Not So Silent Cinema presents 3 Charlie Chaplin shorts w/live original score Jan. 11th at Cleveland Cinematheque

[Press Release from Not So Silent Cinema.]

On Sunday January 11th, The Cleveland Art Institute hosts Not So Silent Cinema’s Charlie Chaplin Shorts, featuring new original scores to three classic Chaplin short films. The performance takes place at 4:00pm. Learn more atwww.notsosilentcinema.com

Nobody does it like Charlie Chaplin! Perhaps the most iconic film star of all time, Chaplin pioneered aspects of acting, directing and writing that shaped the course of cinema history. This program, featuring several short films Chaplin made for Mutual Film Company in an exhilarating two year run in 1916-1917, show the rapid evolution of Chaplin's style from no-holds-barred slapstick to nuanced emotional storytelling.

“You won't be able to hear a pin drop…And you're not likely to be able to sit still either.”

–Philadelphia Inquirer

Dope Island: Police brutality caught on camera! - A Cleveland Movie Blog special video report!

I hope I don't have to explain that the footage is from a classic two-reeler that's almost 100 years old, EASY STREET. The big guy manhandling Charlie is a character actor named Eric Campbell who played villains in practically all Chaplin shorts from this period. And there is a Ferguson connection, insofar as Campbell, a huge Scotsman, died in a car wreck the very year EASY STREET came out (check out his Wikipedia biography; it was an incredibly tragic year for the guy all around). Sentimental movie fans refer to him as a "gentle giant" - wow, sound familiar?

I hope you internet kids get the main gag here, that cop Charlie subdues the strongman four times his size by asphyxiating him using the natural gas piped into an old-fashioned street lamp. This must have been back in the days when many such lights still existed, as pre-electric filament technology (but the same lamp has a police-emergency telephone; don't ask me how true to life that is, the two existing side by side). At dusk the city had fellows who went around lighting the gas street lamps by hand, imagery you'll occasionally find in period movies.

The Cleveland Orchestra performs with Chaplin's Modern Times on Tuesday December. 11, 2012

[Reporting by Charles Cassady, Jr.]

Ever since LeBron James left the only thing significant about Cleveland is the world-famous Cleveland Orchestra. Yes, part of the reason Michael Jordan withdrew from public life was how he still hurts from the time the woodwinds section scored big against the Chicago Bulls in the NBA Playoffs.

Show your appreciation this Tuesday at Severance Hall, in University Circle, when the Cleveland Orchestra performs a live soundtrack alongside a golden-oldie cinematic icon that’s still about 20 times better than most of the garbage on screens in 2012. I speak of Charlie Chaplin’s MODERN TIMES, a pantomime masterpiece starring Chaplin as “the worker,” supposedly the final iteration of his Little Tramp alter ego. The LT is a frazzled assembly-line drone who suffers a hilarious nervous breakdown on the job (this being 1932, it's comedy; today Charlie would just grab a gun and kill everyone). Fired, he goes looking for employment and humanity in a Depression-era world of shantytowns, waifs, strikes and huge machinery.

Repost: The Gold Rush (August 10th at the Cleveland Museum of Art)

[THE GOLD RUSH screens Friday August 10th at 7:00 pm at the Cleveland Museum of Art.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

What's there left to say about Charlie Chaplin's 1925 GOLD RUSH that hasn't been said? I a bit of digging and learned that Chaplin's direct inspiration for this comedy of hardship was reading about the horrific true-life Donner Party incident - a group of California-bound western settlers, snowed in for the winter of 1846, reduced to cannibalism to survive. You know what that means, right? Someday some film-school brat with a dorm shrine to George Romero and Herschell Gordon Lewis and the like will earn his ticket to Hollywood big leagues with a digital-era remake "Gold Rush - The Way Chaplin Intended," with full dismemberment, decapitations, eviscerations, nudity, anthrophagy etc. And the swooning Sundance jury (or San Diego Comic-Con, same thing) nerds who hand the splatter comedy their coveted midnite-screening slot won't even be savvy enough with film history to know the decent 1998 frontier horror flick RAVENOUS, with Guy Pearce, also drew from the Donner tragedy. Making it and THE GOLD RUSH kind of cousins, which is a weird thought.

The Gold Rush (February 25 at 5:15 p.m. and February 26 at 2:50 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[THE GOLD RUSH screens Friday February 25th at 5:15 pm and February 26th at 2:50 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

What's there left to say about Charlie Chaplin's 1925 GOLD RUSH that hasn't been said? I a bit of digging and learned that Chaplin's direct inspiration for this comedy of hardship was reading about the horrific true-life Donner Party incident - a group of California-bound western settlers, snowed in for the winter of 1846, reduced to cannibalism to survive. You know what that means, right? Someday some film-school brat with a dorm shrine to George Romero and Herschell Gordon Lewis and the like will earn his ticket to Hollywood big leagues with a digital-era remake "Gold Rush - The Way Chaplin Intended," with full dismemberment, decapitations, eviscerations, nudity, anthrophagy etc. And the swooning Sundance jury (or San Diego Comic-Con, same thing) nerds who hand the splatter comedy their coveted midnite-screening slot won't even be savvy enough with film history to know the decent 1998 frontier horror flick RAVENOUS, with Guy Pearce, also drew from the Donner tragedy. Making it and THE GOLD RUSH kind of cousins, which is a weird thought.

