The Idle Class was one of Chaplin's last shorts; he had already made his first feature, The Kid, the previous year but owed First National another short. There are those who like Chaplin's shorts better than his features (my eight-year old daughter is among them) either because of or in spite of the fact that they are mostly gags strung together with minimal narrative unity and little sentiment; the endings being relatively happy. In The Idle Class the ending is somewhat ambiguous and the gags are mostly not all that funny. But there is at least one gag that is Chaplin at his most brilliant: Chaplin plays a dual role, as a wealthy dipsomaniac as well as his tramp character, and they happen to look alike; at one point the wealthy man's wife walks out on him and leaves a note that she won't be back until her husband stops drinking. The husband puts this note down on the table, turning his back, and starts to shake for a bit, is he crying or is he laughing? He turns around and is shaking a cocktail shaker! The brilliance is not just the movements of Chaplin but the beautiful timing, giving one just the right amount of time to wonder what the reaction to his wife's letter is.
There is much about class relationships in this short film, including the tramp being taken for a thief just because of how he looks, to the tramp wrecking everyone's game of golf while he plays everyone else's balls with a lovely balletic swing and having to extricate his wealthy lookalike from a suit of armor with a can opener. There is even a wistful fantasy sequence where the tramp imagines he is rescuing Edna Purviance on a runaway horse and she is so grateful she falls in love with him. In the final scene Chaplin kicks Edna's pompous father in the butt and runs away at top speed.
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