The Tramp is homeless, sleeping outside, and is unable to find a job at the unemployment office, but still intervenes to save a stray dog, Scraps, from other dogs attacking it. The Tramp and the dog go to a night club and befriend a girl singer. Scraps finds a buried wallet with stolen money in it, hidden by two gangsters who assault the Tramp to get the money back, but the Tramp outsmarts them. The Tramp uses the money to buy a farm and live there with the girl and Scraps.
One of Charlie Chaplin’s early comedy shorts, this is a light, a little bit overstretched, but overall still effervescent and charming little film, here with a sympathetic dog as Chaplin’s sidekick. Chaplin’s childhood was marked by poverty, and it is remarkable how far-reaching of an impact it left on his film opus: even here, Chaplin satirizes the incompetent society full of unemployment, economic mismanagement and social inequality that plague and disrupt people’s lives even today—in one actual moment, the nightclub owner orders the girl singer to stand there and attract cutsomers ("If you smile and wink, they'll buy a drink"), a bitting commentary on trying to squeeze money from people at every turn. The Tramp is a symbol for the lower class struggling to survive, and finds optimism even in these bleak circumstances. Some jokes work better, some less (the corny gag of Chaplin hiding the dog in his pants to enter a nightclub), yet the best joke truly is a brilliant highlight: after they stole his money, two thugs sit at a table in a room to divide the spoils, but the Tramp sneaks behind one thug behind the curtain, knocks the villain unconscious and then Tramp’s hands emerge under the thugs’s jacket, feigning they are the thug’s hands, so that the Tramp can take half of the money the other thug gives him. Truly an inspired comic idea, which was later copied in numerous movies or TV shows—even in one episode of “Drake & Josh", where one of them stands on the stage, while the other’s hands emerge behind the curtain to play a guitar instead of him. The dog is underused, but overall the movie has just enough creativity to help upgrade Chaplin’s ideas to the next stage.
Grade:++
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