The Circus (1928)

Originally posted to Facebook on 8/10/2018

The Circus was our seventh film from 1928, and the fifth Chaplin feature that we've seen, the most recent being 1925's The Gold Rush.

This film began with a song playing over the opening credits, sung, as it turns out, by Chaplin himself. The kids found this quite surprising, though we'd heard some tinny isolated singing on a Movietone track during 1927's Sunrise. But Chaplin's voice in this case seemed to me a little too clear and resonant to truly be of the era -- and sure enough when I researched it, it turned out to be an addition he'd made in the late sixties, when he was nearing eighty. He added a new score along with his vocals, raising the question of how different the film we watched was from the one audiences saw at the time. Hopefully the changes were minor.

Chaplin again plays a variation on his tramp, starting the film penniless and in trouble with the law, but eventually being hired by the circus -- because he is unintentionally funny. There is a love triangle between him, the ringmaster's daughter (played by Merna Kennedy), and a tightrope walker (played by Harry Crocker), though it takes quite a while for that story to develop. The majority of the film consists of various medium length bits -- such as a chase through a hall of mirrors, or Chaplin getting locked in a cage with a lion. There aren't as many long set pieces as we've seen in his previous films, and there are a few surprisingly violent scenes showing how Kennedy's father, played by Al Ernest Garcia, mistreats her. There was one recurring bit that we kind of enjoyed -- a donkey that had somehow taken a dislike to Chaplin, and would occasionally appear from nowhere and attack him. In essence, though, with the plot being as thin as it is, the film became the sum of its parts -- and its parts ranged from tedious to mildly amusing. I think it is notable too that this film has very few of the iconic scenes that are shown in Chaplin clip reels -- in strong contrast, for instance, to The Gold Rush. I wasn't a huge fan of the earlier movie either, but it was far more ambitious than this one.

It is interesting how few films Chaplin was making by this point. By comparison, Buster Keaton starred in a film or two every year from the early twenties up through the mid-thirties (though he had lost creative control by the time sound films arrived.) Harold Lloyd appeared with similar frequency during the same time period. Chaplin, though, starred in four major films in the twenties, two in each of the thirties, forties, and fifties, and a final film in the sixties. It is probably too easy to ascribe this to his personality or his increasing exactitude about his films -- though I've read stories along those lines. But to the extent that his perfectionism played a role in his decreased appearance on the screen, it seems like a misplaced impulse, in part because his films are not notably stronger than his peers'; in fact most of them, including this one, are in the same "pleasantly amusing but hit-or-miss" category.

Next week we move on to The Man Who Laughs, our eighth film from 1928 -- featuring two German émigrés, Paul Leni as the director, and Conrad Veidt as the lead. Veidt, of course, we saw way back in 1920's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It also will be our first film with Mary Philbin, who plays the female lead. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT