StunnaKrypto Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Sameer Callahan It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Tom Gooderson-A'Court Behind the Screen stars Charlie Chaplin as a stagehand on a movie set. Chaplin is overworked and under-appreciated and his boss (Eric Campbell) spends most of the time asleep, leaving Chaplin to do the heavy lifting. Meanwhile a young woman (Edna Purviance) is trying to get her big break as an actress but is turned down so dresses up as a male stagehand in order to have at least some involvement in the movies. At the same time the fellow stagehands go on strike for being woken up by a studio boss and plot their revenge… This isn't one of the funniest Mutual shorts but it certainly has one of the better plots. It's multi layered and features side plot as well as the main narrative. It is also an opportunity to see behind the scenes of an early movie set in much the same way as His New Job, Chaplin's first film for Essanay a year earlier. What the film is most famous for now though is its forthright joke about homosexuality, a subject which was barely mentioned in cinema for another fifty years.The scene in question comes late on when Chaplin discovers that the new stagehand is actually a woman. In a cute scene, Chaplin sneaks a couple of pecks on the lips. The start of a romantic relationship is interrupted though by the appearance of Eric Campbell who not knowing Edna Purviance is a woman, believes the two hands to be gay men. He starts prancing around in an effeminate way which today feels quite offensive. The fact that homosexuality was even mentioned though, no matter how insignificantly, was very bold. The same scene also features probably the defining image of the film, Chaplin's and Purviance's faces squished together, looking forward towards the camera, Chaplin with a trademark cheeky grin.In terms of comedy, the film is a little short. There are of course funny moments which include a use of a trap door and a pie throwing finale. For me the funniest scene came when the stagehands were eating lunch. Chaplin was sat next to a man eating onions and to escape the smell put on a knights helmet, lifting the visor briefly to stuff bread into his mouth. During the same meal Chaplin tries to steal the meat which the same man is eating and when discovered, pretends to be a begging dog. There is plenty of slapstick to be found here also with large props producing most of the laughs. One fantastic act sees Chaplin pick up about eleven chairs and sling each one over his arm, giving him the appearance of a hedgehog or porcupine. This isn't enough for the poor stagehand as in his other arm he also carries a prop piano. It's very clever and looks incredibly difficult. The scene felt familiar to me but I don't know if that's because Chaplin repeated the stunt for a later film or because I've seen that clip before.One interesting thing about Behind the Screen is getting a glimpse of an old movie set. A surprising aspect of this is finding two separate productions sharing the same stage. As noise made little difference to what the final picture looked like it was possible to have multiple movies being filmed in close proximity. Here Chaplin works on a set of what appears to be a medieval palace which is right next to a farcical comedy set in a police station. As you can probably guess, Chaplin ends up interrupting both at various times before completely destroying both towards the end. The final shot itself is also surprising in its violence. Although no blood, body parts or death was seen, it was still not what I was expecting to end a short comedy.www.attheback.blogspot.com

kagiraa I've read a variety of negative comments on this film. Nevertheless, in my eyes it's a small masterpiece, one of Chaplin's best films. The Mutual shorts are generally of high quality, with The Immigrant, The Adventurer, the Pawnshop, and Easy Street often being singled out for praise: It's easy to see why, as they are all outstanding, often in different ways. While these films do not have the kind of meticulous artfulness of the famous longer films, they have a charm that is all their own, particularly because they are not as clearly morally centered as the later films (I am not complaining about that quality of the later films, but rather saying that each way of telling a story has its own value). As such, the shorts have the feeling of giving free play to the comic imagination, which is somewhat amoral, or loosely moral, contradictory, and unbounded. Behind the Screen is a great study in that: more than that, like the other great Chaplin shorts, there is a lot of care put into the film to keep the chaos going in interesting ways, terrific gags, acting, filming, and story telling. These films really show the excitement of a new creative medium being explored: the resulting art is fresh, inspired, and confounded in a way that maybe only happens when something is still beginning.As for the film itself, I think I like it so much because of the interesting way the plot devices are tied together and serve as a vehicle for extremely zesty comic scenes. Comic reversals are the technique and the theme here, with the scene in which Charlie catches his immediate boss's head in the trap door being a great example of reversals being worked out in extremely well done, lunatic routines. The Elizabethan conceit of a young woman dressing as a boy is played against the modern situation of a workers' strike (as her subversion of the union is the way in which a woman manages to find her way into an untraditional role). This situation in turn is set against the very funny scene in which the high-strung director of a comic film (who seems to have a conception of himself as a serious comic artist) pulls his beard in frustration as his actors hurl pies across the studio nailing the bishop, king, queen, and so on who are trying to act a tragic scene on the opposite side of the studio and throwing them into a state of confusion. In the end, Charlie and his new sweetheart (the woman dressed as a boy) appear to thwart the striking workers, but in fact it is too late and the workers do succeed in blowing up the studio. The artificial world the studio represents is thus brought down, but only of course within the confines of its own lens.Personally, I am fully in sympathy with many of the moral tales Chaplin tells in such great films as Modern Times. However, amoral tales like this one are good in another way. They keep things open and unsettled. Comic stories only get going when things go wrong. In this film, they keep on going wrong all the way to the end.

rdjeffers Monday September 24, 7:00 pm, The Paramount TheaterA wickedly funny parody of his Keystone days, Behind the Screen was Charles Chaplin's seventh production under contract to The Mutual Film Corporation. Building on themes used in A Film Johnnie and The Property Man, it is among the quickest and most clever of the series. Goliath (Eric Campbell) is a lazy stagehand who takes all the credit while his assistant slaves away unnoticed. David (Chaplin) slings eleven chairs over one arm while carrying an upright piano, kicks over cameras, and repeatedly drops a large column on the dramatic director (Henry Bergman). They remain when the crew (caught napping after lunch) goes on strike, and hire an aspiring actress (Edna Purviance) disguised in workmen's clothes to help. David realizes her true identity when she faints, and Goliath discovers them kissing. Behind the Screen ends with a colossal pie fight as the strikers bomb the studio and David rescues the girl.

Michael DeZubiria Chaplin plays the part of David, the lowly assistant to the oafish stage hand Goliath, and as is to be expected, everything goes wrong in the most hilarious ways. Being an early short Chaplin comedy, a good portion of the comedy is slapstick, with such elaborately acted scenes as the one with the stage pillar prop that just would not seem to stand up. Poor David works like a slave for the lazy Goliath, but at first, he just keeps messing things up - he just can't seem to do anything right. But later, when he starts working really hard and doing things right, his boss always walks in just as he sits down to rest, and he gets into trouble for loafing on the job, and Goliath, who spends most of his time sleeping, gets all of the credit for David's work.Not only does this film satirize the falsity of film and stage, but it also goes into actual filming, in the surprisingly effective pie throwing scene. Eventually, all of the workers go on strike, leaving only David and Goliath on stage and, as is common in Chaplin's films, he ends up the victor as a result of some inadvertent events concerning a trap door and a lot of guys fighting. The ending of this film is unusually violent for a generally light Chaplin comedy, but the comedic value is never diminished.