Initial Release Date: January 6th, 1928

Position on the List (at time of viewing): 665

It’s been a while since we’ve had a Chaplin to talk about (the last one was three years ago), but what a great one this is. Perhaps not the greatest movie to star the Little Tramp, but one of the most definitive in terms of the traits that we associate with the figure. This is easily one of the most uproariously funny films that Chaplin ever made, but the movie is far more than just slapstick and setpieces.

The story of The Circus is pretty standard, as these films go: the little tramp stumbles into a circus, accidentally becomes the main attraction, falls in love with a beautiful girl (Merna Kennedy), ends up saving both her and the circus, but in the end is left behind as the circus pulls up stakes and moves on without him. There’s not much more to it then that, but Chaplin puts together some of the best visual and spatial gags of his entire career for this outing. The scene where he goes tightrope walking and some monkeys get loose at the same time is, without exaggeration, the funniest thing Chaplin ever put on the screen. It’s one of those laugh so hard you can’t breathe and your sides hurt moments. There are a surprising amount of scenes with live animals (the lion cage scene and a series of gags with a particularly mean-spirited horse are also standouts), and they add a great deal to the feel that the movie actually takes place in a circus. The plot really isn’t the focus (as in most of the silent comedies) and is more an excuse for stringing together brilliant gags and pratfalls, and a circus is a perfect opportunity for that.

The filming and production of the movie was one of the hardest of Chaplin’s career. He was going through a bitter and angry divorce, his mother passed away, there was a huge fire on his set, and he was audited by the IRS all in the single year of the film’s production. It was so bad that by the end of the production his hair had to be dyed to match its color in the early scenes, because his hair had gone almost completely white from the stress. It’s clear that the production is a lavish one, though. Chaplin had wanted to make a movie about the circus since as early as 1920, and he really pulled out all the stops to try to make this one excellent. For the lion scenes alone, he did some 200 takes, many of which had him actually in a cage with a lion. He did all his own stunts as usual, but some of them here approach Buster Keaton levels of self-risk. Partially due to the many production delays, he spent months working on the edit, trying to stave off a nervous breakdown. It’s almost as if he somehow knew ahead of time the position this movie would have both in his body of work and in the history of film in general, and wanted to make it the absolute best film it could possibly be.

You see, this is the last Chaplin film of the silent era. He would go on to make more silent films, even great ones, in defiance of popular opinion and logic, but this was the last one that came out at a time when silent films were still a normal Hollywood release. The Jazz Singer had come out only three months before the release of this film, and the writing was pretty clearly already on the wall for silent movies. This movie, then, serves as a kind of epitaph for silent film in general, and for Chaplin’s period as a dominant force in Hollywood in particular. And the autobiographical nature of the film is pretty clear if you think about it. The tramp stumbles into a career, rises meteorically to the top of it, changes it and everyone around it for the better, but then is left behind as it moves on to greater and more profitable things. It may not be terribly humble, but the parallels aren’t difficult to see. The final scene of the film, with the tramp left behind, the girl he loves happily married to another man and nothing but dust and tattered flags left of his workplace, was filmed four days after the premiere of The Jazz Singer, surprisingly late in production. For a movie this uproariously funny, it lends a painful melancholy to watching the end of this film. Even if the tramp is indifferent as he waddles away, I’m sure not.

But ultimately the movie’s legacy is comedy, not tragedy. If Chaplin wanted to make a lasting memorial of the work he did in silent film, this movie absolutely manages that feat with aplomb. Without hesitation, I would label this the funniest movie of his entire career (not necessarily his best movie, but by far the most hilarious). I also think it would almost be the perfect Chaplin movie to start with for someone who was inexperienced with silent film. It has everything one associates with the character, and almost all of it has been perfected by this point in Chaplin’s work. It’s constantly funny (not just funny ‘for its time’) and even has the slightly melancholy ending that Chaplin was so often known for. It’s not a perfect film, certainly. It’s a little sloppier than his very best work, and not quite as thematically rich. But in the end, I don’t think most viewers will care that they aren’t watching the most intellectually stimulating Chaplin film. They’ll be too busy laughing.

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