While running away from a police officer who confused him with a pickpocket, the Tramp enters a circus and disrupts a circus act, but the audience love him and find him hysterical. The circus owner thus hires the Tramp, but finds out the latter can only be funny unintentionally, not on purpose. The Tramp falls in love with a girl, the daughter of a circus owner, but she has a crush on Rex, a daring tightrope walker. In order to impress the girl, the Tramp also tries out to walk on a tightrope, but it doesn't work and thus gets fired. The girl goes with the Tramp, but he persuades her to marry Rex. The circus caravan leaves the Tramp behind.
One of the 10 highest grossing movies from the silent era, "The Circus" came during Charlie Chaplin's annus mirabilis, a time period when it seems the comedian was invincible, had an endless supply of ideas and made great films almost as on an assembly line, where everything he did turned out wonderful—which is evident even in the fact that the film ended up so elegant, fluent and smooth, in spite of its numerous production problems. An excellent comedy, "The Circus" abounds with numerous stylistic sight gags: the scene where a man is holding a child leaned on his shoulder, while the Tramp is eating the child's donut behind the man's back; the Tramp pretending to be a mechanical puppet who is hitting a pickpocket next to him, again and again, in an amusement park in order to hide from a police officer; the dazzling confusion of a police officer trying to capture the Tramp in a house of mirrors which has over a dozen reflections of both of them... The list just goes on and on, and it is remarkable how fresh these jokes look even today.
Chaplin, together with only a handful of other comedians from the silent era, such as B. Keaton and H. Lloyd, perfected the comic timing into true art, elevating it into a meticulous science process that, congruently, unwinds as if it is the simplest thing. Just take the sequence where the Tramp escapes from a lion in a cage—he is relieved, only to later on be scared randomly by a little cat. Chaplin, though, also gives his character an emotional dimension: just like many other great movies, even "The Circus" feeds off the author having a touch with the subject matter, a sort of semi-biographical resemblance, since Chaplin's career started on stage comedy and vaudeville, which resembles the situation of the Tramp in the story. He can only be funny unintentionally, when he is clumsy, but not on purpose, which symbolically speaks about how it is for something funny happening in a comedian's private life, only to find out how difficult and evasive it is to emulate it in front of the public, i.e. how strange it is to translate someone's talent into something useful and commercial. Unlike many other films where he gets the girl, here the Tramp ends up exactly where he started, in his own world, which is touching, almost as if Chaplin knew that the cinema is moving on without him in the allegorical last sequence, while he stays behind. This is a rich film, and it rewards richly, appropriately.
Grade:+++
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