Chaplin The Collection: Volume 5 review
January 7th, 2010 Posted in UncategorizedAmerica and its hypocritical pieties.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
Charles Chaplin’s (“Easy Street”/”The Immigrant”/”The Vagabond”)
third film for First National is a two reeler set in the country on a Sunday
morning that pokes fun at small-town rural America and its hypocritical
pieties. Charlie is the hard working handyman who between work and courting
the farmer’s daughter has two dream sequences.
Charlie’s boss, Tom Wilson, owns a farm, a hotel, a barber shop and
a general store, and Charlie works full-time at all those places. The boss
is always pushing him to work harder and treats Charlie with contempt even
though his hotel has a sign that says “Love thy Neighbor.” The boss wakes
Charlie early to milk the cows and to prepare breakfast, and to save time
Charlie has a chicken lay his egg in the frying pan.
When Charlie is tending his cows in the country while the locals
go to church in the village, he loses track of the herd while reading from
the Bible while walking them and the herd upsets the church service by
roaming through the town. The locals chase Charlie back to the country,
where he stumbles off a bridge and has a brief dream whereby he’s surrounded
by smiling nymphs. Awakened by the locals, he returns to work only to take
a break and court his love interest, the farmer’s daughter Edna Purviance.
To get rid of her pesty kid brother, Charlie proposes they play blind man’s
bluff and leaves the dumb hick blindfolded outside in traffic while he
stays inside courting Edna and playing the piano until her angry father
kicks him out. Returning to the hotel, there’s a fancy dressed city slicker
propped up on the desk who was just in a car wreck and gets treated by
the village doctor with horse medicine and when recovered the city slicker
turns his amorous intentions on Edna. He uses the knob of his walking stick
as a cigarette lighter to impress the lady and get Charlie jealous. When
Charlie tries to impress Edna by doing the same thing with his walking
stick, it doesn’t work. In the end, this turns out to only be a dream and
when the city slicker departs he gives Charlie such a big tip that he can
now afford to marry Edna.
Improve your internet experience by watching high-quality streaming movies on your computer and skip the hassles of renting from your local film store and paying the fees charged for returning a DVD late. Through online movies sites, you can watch new movies when it is convenient for you with no rental agreements to sign or late charges to pay ever. Watch Fantastic Mr. Fox movie online .
The short was better on the social commentary than the comedy. If
anything, those arty dream sequences were confusing and destroyed the integrity
of the film by adding a false sense of suspense.