Une journée de plaisir

Chaplin is married with a couple kids. They appear to be 10-12 years old or so. Once they get the car started, a major task, they head off to a pier where they will get on an excursion boat. The sign says, children in arms are free, so he carries these two kids onto the boat. From there on things don't go well. Thee is seasickness, fist fighting, and a misunderstanding husband. Upon there return, there is a hilarious series of events at an intersection. No Academy Award her, but non stop craziness.

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.

This is a good short comedy, and it has a bit of a different feel to it than most of Chaplin's shorts. Instead of his familiar tramp character or some other underdog, this time Charlie is a family man taking everyone out for a day of fun, along with some misadventures on the way there and back. There isn't much of Chaplin's usual social commentary, as it focuses instead on trying to get as much mileage as possible out of a few basic gags. Most of the time this works pretty well, although it bogs down a bit in the middle when a couple of the gags start to wear rather thin. Among other things, it's interesting in that the approach this time - the story line, and especially the milking each gag for all it is worth - is what you would expect from Laurel and Hardy, rather than from Chaplin. Overall, it's amusing and interesting, and worth a look.

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.

"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.