Laughing Gas

A chaotic early Chaplin film for Keystone, and as with most of his movies for Mack Sennett's studio, it's not exactly subtle. The little comic spends most of his time throwing bricks and kicking arses, and it's clear that everyone involved was winging it. There are a few laughs, and the action is too frantic to get boring.

Am a big fan of Charlie Chaplin, have been for over a decade now. Many films and shorts of his are very good to masterpiece, and like many others consider him a comedy genius and one of film's most important and influential directors.

He did do better than 'Laughing Gas', still made very early on in his career where he was still finding his feet and not fully formed what he became famous for. Can understand why the Keystone period suffered from not being as best remembered or highly remembered than his later efforts, but they are mainly decent and important in their own right. 'Laughing Gas' is a long way from a career high, but has a lot of nice things about it and is to me one of the better efforts in the 1914 Keystone batch.

'Laughing Gas' is not as hilarious, charming or touching as his later work and some other shorts in the same period. The story is flimsy and the production values not as audacious. Occasionally, things feel a little scrappy and confused.

For someone who was still relatively new to the film industry and had literally just moved on from their stage background, 'Laughing Gas' is not bad at all.

While not audacious, the film hardly looks ugly, is more than competently directed and is appealingly played. Chaplin looks comfortable for so early on and shows his stage expertise while opening it up that it doesn't become stagy or repetitive shtick.

Although the humour, charm and emotion was done even better and became more refined later, 'Laughing Gas' is humorous, sweet and easy to like, though the emotion is not quite there. It moves quickly and doesn't feel too long or short.

Overall, pretty decent. 6/10 Bethany Cox

I think Chaplin is over rated because i have saw couple of movies but none of his act entertained me. I was constantly looking at watch to when it will end. But i must say that this was somewhat better than his films i watched earlier. But my suggestion is avoid it if you can. Do something fruitful. This is my 1st review. The sole purpose of writing the review is to save your time as i havewasted mine.

A so-so Chaplin entry where the material is not as good as it should be. The interaction with Chaplin and the pretty dental patient is good, but the film as a whole is crying out for better slapstick. 6 out of 10 stars.

I've seen quite a few Chaplin shorts from early in his career and I've noticed that his early stuff (done for Keystone Studios) is pretty dreadful stuff. Unlike his wonderful full-length films from the 20s and 30s, the films from 1914-1915 are incredibly poorly made--having no script but only vague instructions from the director. In most cases, the films had almost no plot and degenerated to people punching and kicking each other.

This short is quite a bit better than the norm. While at times the plot degenerates to a lot of punching and kicking for absolutely no reason at all, the film also has a few decent laughs as Charlie pretends to be a dentist. Nothing outstandingly funny, but compared to the generally boring stuff he did for the studio, it's a big improvement.