Une journée de plaisir

A DAY'S PLEASURE is a pleasure to see. It's not on the same level as Chaplin's A DOG'S LIFE or SHOULDER ARMS, but it might be a step above SUNNYSIDE. It really is funny. Chaplin plays a married man. First, he has a time trying to get his car started, then has a load of mishaps aboard a pleasure cruise ship. Finally, the traffic jam sequence is a laugh riot. The usual Chaplin players-Edna Purviance, Tom Wilson, Henry Bergman, Albert Austin, Loyal Underwood, even Jackie Coogan-are all as great as usual. A DAY'S PLEASURE is worth seeing if you're a Chaplin fan. For comedy lovers alone, it might not be as big a treat. Either way, it's funny.

It's short and sweet, but Chaplin is in full swing here with his physical comedy and in projecting a screen presence that commands attention. The scenes on the boat on this "day out" are pretty funny, starting from when he boards in a hurry over a face down woman who has her arms stretched out to reach the boat and her toes gripping the dock. The dance with the boat rocking wildly, the guests in various stages of sea sickness, the boxing match Charlie has a guy much bigger than him (initially some blows to the guy's backside as he leans over the railing) ... it's all pretty silly, but highly entertaining. Not everything works and it feels a little fragmentary, but I liked it. I wish it had been fleshed out a little more.

More like a day with the family, it appears that The Tramp is married with children. Here, he spends the day with the family as he drives them to and from the boat ride. While the movie deals with situation after situation that the 'Tramp's' get themselves involved in, the majority of the movie takes place on the boat ride. It is here where Chaplin uses some early fantasy camera work to make the boat ride less enjoyable than it really is. Back and forth Chaplin sways the camera from left to right, making the boat look like it is being rocked back and forth by the ocean waves. A nice little comedy with a minor blooper in the background. In the start of the movie when Chaplin is trying to start the car, if you look behind in the open street you will see a man walking down the sidewalk toward the car. He stops half way when he sees that there is a camera and that they are shooting a movie. He quickly stops and turns around to walk out of the shot. Before he does, he stops again and looks back to get one final look. He then hurries off to get out of the shot.

I have heard that Chaplin rushed to produce A Day's Pleasure because the studio was demanding product while he was working on The Kid, but I have to disagree that it is a below-average comedy. It is a little different from the fare that we have come to expect from him in his short comedies, but I think this is as much a reflection of his desire to do something different as it is of the fact that he rushed through the production to satisfy the studio while he made another film, which he was more than likely more interested in.

It should be kept in mind that Chaplin had been involved in the production of nearly 100 short silent comedies by the time A Day's Pleasure came around, so I can forgive him a little distraction in it's production. If nothing else, I find the film to be particularly interesting, especially at the beginning, because the building that Chaplin and the family leave from at the opening of the film is Chaplin's office in Los Angeles, where I live. It's hard to mistake those mountains in the background!

One thing that I found to be interesting is that at one point in the opening sequence, a man walks into the frame in the background, and the trivia on the IMDb claims that he was most likely a studio employee, which seems like a preposterous notion, since the man not only walks right into the frame during shooting, but also pauses to see what's going on after he turns back. If he was a studio employee, it must have been his first day!

Also of some note is a rather disturbing portrayal of the black characters. Granted, 1919 was a very different time than now, but like Hitchcock's The Ring, which featured a sadly slave-like black man grinning gleefully as dirty, backwards-looking white people dunked him in a tub of water, A Day's Pleasure features a band of black musicians which doesn't say anything good about Chaplin's idea of black people (what is the meaning of "Three minds with but a single thought?").

While I agree that some of the material is a little different from many of Chaplin's other short films, the sequences here are certainly not without merit, particularly a hilarious bit with an uncooperative deck chair midway through the film. Some of the behavior of Chaplin and his other actors in the film is a little odd (at one point the family is on a crowded passenger ship on which everyone seems to be falling asleep on their feet in the middle of the day), but I should think that Chaplin made a graceful exit from the short silent comedy, if not an eventful one.

With a fun day ahead of them, a man, his wife and two young sons load up the car and prepare to head out. After some significant problems actually getting the car to go, they board the pleasure boat for an exhausting but fun voyage. And f course what fun family outing would be complete without traffic chaos to close it out? I've not actually watched that many Charlie Chaplin films you know. I can think of a handful off the top of my head that I saw a year or so ago but other than that not really and certainly I'm remiss in seeing some of his classic films. Fortunately an arts channel recently gave me a full afternoon to catch up, showing several classic film as well as some shorts – one of which was this. A Day's Pleasure takes a couple of situations to make for a family outing and produces some genuinely funny moments out of them. Sad to say that the film is not funnier but when I wasn't actually laughing (which was the majority) it was still amusing.

This is almost entirely down to Chaplin himself, who did everything but make the tea in this film according to the credits. Physically he has great comic movement and just the sight of him coming down the steps at the start warmed me. Not all the routines are that funny but all of them are well delivered by him, while the supporting cast of Wilson, Bergman and others all do well. The end result is an amusing short film that is consistently amusing with a few good laughs. Modern viewers not interested to begin with won't be won over but regardless it is amusing and has stood up well in terms of entertainment value.