Leichte Straße

Easy Street starts with Charlie with as a poor, destitute tramp. After attending a storefront revival service, and meeting the always delightful Edna Purviance, he decides to turn his life around. He quickly gets a job as a policeman and he finds himself assigned to Easy Street, the worst neighborhood in the city ruled by tough Eric Campbell. Using his own unorthodox tactics, Charlie eventually subdues Eric and neighborhood and they all live happily ever after.

Easy Street was one of the twelve films Chaplin made for Mutual. Mutual gave Chaplin unprecedented freedom and responded by giving them, overall, twelve of the best comedy shorts ever made. Easy Street is easily the best of them. It is a very funny short. This is the film I show when I want to introduce someone to Chaplin or silent films in general. The gags are inventive, and they are extremely well-played by his regular company of Mutual performers. Chaplin himself is at his best in this film, but where would he be without Eric Campbell, the best heavy he ever played against. (Sadly, Campbell would die in a car accident after the completion of the Mutual comedies. His loss would be felt in the First National comedies, which rarely reached the heights of the best Mutual work.)

But there is more to Easy Street than laughs. It is unusually mature for a silent comedy of its period. Chaplin usually presented his tramp character as a happy-go-lucky figure - a vagabond by choice, not circumstance. This film starts with the tramp as a down-and-out character, much in need of the new beginning he gets at the mission. In perhaps his first attempt at social commentary, Chaplin provides an unblinking view of ills of the society of the time. The most graphic example is the drug addict shooting up with a needle. People often have a misconception of silent comedies being simply quaint. That isn't quaint.

This is a must see.

Charlie Chaplin remembered the rough and tumble neighborhoods he grew up in and the moral anchors the scattered Christian missionaries provided for the indigent residing in those rough boroughs of London.

He brings law and order into his January 1917's "Easy Street," in his attempt to tame those bullies he was so familiar with growing up. Chaplin, after attending a session at a missionary, decides on applying for a police position. Once he gets badged, he's patrolling one of the meanest streets in the city. Actor Eric Campbell's character is the toughest of a tough lot, to which Chaplin sets out involuntarily to control the beast. A street gas light proves to be the comedian's best weapon; it was while filming this scene the lamppost, bent in the middle, fell on Chaplin, requiring him to be rushed to the hospital.

Chaplin used the bookends of the missionaries, one in the beginning and another, a newly-constructed missionary in the tough neighborhood, to convey the movie's message. All the reformed neighborhood thugs, including Campbell, are dressed up to go to service. Here, Chaplin is making an overt statement on the power of redemption.

Easy Street (1917) : Brief Review -

Charlie Chaplin as a Heroic Cop inventing useful cliches on "Tough Street". That's Enough! The toughest beat for a cop is named 'Easy Street'. This is a good metaphor even after 104 years, don't you agree? Or haven't you seen the similar stuff in at least one film in your life which was of course made years after East Street. Well, that's called inventing cliches. Hollywood was getting involved in almost every genre in the 10s decade but Comedy wasn't really explored by the mid 10s. Chaplin did the job alongside Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton by the end of the 10s decade and continued the same in the 20s decade too. We owe them a lot for that. Easy Street is an action-comedy, an unknown genre then but a popular one Today. I live in India, i belong to Bollywood Industry so this Action-Comedy Genre is well known, and well in demand which makes this film a very important affair for me. And like i said, Chaplin discovered useful cliches which i have seen in almost every cop film belonging to action-comedy genre in Hollywood as well Bollywood. A reformed tramp becomes a police constable who must fight a huge thug who dominates an inner city street. Chaplin again does some innovative acrobatics and brings laughter but most importantly it has that linear equation formed correctly. Comedy stunts are not easy in any era, whether it was 1917 or 2021, this segment always has to have sense which obviously comes from proper management. Here, that linear equation, that well planned cat and mouse game in pacy line-up makes it looks sensible and so does extremely funny. Eric Campbell can be seen doing all his trademarks here. Overall, Easy Street is short and sweet and believe me watching Chaplin in Cop's avatar is some pleasant thing for sure. Enjoy the original resource of those cliches you have been enjoying for years.

RATING - 7/10*

By - #samthebestest.

Easy Street is one of the first films that really solidified Chaplin's intentions to continue to represent the poorer people of society. In this film, Chaplin's common rich vs. poor theme is especially prevalent in the way that the predicament of the poor is presented, and especially given the fact that, at this point in his career, Chaplin was earning roughly $10,000 a week.

Although this is one of Chaplin's best short films, it is strange that in the church near the beginning of the film, he turns the hymn book upside down as though he can't read, but then he is soon able to read the help wanted sign at the police station. At any rate, after he leaves the church, having found Jesus, he finds the streets seething with comical violence. He sees that the police are looking to hire, and his hesitant entrance into the police station is one of the funniest parts of the entire film.

Clearly, it's amusing enough to see the tramp in a policeman's uniform, but the way that he and the bully that seems to have claimed ownership of Easy Street interact is also some classic comedy. The irony in this film is that Charlie is trying to get this huge guy under control so that he will stop terrorizing the people, but then when he does, in fact, defeat him, the people are afraid of HIM. As is almost always the case when Charlie performs some heroism in his films (usually inadvertently), he acts like it was no big deal when people arrive (see the scene in The Gold Rush when Jack gets knocked out by a falling clock, and Charlie thought that he had done it).

The part that most clearly represents Charlie's sympathy for the poor in this film is the scene when he catches the woman stealing from the sleeping street vendor. At first, it seems that he is going to turn her in, but he is so heartbroken that he runs to the street vendor (who is still asleep), and steals more food for the woman, and then encourages her to hurry off before the vendor wakes up and realizes what has happened.

This rich vs. poor theme is one of the many that traverses a good majority of Chaplin's career, but there are many other things that can be seen in his later films, like the love interest element of The Bank that can be seen in a very similar form later in City Lights. In this film, there is a short sequence where Charlie sits on a hypodermic needle that had been used by a man to shoot up with (something like that wouldn't be quite as funny if it was done today), and his reaction to the small dose of the drug is almost exactly the same as that in Modern Times, when he pours cocaine onto his food, thinking it's salt.

Easy Street is an entertaining and heartwarming story in many ways, and the ending leaves the feeling that something has really been accomplished in the film. As Charlie calmly walks the sidewalks in his policeman's uniform, everyone on the street is orderly and well dressed, and even the bully tips his hat to Charlie as he walks by. Unfortunately, very few people watch Chaplin's films anymore, but even if only a few are watched, this should definitely be one of them.

This is the one in which Chaplin gets a job as a policemen and is given the prime task of policing Easy Street, a notorious hotspot of vice and crime, from which the police are usually wheeled back to the station in a wheelbarrow. Eric Campbell, often seen in Chaplin films as an upper-class braggart with an elaborate beard here plays a clean-shaven bully who rules the street with an iron fist, and it's not long before Chaplin has to go head to head with him.

This one is pretty funny. The street has such a reputation that even an 8-year-old kid can scare the police. To defeat Campbell's bully, Chaplin has to trap his head in the gas lamp of a suspiciously rubbery lamppost. One aspect of the film that looks quite bizarre today is the way that one character who is clearly a junkie is portrayed as a figure of fun.