childhood for the material (and may have been inspired by the death of an infant son immediately before beginning the... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Charles Chaplin - Edna Purviance - Jackie Coogan Director(s): Charles Chaplin DVD Release Date: Released the 02 March 2004 Usually ships within 24 hours
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After the box-office failure of his first dramatic film, A Woman of Paris, Charlie Chaplin brooded over his ensuing comedy. "The next film must be an epic!" he recalled in his autobiography. "The greatest!" He found inspiration, paradoxically, in stories of the backbreaking Alaskan gold rush and the cannibalistic Donner Party. These tales of tragedy and endurance provided Chaplin with a rich vein of comic possibilities. The Little Tramp finds himself in the Yukon, along with a swarm of prospectors heading over Chilkoot Pass (an amazing sight restaged by Chaplin in his opening scenes, filmed in the snowy Sierra Nevadas). When the Tramp is trapped in a mountain cabin with two other fortune hunters, Chaplin stages a veritable ballet of starvation, culminating in the cooking of a... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Charles Chaplin Director(s): Charles Chaplin DVD Release Date: Released the 01 July 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Charlie Chaplin is in glorious form in this legendary satire of the mechanized world. As a factory worker driven bonkers by the soulless momentum of work, Chaplin executes a series of slapstick routines around machines, including a memorable encounter with an automatic feeding apparatus. The pantomime is triumphant, but Chaplin also draws a lively relationship between the Tramp and a street gamine. She's played by Paulette Goddard, then Chaplin's wife and probably his best leading lady (here and in The Great Dictator). The film's theme gave the increasingly ambitious writer-director a chance to speak out about social issues, as well as indulging in the bittersweet quality of pathos that critics were already calling "Chaplinesque." In 1936, Chaplin was still holding out against... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Charles Chaplin - Paulette Goddard - Henry Bergman Director(s): Charles Chaplin DVD Release Date: Released the 01 July 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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This blistering little black comedy was well ahead of its time when released in 1947. Originally, Orson Welles had wanted Chaplin to star in his drama about a French mass murderer named Landru, but Chaplin was hesitant to act for another director, and used the idea himself. He plays a dapper gent named Henri Verdoux (who assumes a number of identities), a civilized monster who marries wealthy women, then murders them (as we meet him, he's gathering roses as an incinerator ominously bellows smoke in the background) and collects their money to support his real family. The Little Tramp is now a distant memory, though this was the first film not to feature Chaplin's beloved creation. Verdoux is largely viciously clever until it gets too heavy-handed, as evidenced when a woman he spares... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Charles Chaplin Director(s): Charles Chaplin DVD Release Date: Released the 02 March 2004 Usually ships within 24 hours
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