Limelight (June 3 at 9:25 p.m. and June 4 at 5 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[LIMELIGHT screens Friday June 3 at 9:25 p.m. and Saturday June 4 at 5 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady Jr.

Some big football coach at Ohio State University just resigned in an ethics-violation case. Or, as local polticians call it, "natural causes." So that means that probably nobody is reading the Cleveland Movie Blog. I can write anything I want here. So what? Nobody's ever going to know it. I can name the dude who may have discovered the secret of perpetual motion...I can reveal the identify of that ghost nurse who is supposed to walk in the woods near the Memphis Kiddie Park...I can ruin the twist ending of PSYCHO. But instead I'll just beat up on the The Cleveland Cinematheque for messing up the chronology of their Charlie Chaplin retrospective. Thought they'd be showing Chaplin's sound-era features in the order in which they were made, but either they can't tell time over there or (far more likely) the impresarios of the Cinematheque have decided to finish off the cycle not with Chaplin's lackluster final pictures but with what should've rightly been the great entertainer's career farewell - or anybody's career farewell, for that matter: LIMELIGHT.

A King in New York (May 27th and 28th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[A KING IN NEW YORK screens Friday May 27th at 9:25 p.m. and Saturday May 28th at 5 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque]

Review by Charles Cassady Jr.

Though far from successful, A KING IN NEW YORK, Charlie Chaplin's scattershot 1957 satire of American life, is a fascinating artifact. I remember it being heavily peddled on Super 8mm format in the great old Blackhawk Films catalogue I grew up receiving, and it always intrigued me that it seemed to be in the part of the Chaplin filmography that most critics didn't want to talk about, the duds. The flick is impossible to separate from the backstory: In real life Chaplin had literally fled the USA where he was once such a beloved entertainer, having been red-baited by McCarthy right-wingers and sleazy news columnists. He even won a libel suit against one of them, somebody called Hy Gardner. As a youth I read Hy Gardner's memoirs (yes, I had no friends), and let's just say I wonder if Glenn Beck is Hy Gardner thawed out of Limbaugh the Hutt's carbon-freeze. Just a theory.

Monsieur Verdoux (May 20th and 21st at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[MONSIEUR VERDOUX screens Friday May 20th at 9:45pm and Saturday May 21st at 5pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady Jr.

The NATURAL BORN KILLERS of 1947 starred Charlie Chaplin, if you can believe the McCarthyist boycotts, critical catcalls and opportunistic political speeches raised against the silent-slapstick idol when Chaplin appeared here in a startlingly different role, a hero serial murderer long before Dexter or Hannibal Lecter.

The Great Dictator (May 14th and 15th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[THE GREAT DICTATOR screens Saturday May 14th at 7:15 p.m. and Sunday May 15th at 3:45 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady Jr.

Viewers are used to short-lived satire like EPIC MOVIE or DISASTER MOVIE, which will look terribly out of date just months later. Not exactly great art. But THE GREAT DICTATOR is different. This is satire as art, with indeed silent-era icon Charlie Chaplin - in his first film with extensive dialogue - on a mission to raise an outcry over the screwed-up world of the 1930s (seemingly more screwed-up than today, if that's possible), attacking the international villains of the era, the Third Reich. Between WWI and WWII, a title tells us up front, insanity reigns and humanity "got kicked about a bit" in a suspiciously German-looking country called Tomania. 

Modern Times (May 6 at 7:30 p.m. and May 7 at 5:15 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

The finest, freshest comedy you can find is, no, not the HANGOVER sequel, sorry, but this vintage-1936 pantomime tour-de-force starring Charlie Chaplin. As with his previous CITY LIGHTS, Chaplin decided not to jump head-first into the sound-film era like so many of his compatriots did. But rather he made - perhaps symbolically, intentionally or not - the last great silent-film feature. There is brief dialogue, and Chaplin's first spoken words on film (which turn out to be nonsense lyrics improvised in a pseudo-European song), but most of this is sheer slapstick-silent virtuosity. Chaplin, billed simply as "a Worker," is a frazzled assembly-line drone who, in the opening moments, suffers a hilarious nervous breakdown on the job (this being the 1930s, it's comedy; today Charlie would just grab a gun and kill everyone). Fired, the Worker goes looking for employment in an absurdist, Depression-era world of shantytowns, waifs, night clubs full of rich folks, strikers, exploitation, discontent and huge machinery. No, wait, that was me in Cleveland, the other day. No, wait, that is Chaplin. Hard to tell, since we're both named Charles, among other regional similarities.

City Lights (April 29th and 30th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[CITY LIGHTS screens Friday April 29th at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday April 30th at 5:15 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady Jr.

These days a filmmaker gets a certain heroic acclaim by actually shooting on celluloid rather than ubiquitous digital video. But Charlie Chaplin, in 1931, was ahead/behind the technological curve more bravely than that. As an expert mime artist, his career built on nonverbal humor, Chaplin, with the luxury of owning his own studio and having total business-creative control, simply chose to ignore the existence of talkies altogether, and he kept making silents - albeit ones with recorded music (Chaplin’s own compositions) and brief, brilliant bursts of sound effects - eschewing the bulky microphone gear that severely restricted camera movement (ironically, perhaps, as Chaplin’s plainly-shot, set-bound business never indulged in fancy camerawork anyway). Chaplin had the popularity and artistry that allowed him to get away with it splendidly with the retro-technology. Me, I still used MS-DOS word processors long after Windows had taken over. And I’m this close to being a homeless tramp. Where’s my legend status?