This will be the first time Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp graces a New Beverly kiddee matinee! We find the Little Tramp as the inadvertent star of a downtrodden circus. His performances, although not intentional, are a hit. Roger Ebert wrote of The Circus, “The film is rich in sight gags. It opens with a complex pickpocket scenario, continues with a famous chase around the fairgrounds, includes a house of mirrors scene in which multiple Tramps, cops and strangers chase one another’s reflections. One scene has him locked in a lion’s cage; measures must have been taken to assure his safety, but CGI was unknown and the lion seems real enough…. The piece de resistance is the extended tightrope scene.” Quentin Tarantino recently rewatched the film and thought it would make a terrific matinee. We’ll even be using a 35mm print from his personal collection!
Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp accidentally joins The Circus, becomes a clown and falls in love with a fellow performer in one of the highest grossing silent films in cinema history. The Circus is an equal blend of hilarious slapstick and behind-the-tent melodrama, featuring one of Chaplin’s greatest set pieces high atop the tight rope!
“There’s an edge to The Circus that suggests a man gazing deep into thevoid, laughing at the darkness and urging us to do the same.” – Keith Uhlich, Time Out
“The Circus may be the film that most definitively silences critics who claim that Charlie Chaplin’s movies aren’t cinematic. It is Chaplin’s great elegy to the lost art of music-hall pantomime and, for that matter, the soon-to-be lost art of silent-film comedy.” – Christian Blauvelt, Slant Magazine
