Chaplin's The Pilgrim (1923)

 The Pilgrim was Chaplin's last short (a short being anything shorter than 60 minutes) before he turned exclusively to full-length films, having made The Kid in 1921.  It starts out with a lilting song about going to Texas that was written by Chaplin and sung for Chaplin's re-issue of the film (in 1959) by Matt Monroe.  It is as well Chaplin's last film starring with Edna Purviance (though she did appear in his A Woman of Paris later that year, in which Chaplin did not appear but did direct.)

The Pilgrim is a brilliant and beautiful film and I had to do a great deal of explaining along the way to my six-year-old daughter, who loves Chaplin's shorts but does not quite yet get all the social and political references in his later films.  In The Pilgrim Chaplin poses as a minister after escaping from jail and is thought by a Texan congregation to be their new pastor.  He warms to the role, e.g., doing a lovely pantomime of David and Goliath for his sermon.  Then he falls for Edna, daughter of a poor family having trouble paying the mortgage and when an old jail buddy tries to steal from her family he becomes the "good bad man" --known so well to movie-goers of the 20's from the Westerns of William S. Hart -- disguising himself as a member of a gang of robbers in order to return the money to Edna's family.

There's a lot more crammed into this complex film, including encounters with children at church and home and an impressive sequence where a hat covers up a cake and is frosted and cut before anyone realizes what has happened.  My daughter liked best of all the elegant physical comedy as Chaplin jumped on the back of the thief, closing a drawer repeatedly with his feet each time the thief opened it with his hands. This is a wonderful transitional film, as Chaplin adds political and personal elements to his marvelous choreography