Charlot e la maschera di ferro

One of Charlie Chaplin's best short comedies, "The Idle Class" uses some of his favorite themes to very good effect. Charlie has a dual role, playing his usual 'tramp' character and also playing a rich idler. He thus sets up some identity confusion and also the kind of class contrasts that often set up some of Chaplin's best material. There are plenty of good gags in this one, and some memorable scenes, with the hilarious costume party sequence being especially good. This was one of Chaplin's last short comedies, and it is constructed very carefully, with excellent timing in the gags and in the plot. While in a much lighter vein than the full-length pictures he was then starting to make, it has the same level of craftsmanship and is very entertaining.

The post-war period, until the depression, must have been a class-conscious period in America, with some people very rich and most others (eg., farmers) poor. Charlie is the tramp character so he's poor. The plot is said to have been developed by him after he wandered around the prop room and spotted a bag of golf clubs. The story is certainly simple enough. Chaplain finds himself on a golf course and a series of gags ensue, after which he's chased by a cop and runs into a mansion where a costume party is in progress. He's taken for the host, who is a ringer. The other guests believe that the host's tramp outfit is simply a costume for the party. The real host, meanwhile, is encased in a suit of armor whose visor has dropped and jammed shut so no one can see his face. Charlie gets out of it okay and ends the movie by kicking the security guard in the pants and running away.

To me, the funniest gag, in a movie filled with funny gags, has to do with Charlie as the real host. (He has a double role.) The high-class host is a drunk. In his natty evening dress, but without trousers -- don't ask -- he comes home to find a note from his wife. "I am taking up other quarters until you rid yourself of your drinking habit," says the note. Charlie reads it and slowly turns away from the camera and bends over a table, his shoulders racked with sobs. What remorse! But, no. When he turns again towards the camera we see he is matter-of-factly shaking a cocktail mixer! It's called a "garden path" joke, and it efficiently explodes our expectations.

It's hard to imagine how Chaplin could have found any humor in alcohol use, given his family history. His girl friend at the time, Edna Purviance, was to become bloated from alcohol abuse too.

Well, as I say, though, the story isn't much. It's really two stories: (1) the golf course sequence, and (2) the mixed identities at the costume party. Both of them are good. There's more slapstick in the second part and probably more gag continuity in the first.

I saw this only a few hours ago and I'm still laughing, enough to be compelled to add a description of one more joke. On the golf course, Charlie has hit a ball that lands in the open mouth of a fat man asleep on his back. As the fellow snores, the white ball appears and disappears in his mouth. How does Charlie manage to hit the ball again? He steps on the guy's belly, the ball pops a few feet up in the air, and he hits it in mid air using his golf club like a baseball bat. If the joke loses something in the course of its transposition into print, well, blame it on Charlie's "genius," in the original sense.

It's pretty consistently funny.

A great scene in the film is when the HUSBAND has his back to the screen so you can't tell when he is actually doing. To some it looks like he is crying until he turns around to face the camera. In fact, the drunk HUSBAND is mixing himself a martini in his glass shaker. Just one of many situations where Chaplin plays with the audience.

This Chaplin short opens promising enough with elegant Edna Purviance arriving at the station tres elegante simultaneously with The Tramp falling out of a dust bin setting the stage for the his entrance into high society. But first he must put in a round of golf. While he brings his clubs he neglects to bring a ball. Meanwhile Edna's alchholic husband, also played by Chaplin forgets to pick her as well as his pants up.

This Chaplin lacks the energy and tightness of his usual short. Playing dual roles he comes up with some excellent bits making nice use of the sport of golf but the scene which starts promisingly enough quickly becomes disjointed and overlong. The masquerade ball where his identity is mistaken for Purviance's husband also has some fun moments as Charlie attempts to explain but a scene with his other character stuck in a knights armored helmet (something Peter Sellers would refine forty years in the future) goes on too long interrupting Charlie who works best alone though the films final seconds has a subversive extra that should elicit joy from the masses.

While Charlie Chaplin's little tramp persona has been famous worldwide for nearly a century, a character he created back in his musical hall days is less well-known. That character was the alcoholic aristocrat. Here, in the Idle Class, he makes his final appearance, and his only one opposite the tramp, in a mistaken identity comedy that prefigures Chaplin talkie The Great Dictator.

In spite of this being his swansong, the posh drunk's personality is more fully fleshed out here than ever before, as if Chaplin was eking the utmost out of the character before abandoning him. Chaplin also involves him in gags of a type he did not often do; the pull-back-and-reveal joke, like the shot revealing he is wearing no trousers, or the elaborate arrangement of people and props as he tries to conceal it from the people around him. These jokes are hilarious, but they are not typical Chaplin – they draw too much attention to the artifice of it all, and threatens to detract from the humanity of the characters, which is why he would never have used such gags with the little tramp.

Speaking of the little tramp, he is far from absent in The Idle Class, and there is plenty of his kind of humour here. He gets a great entrance, emerging from a little hatch on the underside of a train after the grand arrival of an assortment of toffs. There are some supremely confident gags on a golf course, where in the classic style of the Mutual shorts the focus is upon the trail of chaos that the tramp leaves behind him. For example, we see Charlie sauntering into the distance while in centre-screen his two fellow golfers get into a fight over a misunderstanding he has caused. In a following shot only his legs appear, as he stomps on a straw hat in one corner of the screen, causing yet more mayhem. Charlie is not shown directly, but it is his personality and his influence on the comedy you remember. Compare that to the scenes of the wealthy drunkard, in which Chaplin is always on screen because the character is weaker and requires our constant attention to work.

So, an odd little Chaplin short, featuring much material of a kind he would not return to again. And yet it is very effective and funny, even when it wasn't in a mode that suited him. As if to prove the value of the kind of gags we see in The Idle Class, they went to live on in the work of his fellow silent comics. Whether the influence of this picture was significant or not, those pull-back-and-reveal gags are used to great effect in Harold Lloyd's films, while those elaborately staged sight-gags were of course a staple for Buster Keaton.

All of which heralds the timely arrival of that all-important statistic – Number of kicks up the arse: 7 (2 for, 4 against, 1 other).