The Chaplin Revue

Three of Charlie Chaplin's classic short features – 'A Dog's Life', 'Shoulder Arms', and 'The Pilgrim' – are packaged here into an essential collection, but with a serious flaw: when he compiled the review in 1958 Chaplin hung a cloud around the silver lining of his own timeless pantomime technique by carelessly 'updating' each selection for contemporary audiences with crude step-printing and indiscriminate music scoring. The tampering severely crippled his comic rhythm, but with a little mental arithmetic it's still possible to laugh loud and long. The weakest of the three films is the enormously popular World War One spoof 'Shoulder Arms', which enlisted the Little Tramp as a cheerleader for the war effort, but the other two are minor masterpieces of comic invention, highlighted by more than one classic, much imitated routine. The pathos that would later enrich Chaplin's later features is all but absent, leaving only pure, unadulterated comedy.