Comedy & Laughter
People sometimes assume that silent films require patience and a certain tolerance for historical quaintness — that watching them is more like studying an artifact than enjoying entertainment. I want to correct this assumption. The best Charlie Chaplin films are not artifacts to be appreciated. They are comedies to be laughed at, and they earn those laughs as reliably in the present day as they did when they were made.
Chaplin was born in London in 1889 and grew up in genuine poverty — his mother was intermittently institutionalized, his father largely absent. He began performing in music halls as a child and arrived in Hollywood in 1913. By 1918 he was the most famous person on earth. Not the most famous actor. The most famous person. On earth. People in remote villages who had never heard of any American president had heard of Charlie Chaplin.
His most enduring creation was the Tramp: a small man in a bowler hat, ill-fitting suit, and enormous shoes, with a cane he didn't need and a dignity he couldn't quite hold onto. The Tramp wanted things — food, warmth, love, a place to belong — and the films are about his attempts to get those things in a world that was generally not inclined to give them to him. This is, when you think about it, a fairly universal situation.
Here are five films worth your time, with brief notes about what makes each one work for modern audiences.
This is where to start if you want to understand why people loved Chaplin. The Tramp discovers an abandoned infant and raises the child himself. The baby grows into a boy played by Jackie Coogan, and the two of them run small scams together with an easy partnership that is genuinely charming. When authorities attempt to separate them, the film becomes something more than a comedy.
The physical comedy is excellent throughout. But the scene where the Tramp realizes they are about to take the kid away from him — the way Chaplin holds a beat, and then another beat, and then moves — is one of the most efficiently affecting moments in the history of film. Available free on the Internet Archive's Chaplin collection.
The Tramp heads to Alaska during the gold rush and encounters blizzards, starvation, a cabin that teeters on a cliff, and a dance hall girl he becomes hopelessly enamored of. The film contains two of the most famous comedy sequences Chaplin ever filmed: the Thanksgiving dinner where he boils and eats his own boot with the ceremony and appreciation of a fine meal, and the "Oceana Roll" sequence where he dances two bread rolls on forks in a way that still appears on lists of the greatest film moments ever captured.
The Gold Rush is also the film in which the comedy and the tenderness are most perfectly balanced. You laugh frequently and you feel something genuine at the end.
By 1931, sound films had taken over Hollywood. Chaplin made City Lights as a silent film anyway, accompanied by a score he composed himself. This was a significant act of stubbornness, and it paid off entirely. City Lights is frequently cited by film scholars as the greatest film Chaplin ever made, and it is not hard to see why.
The Tramp falls in love with a blind flower girl and sets about raising money for an operation that might restore her sight. His methods involve a boxing match that is one of the finest pieces of physical comedy ever filmed — consistently ranked among the greatest films of all time by the British Film Institute — and the final scene of City Lights is as moving as anything the cinema has produced.
The last true Tramp film, and the one that most directly addresses the world outside the movie theater. Modern Times is about industrialization, unemployment, the dehumanizing effects of factory work, and what happens to the small individual caught in large economic machinery. It is also extremely funny.
The opening sequence, in which the Tramp works on an assembly line and gradually goes insane from repetition, is a satire so accurate that it has been used in sociology courses. The Chaplin who could write a sequence this funny about something this serious was operating at an unusual level of craft. The film includes the only time Chaplin's Tramp speaks — or rather, sings — in a Chaplin-composed gibberish song that somehow perfectly captures the character.
Chaplin's first true sound film, made as Hitler was rising to power. Chaplin plays both a Jewish barber (essentially the Tramp in a new setting) and Adenoid Hynkel, the dictator of Tomania, in a double-role satire that required remarkable courage to make in 1940 when the war's outcome was not yet known.
The film contains what many consider the greatest speech in cinema history: the barber, mistaken for the dictator, addresses a crowd and speaks directly into the camera about kindness, humanity, and the possibility of a better world. It lasts four minutes. It was sincere. It holds up completely. The comedy in the film is very good. The speech at the end is something else entirely.
Several of Chaplin's silent films are in the public domain and available for free streaming on the Internet Archive's film collection. The sound films, including Modern Times and The Great Dictator, are available through most major streaming services. Criterion Collection editions, when you can find them, offer restored picture quality and thoughtful supplementary material.