The Pilgrim. 1923. USA. Written and directed by Charles Chaplin. With Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Sydney Chaplin, Mai Wells. North American premiere. Silent, with score by Chaplin recorded in 1959 for The Chaplin Revue at Shepperton Studios. 46 min.
One of the cleverest of Charlie Chaplin’s shorts (or, more accurately, featurettes), shot in record speed to fulfill his First National contract, The Pilgrim makes short work of smalltown pieties—and according to historian Brian Cady, even the Ku Klux Klan took umbrage. As the Tramp escapes prison disguised as a newly arrived pastor in Devil’s Gulch, Texas, his pantomime sermon of the David and Goliath story alone is worth the price of admission. In fact, Chaplin intended the film as a comical homage to the Westerns of William S. Hart, and the inspired climax at the US-Mexican border takes on a whole new meaning in today’s climate of anti-immigrant nativism.
4K digital restoration by Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata Laboratory with material supplied by Roy Export SAS, Paris, as part of the Chaplin Project; courtesy Janus Films.
Sherlock Jr. 1924. USA. Directed by Buster Keaton. Screenplay by Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez, Joe Mitchell. With Keaton, Kathryn McGuire, Joe Keaton. Silent, with musical accompaniment. 47 min.
When the floor sweeper and projectionist of a local cinema falls asleep on the job, he imagines he’s become a crack detective in a race against time to rescue his kidnapped sweetheart and her purloined watch. Sherlock Jr. is one of Buster Keaton’s most brilliantly crafted pieces of montage, a comical collision of the physical and the cerebral, the mechanical and the human, that the Surrealists proudly claimed as one of their own. Of this ultimate movie Dream-Work, the great Walter Kerr observes, “In his dazzling film-within-a-film Keaton illustrates basic theories of continuity and cutting more vividly and with greater precision than theorists themselves have ever been able to do. But the analysis is not in Keaton’s head. It is in the film, he worked only with the thing itself, creating what amounts to theory out of his body, his camera, his fingers, a pair of scissors.”
4K digital restoration courtesy Lobster Films.