Thursday, May 20, 2021

One A.M.

This is a 1916 Charlie Chaplin short that (for now) is on the Criterion Channel streaming service: 

Great for when I only had a half hour to spare.

As I did not have as much time/motivation in the past 24 hours, I returned to the Criterion Channel and saw one in their collection of Charlie Chaplin silent shorts he made at Mutual Film from 1916 through the next year. As I had a selection, this was picked as it had quite the simple (yet promising) plot: The Tramp is drunker than Cooter Brown and has returned to his house. As he has great difficulty just getting out of the taxi, into his home, and various bric-a-brac on the ground floor-such as a spinning table and various rugs-you can only imagine his struggles in walking up a flight of stairs so he can sleep it off in his bedroom. If you're like me in my college days, you'll sympathize with his stumble-bum behavior...

There are only a few intertitles as most of this is Chaplin on the screen alone, engaged in much visual humor, sight gags, and pratfalls. Sometime in the future I'll see a Tramp comedy where he interacts with others and is in a situation that has a more complicated plot; this on its own worked for me as the 27 minutes flew by. The increasingly absurd situations were mined for all they were worth & there was never any boredom from me. This did help lighten my mood-helpful as there have been some aggravations the past several days.

No comments:

Post a Comment