This is the second part of a two-part review of Charlie Chaplin’s classic film “The Circus,” written by Dan Schneider who sometimes leaves comments on this site. He has this site and this new film site.
DVD Review Of The Circus
Copyright © by Dan Schneider
This sense of a narrative bildingsroman that the audience is left with is recapitulated within the structure of the film, and its effect upon the viewer, which starts of with some of the greatest gags in film history- like the pickpocket scene, and the hall of mirrors brilliance, which prefigured Orson Welles’ brilliantly derivative scene, two decades later, in The Lady From Shanghai. That scene ends with another great gag, as he and the pickpocket (Steve Murphy) pretend to be funhouse automata to fool the stolid cops.
Only slowly do we get a sense of character development, as Chaplin warms to the girl, is despondent when she falls for Rex, and even within his subtle subversion of his English dance hall roots. We see how The Tramp is funny only unintentionally, or being chased by the ass. When he tries to be funny he is not, at least to the other circus performers. But, his subversion of classic commedia dell arte is brilliant, for he is really critiquing the gags that brought him superstardom a decade earlier, but which were considered passé, even in 1928. Yet, the film is also very much of its age and for the ages, as well.
It is a work of absurdism, in the very situations that come up over and again- especially considering the hall of mirrors sequence, yet also a herald of what would wrongly be called Postmodernism, for it is highly recursive and self-referential, as it is a film by a comedian about the craft of comedy- witness when Chaplin repeatedly knocks the pickpocket over the head with a cudgel, as they pose as automata, then mechanically laughs. In this manner, the film is the grandfather to films like Federico Fellini’s 8½ or Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories.
There are other great scenes, such as the circus barber and William Tell routines (with a wormy apple), when Chaplin and the pickpocket are in parallel flight from two cops, when Chaplin steals bites of a sweet from a toddler looking back over his father’s shoulder, when he meets Merna, and assumes she’s the sword swallower from the circus poster- a sly subversion of the sexual prudery of the era, as well as a couple dozen other briefer gags, but the film also shows Chaplin growing technically- such as when he uses a double exposure in a brief fantasy sequence that shows him leaving his body to knock out Rex. Cinematographer Roland Totheroh uses mostly static camera shots, although the high wire shots play with angles and close-ups. The scene was shot in over seven hundred takes, but are so skillfully edited together that they flow beautifully, and were obviously the inspiration for similar scenes a quarter century later, in Fellini’s La Strada.
As for the DVD? It is part of a two box set of Chaplin’s classics out on DVD, put out by the French film company MK2, distributed through Warner Home Video. Volume 1 of The Chaplin Collection has The Gold Rush, Modern Times, The Great Dictator, and Limelight. Volume 2 has The Circus, The Kid, City Lights, Monsieur Verdoux- perhaps the only other Chaplin film as wrongfully neglected as The Circus, A King In New York with A Woman Of Paris, The Chaplin Revue, and Richard Schickel’s 2003 documentary, Charlie: The Life And Art Of Charles Chaplin.
The Circus is given two disks. Disk One is just the film- the 1970 reissue version, and Disk Two has many special features, such as a five minute introduction to the film by biographer David Robinson, and a half hour French made documentary by François Ede, called Chaplin Today: The Circus, on the history of the film, and features Bosnian film director Emir Kusturica’s comments. There are a few deleted scenes without audio, a week’s worth of outtakes during filming, home movie shots, a few other minor segments- such as shots of the film’s premiere, as well as trailers for the film- one from France and one from America- both for the 1970 reissue of the film.
As pure comedy, perhaps the only film that has as ceaseless a run of comic gags that all work is the 1960s all-star comedy classic It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, but that film could lay no claim to great nor higher art. Perhaps the only downside to The Circus- or rather the DVD, is that it does not offer the original film from 1928, replete with a silent film organ score- say by the great silent organist Rosa Rio? Instead, we only have the overwrought, and didactic musical score Chaplin composed in 1970.
His opening rendition of the saccharine Swing Little Girl, sung over the opening titles, is plain bad- both as music and as sung, but thankfully passes quickly. As with his unfortunate 1942 reissue of The Gold Rush- with added narration, this music guides the audience too much, although the film’s main theme, I must admit, wins you over at the end. Fortunately, that film’s DVD comes with both the 1942 reissue and the 1925 original- which is superior.
Some artists never know when to leave greatness alone. Even so, The Circus is the purest and least flawed Chaplin feature film ever made, in that it distills every single aspect of his greatness and, yes, even that grossly overused term- genius. For anyone with a love of pure cinema, silent cinema, and its history, this film and DVD is a must to see and own.
But, if you have heart problems, I advise you to be wary, because it is so funny it could literally hurt you….but wouldn’t that be the best way to go?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.