Charlot brocanteur

"The Pawnshop" is a pretty good Charlie Chaplin comedy, with some routine stretches but also some very good slapstick. It features Charlie as an assistant in a pawnshop, engaged in a heated rivalry with another employee, trying to stay on the good side of the boss and the boss's pretty daughter, and occasionally waiting on a customer. The beginning has some very funny moments, with some slapstick that makes good use of the props, which include a feather duster and a ladder. There is a funny finale with Eric Campbell - one of Chaplin's best regular supporting players - playing a thief. The parts in between have some good moments, too, but they overdo it a bit with Charlie's fights with the other shop assistant. Overall, this is an average short feature for Chaplin, which means it is pretty good by most other standards.

Am a big fan of Charlie Chaplin, have been for over a decade now. Many films and shorts of his are very good to masterpiece, and like many others consider him a comedy genius and one of film's most important and influential directors.

From his post-Essanay period after leaving Keystone, 'Pawnshop' is not one of his very best but is one of his best early efforts and among the better short films of his. It shows a noticeable step up in quality though from his Keystone period, where he was still evolving and in the infancy of his long career, from 1914, The Essanay and Mutual periods were something of Chaplin's adolescence period where his style had been found and starting to settle. Something that can be seen in the more than worthwhile 'The Pawnshop'.

The story is more discernible than usual and is never dull, but is sometimes a bit too busy and manic and flimsy in others.

On the other hand, 'The Pawnshop' looks pretty good, not incredible but it was obvious that Chaplin was taking more time with his work and not churning out countless shorts in the same year of very variable success like he did with Keystone. Appreciate the importance of his Keystone period and there is some good stuff he did there, but the more mature and careful quality seen here and later on is obvious.

While not one of his most hilarious or touching, 'The Pawnshop' is still very funny with some clever, entertaining and well-timed slapstick, didn't mind that the pathos wasn't there as it was not the right kind of story. It moves quickly and there is no dullness in sight. The clock scene is one of the most uproariously funny and best scenes of any of Charlie early career output.

Chaplin directs more than competently, if not quite cinematic genius standard yet. He also, as usual, gives an amusing and expressive performance and at clear ease with the physicality of the role. The supporting cast acquit themselves well, particularly the charming regular leading lady Edna Purviance.

Overall, very enjoyable. 8/10 Bethany Cox

I've seen about 15 early shorts by Chaplin so far and this is definately in the top 5. Charlie works at a pawnshop and has to deal with several customers, his boss and ultimately a thief. But, once again, he saves the day.

Great slapstick early on with the 'ladder-scene' and later on with what seems to be a cello or contra-bass (I know nothing of those sort of things), hitting people in the face. There's also a very funny scene with an alarm-clock, which Charlie 'fixes', but not quite!

Although probably not up there with The Adventurer (my favorite short so far) or The Tramp, this is pretty funny stuff, even by Chaplins standards. Final score: 8/10.

This is definitely one of Chaplin's top 5 or 6 shorts. The part with Albert Austin and the clock is just so hilarious, and I really like the end of that bit where the drunk gets pushed down, just because it makes no sense.

I think this is the exact point in Chaplin's oeuvre in which he matured to the point in which he could make masterpieces. Don't get me wrong I like many of his earlier shorts, but everything he did from this point on could be argued as a masterpiece of comic cinema.

It is true that there isn't a great amount of pathos in this one, but I like the fact that there a just so many ridiculous situations that come one after the other. A+ grade.

A truly great comedian doesn't sit around dreaming up funny situations – they take a look at what is around them and make something funny out of it. This is what stand-up comics do when they make satire out of anecdotes from their own life or surroundings. And in another way this is what Charlie Chaplin does in a picture like The Pawnshop, where he takes a realistic setting that could appear in any straight drama (or, indeed, the real world) and simply plays around with the props and conventions of the environment.

The Pawnshop is known as one of Chaplin's greatest "prop" pictures, in which he manages to sustain an entire twenty-five minute short just through messing around with the bric-a-brac and getting in the way of his co-workers. Still, what he is doing is really quite simple. He is merely very inventive at thinking up mismatches between an item and its purpose – for example using a mangle to dry crockery or absent-mindedly cleaning a violin with a soapy cloth. Like all the best comedians, Chaplin's genius lies in his timing and positioning. He never lets any routine run for too long and become boring or repetitive. He places gags where they will have the most impact – such as the spraying of crumbs when listening to the "sad story", which he does towards the end of the sequence to diffuse the over-the-top, hammy build-up. For a piece like the well-known "clock dissection", he is able to play it slowly in just two long shots because the material has plenty of potential, and he can keep the audience wondering just how far it will go.

Watching The Pawnshop, I was struck by how much more editing there now is in Chaplin's pictures. His earlier style was to keep everything in unbroken takes and let the comedy unfold naturally, but now he is throwing in a lot of angle changes and reaction shots (which is in any case consistent with how cinema was developing at this time). However he still preserves the flow of the picture by making sure the various edits complement each other. For example, in one of Charlie's fights with John Rand, we cut over to Henry Bergman gesticulating angrily at the woman with the goldfish bowl – so the pace of movement in the two shots is consistent. In an earlier fight, he throws in a couple of shots of Edna Purviance hearing the brawl from the next room. These are in mid-shot and last only a split second, thus having a snappy feel and not breaking the tempo of the fight. This is proper film-making technique in the service of comedy.

Genius as he was, where would Chaplin have been without his fine supporting cast? The Pawnshop contains some of his regular co-stars at their best, including the debut of the reliable Henry Bergman. Chaplin collected generic stock characters, and Bergman is his archetypal Jolly Fat Man. Look at the way Bergman falls – his feet go one way, his head another, while the centre of his bulk goes straight down. John Rand is great as the pompous and indignant antagonist, and he manages to match Charlie for stance and timing as he suddenly dives back to work whenever the boss walks in. There's also one the best appearances of gangly Albert Austin, whose concerned but naively trusting expression really adds to the clock dissection, making the build-up seem funnier by contrast because his face stays the same regardless of how drastic the things Charlie does to his clock are. The appearances of Eric Campbell and Edna Purviance are slightly shorter than usual, but nonetheless worthy.

Which brings us hurtling towards that all-important statistic – Number of kicks up the arse: 7 (7 against)