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The Chaplin Mutuals, Vol. 2 |
List Price: $29.99
Your Price: $26.99 |
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Reviews |
Features:
Description:
Charlie Chaplin refined his trademark character the Little Tramp through his short films at Mutual Studios with the help of his two key costars: burly, barrel-chested Eric Campbell, his hulking physical opposite who forever played the bullying nemesis (often behind a positively demonic beard), and sweet-faced Edna Purviance, the alternately demure and plucky innocent he's forever courting, saving, or simply mooning over. In The Count, Chaplin and Campbell crash a society bash under false identities to woo a rich lovely, but Chaplin soon reverts to his impulsive instincts and turns the posh gathering into an anarchic free-for-all. The Vagabond, Chaplin's second Mutual short, is a rural melodrama of a young girl saved from abusive guardians by the resourceful Tramp. Favoring pathos over slapstick, it looks forward to the sentimental melodrama of his features to come. As a lowly menial in The Fireman, Chaplin is cheerfully oblivious to the chaos he causes to the ordered firehouse and still manages to emerge a hero. Finally, Behind the Screen thumbs a nose at the movies in general and Mack Sennett (Chaplin's old boss) in particular with a lampoon of the studios that concludes with the invention of the pie fight ("I don't like this highbrow stuff," comments one victim). Equal parts class clown, downtrodden social outcast, and sentimental softy, Chaplin's continued appeal lies not merely in his comic invention but his dogged defiance of authority, class, and convention, and these classic shorts preserve the edginess he smoothed out in later features. --Sean Axmaker
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