The Cinefamily rep cinema has been doing a Chaplin series for the past couple of months (all the features and a bunch of silent shorts), and they capped it off last night with Modern Times – but first they played probably my all-time favorite Chaplin short, One A.M. Chaplin is closely associated with the Little Tramp character he played in pretty much all of his features from The Kid through The Great Dictator, but he also had another character in his shorts – a more dapper man-about-town wearing a suit that actually fit. That’s who he plays in One A.M., which is a one-character piece of Charlie, very drunk from a night out, trying to get into up to bed. It’s a fantastic exploration of how much physical comedy you can get out of essentially one person and two rooms. And it’s a lot.
Split up into two parts because of YouTube’s length limitations.
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