Manicheus

Fantastic film essay and a jarring frree-jazz soundtrack makes for a great time travel. Probably closer to 7 stars than 6, in my book...

Above all else, Charlot was the product of his era. This film best exemplifies his shortcomings. It's actually (unfortunately) a double handicapp: his music hall genius for gag humor has, naturally, dissipated in his talkies. But other handicap, the one seldom if ever discussed, is that - in retrospect of most of his oeuvre - Charlot has been primarily a music hall comedian. Even in his most succesful films, the Keystone comedies and later the great classics such as my favorite "The Goldrush", Charlot was never able to use the film medium in a sense that a handful of true cinematic filmamakers (Griffith, Von Stroheim, Orson Welles)used it even in Hollywood. That is not to mention the most creative film-makers of France (Gance, Vigo, Bunuel), Germany (Murnau, Lang), Scandinavia (Dreyer, Sjoberg) or particularly Russia (the Soviet avant-garde). This, then, is a touching film but like near everything else of Chaplin's lacks the understanding of the film medium itself. It bespeaks his vaudeville background and in a sense it is a lovely, if depressing tribute to the vanished world of the British music halls.