The Circus
Short description
Charlie Chaplin's The Circus follows the Tramp as he wanders into a traveling carnival and is mistaken for a pickpocket. Fleeing the police, he stumbles onto the circus ring in the middle of a performance and accidentally makes the audience laugh. The struggling circus owner hires him, first as a clown and then as a prop handler whose clumsiness turns into a comedy act. The Tramp falls for the owner's stepdaughter, a rider in the show, and tries to protect her from the proprietor's harsh treatment, though her heart belongs to a tightrope walker. Much of the comedy comes from his efforts around the big top, including a perilous walk on the high wire.
The film is the fifteenth of the twenty-two features Chaplin directed, arriving between The Gold Rush and City Lights. He wrote, produced and directed it, and plays the lead, with Al Ernest Garcia as the circus proprietor, Merna Kennedy as the rider, Harry Crocker as the rope walker and Henry Bergman among the supporting players. It was made for United Artists and Charles Chaplin Productions on a reported budget of nine million dollars, a considerable sum for its time, and runs seventy-two minutes.
On IMDb it holds 8.1 from around 38,000 votes, while on TMDB it has 7.9 from roughly 920 votes. A critics' rating of 8.7 from thirty reviews places it above both audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Before filming began, Charles Chaplin (1889-1977) practiced walking the tightrope for weeks. He performed on a rope stretched 13 meters above the ground. Unfortunately, the footage was lost because the negatives were scratched during film processing, and the scene had to be reshot. Chaplin himself believed the second take was worse than the first.
- Chaplin did over 200 takes of the scenes with lions, and in many of these scenes he actually entered the cage with the predators. So the fear on his face was completely genuine.
- Work on the film had to be postponed for almost a year due to several incidents: a fire at the studio, Chaplin's scandalous divorce, a dispute with the US tax authorities, technical problems with the laboratory that resulted in the loss of four weeks of footage, and a hurricane that destroyed the circus tent. All of this led to a three-year gap between the release of Chaplin's previous film ("The Gold Rush", 1925) and this one.
- Although Chaplin was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor, the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decided to honor him separately and presented him with a special honorary award with the citation "For versatility and genius in acting, writing, directing and producing The Circus."
- The scene where Chaplin is bitten by monkeys was an accident. The cage opened accidentally, and the enraged animals attacked the actor. Charlie was in shock for the first few seconds (which is visible), but then he just shouted: "Don't stop filming!"
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