A Day's Pleasure

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.

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.

Chaplin's shorts are beginning to look very thin - aesthetically, philosophically, comically - especially in comparison to Buster Keaton's melancholy fantasies, but A DAY'S PLEASURE has much to recommend it. Usually the Little Tramp - a disruptive rebel - Charlie is a model bourgeois here, with family and modern appurtenances. Foreshadowings of Bunuel and Godard as the family take a trip, and adverse circumstances force worst bourgeois instincts to surface: especially savage violence. Ship sequence hilarious, especially the woman with pram who dives for an embarking boat.

"A Day's Pleasure" has a story and plot. In this one, Charlie Chaplin plays a family man, and they have a day of misadventures beginning with some trouble starting their automobile, then sea sickness on a cruise and, finally, they have difficulties passing a traffic crossing. The problem with the story and plot isn't that it's simple or episodic; the problem is that it's uncharacteristic of Chaplin. It would be a completely acceptable, perhaps even above average, two-reeler for any lesser comedian. Although everyone was a lesser comedian (at least in 1919), I mean those who didn't rise above these kinds of slapstick shorts.

Those like Laurel and Hardy would become masters of them, but films such as "A Day's Pleasure" were no longer the best Chaplin could do. He was already working on "The Kid", and it seems he wasn't very interested in shorter and simpler films anymore. First National demanded product, however, and so Chaplin rushed and forced out "A Day's Pleasure". And, it shows.

This is still pleasant to watch (it'd have been difficult to make this kind of picture unpleasant), and one may find plenty of laughs in it, but Chaplin was aiming, by now, for more than humor, and he could also be a lot funnier. His breakthrough, "The Kid", reflects that.