Charlot s'évade

Charlie Chaplin made a dozen short films for Mutual Films and this is one of them. It's a very good film, but also very odd because the Little Tramp is in this case the Little Jail Bird! Charlie playing an escaped prisoner is not that unusual in his early years, but those used to the sweeter character he played in his full-length films won't really recognize this characterization.

Despite being a wanted man, Charlie seems pretty decent as he helps several people who fall into the sea. As a result of his efforts, he is taken back to the home of one of the rich people he saved. When he awakens, he thinks, initially, he's in prison. But, once he realizes where he is, he relaxes and has a good time--until the police arrive and a series of mad dashes and chases occur--much like the very beginning of the film.

Cute, fun and, all in all, pretty insignificant fare from Chaplin.

I've seen The Adventurer well over a dozen times and each time it is just as funny as the time before. I repeatedly find myself thinking during the first scenes (where Charlie is on the beach and on the lamb from the police) that those scenes must be the high of the movie and as such that the movie will progessively sink from the close of those scenes on. Yet each time I watch the film I am pleasantly refreshed to the fact that the whole film is equally great.

Chaplin is excellent in the film, and his frequent foil in the early movies, Eric Campbell, is also perhaps at his best.

This film is well worth watching (several times).

Not all the early Chaplin films are classics, but this one is. The best bits are the chasing scenes, especially at the beginning (Charlie escaping from prison) and in the middle. The way Chaplin makes excellent and varying use of a humble lampshade should put many modern filmmakers with their inflated budgets to shame.

In The Adventurer, Charlie plays an escaped convict who briefly manages to enjoy the good life after rescuing a drowning rich woman before the police find him again.

The Adventurer is the last of Chaplin's twelve films for the Mutual Company. Lacking any attempt at the pathos and social commentary that Chaplin injected in some of his previous Mutual shorts, this chase comedy almost appears to be a throwback to his rough-and-tumble roots at Keystone. However, there is one major difference, this film much funnier than anything did at Keystone. While I do not consider this to be his best short, it is arguably his funniest. The chases that bookend the film are hilarious. The middle is hilarious too. The film is a laugh fest through and through. If this film doesn't put a smile on your face, check your pulse.

When I was a young boy (about five years old), my parents couldn't afford a TV and, in order to give me entertainment, my dad bought a second hand silent cine projector and showed me some silent westerns (which I have all but forgotten) and - oh joy, oh bliss - the Essanay and Mutual Chaplin films. The greatest of these - by a long way, in my estimation is 'The Adventurer' indeed, it is one of the very few short films worthy of the term 'masterpiece'.

The Adventurer is a sonata on the number 3. There are three main locations - the beach, the pier and the house. The cliff location in the beach scene is triangular, Charlie and his two pursuers make an hilarious trio, with every combination of characters and apexes of the triangle being explored...

Then we go onto the pier... There we have three sub-locations - the top of the pier, the car and the sea. Charlie explores all of these and then moves onto the house.

Here we also have three locations - upstairs, downstairs and the terrace. You can see dozens of other 'threes' in the film, but the coda, in which Charlie is chased three times round the set is like the delirious coda to Mozart's 41st Symphony when the orchestra seem to take off. There is noting like it in all cinema.

Of course I had no idea about all this subtlety when I was a kid, I just looked and laughed in wonder and said with a pleading thrill in my voice.... 'Play it again, Dad.'

Without these wonderful Chaplin films, I doubt that I would have given my life to the cinema for the last fifty years.