Charlie Chaplin

1921's The Kid and The Idle Class

54 minutes, 32 minutes

The Kid

The Idle Class

New 35mm print!

The Kid was director Charlie Chaplin's first full-length film and is considered one of his best. Co-starring five-year-old Jackie Coogan---whom Chaplin discovered on a Los Angeles vaudeville stage---this is the story of a child abandoned in a limousine by his unwed mother (Edna Purviance). When The Little Tramp finds him, he tries to find a home for the boy. Obliged to keep him, The Little Tramp teaches the youngster about life on the streets and just as they have bonded and become a family, the boy's mother returns in a bittersweet finale. The Idle Class casts Chaplin in two roles: as the Tramp, and as a foppish rich man with a weakness for drink (and a weakness for absent-mindedness, in a brilliant scene in which he forgets his trousers).

"The most enchantingly Victorian of Chaplin’s features, and perhaps because of the way his sentimentality fits the subject, this film seems remarkably innocent and pure."
- Pauline Kael

1928's The Circus

72 minutes

New 35mm print!

Chaplin's The Little Tramp is taken on as a clown at the circus. He falls in love with the ringmaster's daughter (Merna Kennedy) but is swiftly rivaled by a new addition to the circus, a handsome tightrope walker. To try to win back her affections, the Tramp himself attempts the same act, culminating in the best sequence of the film, when he is assailed by monkeys as he totters amateurishly and precariously along a rope suspended high in the tent. Made in 1928 while he was in the middle of a painful divorce case, Charlie Chaplin's The Circus was so associated with bad memories for its maker that he refused even to mention it in his 1964 autobiography. This version includes Chaplin’s own music and a pre-credits song (performed by an octogenarian Charlie) added for the 1970 reissue.

"A beautiful film, one for movie cryptologists, for movie purists, for historians, for maiden aunts, for sullen children, for bored parents — and mostly for people who haven’t laughed recently."
- Vincent Canby, The New York Times

1931's City Lights

87 minutes

New 35mm print!

City Lights is the charmingly simple story of The Little Tramp who meets a lovely blind girl selling flowers on the sidewalk who mistakes him for a wealthy duke. When he learns that an operation may restore her sight, he sets off to earn the money she needs to have the surgery. In a series of comedy adventures that only Chaplin could pull off, he eventually succeeds, even though his efforts land him in jail. While he is there, the girl has the operation and afterwards yearns to meet her benefactor.

"Comes closest to representing all the different notes of Chaplin’s genius."
- Roger Ebert

1936's Modern Times

87 minutes

New 35mm print!

Charlie Chaplin is in glorious form in this legendary satire of the mechanized world. As a factory worker driven bonkers by the soulless momentum of work, Chaplin executes a series of slapstick routines around machines, including a memorable encounter with an automatic feeding apparatus. Chaplin also draws a lively relationship with a street gamine played by Paulette Goddard (then Chaplin's wife). In 1936, Chaplin was still holding out against spoken dialogue in films, but he did use a synchronized soundtrack of sound effects and his own music, a score that includes one of his most famous melodies, "Smile." And late in the film, Chaplin actually does speak – albeit in a garbled gibberish song, a rebuke to modern times in talking pictures.

"Chaplin returns in triumph with this rambunctious comedy. One of the happiest and most lighthearted of the Chaplin pictures."
- Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

1940's The Great Dictator

124 minutes

New 35mm print!

Since Adolf Hitler had the audacity to borrow his mustache from the most famous celebrity in the world--Charlie Chaplin--it meant Hitler was fair game for Chaplin's comedy. The Great Dictator, conceived in the late thirties but not released until 1940, when Hitler's war was raging across Europe, is the film that skewered the tyrant. Chaplin plays both Adenoid Hynkel, the power-mad ruler of Tomania, and a humble Jewish barber suffering under the dictator's rule. Paulette Goddard, Chaplin's wife at the time, plays the barber's beloved; and the rotund comedian Jack Oakie turns in a weirdly accurate burlesque of Mussolini, as a bellowing fellow dictator named Benzino Napaloni, Dictator of Bacteria. Chaplin himself hits one of his highest moments in the amazing sequence where he performs a dance of love with a large inflated globe of the world. Never has the hunger for world domination been more rhapsodically expressed.

"Audiences who had waited years to hear Chaplin himself speak, finally got their wish, and it's about as genuine and earnest a call for a new humanity as has ever been expressed."
- Christian Blauvelt, SLANT Magazine

1942's The Gold Rush

72 minutes

New 35mm print! 4 screenings only!

In search of gold in turn-of-century Alaska, Charlie takes refuge with fellow prospector Mack Swain in an isolated, comically-imbalanced cabin, where hunger forces him to eat that famous shoe. The masterpiece that features more great Chaplin moments than any other: the dance of the rolls, the cabin tottering over the cliff, the giant chicken, and so much more. Although originally released in 1925, this version features Chaplin’s own music and poetic narration, added for his 1942 reissue.

"The Gold Rush has been delighting audiences for almost 80 years -- it's one of the flat-out funniest films made in the silent era or any other."
- Glenn Abel, Hollywood Reporter

1957's A King in New York

110 minutes

New 35mm print!

A King in New York, Charlie Chaplin's penultimate film--featuring his final starring performance--was made in 1957 but wasn't officially released in the United States until the '70s, when it, surprisingly enough, won an Oscar for Chaplin's score. Advertising, movies, TV, rock music, celebrity and more are in Chaplin's comic sights as he portrays a deposed European monarch who becomes a U.S. media sensation. Chaplin plays King Shahdov of Estrovia, on the lam when revolution grips his homeland. In New York, despite the occasional indignity, he's treated as royalty until he takes a stand against the commie-hunters.

"Hugely funny, healthily vulgar [and] always extremely moving."
- The New York Times

1918-1919's The Little Tramp Shorts

86 minutes

A Day's Pleasure

Shoulder Arms

Sunnyside

New 35mm prints!

In A Day’s Pleasure, the Little Tramp decides to treat his family to a day of leisure, but an uncooperative car and an overcrowded ferry prevent the day from being smooth sailing. And although the Little Tramp finds work at a country inn and develops a crush on the pretty girl next door in Sunnyside, his boss is determined to work him dry. In Shoulder Arms, The Little Tramp enlists in the military just in time for the First World War. Stuck in the trenches, he figures out a way to capture the enemy by himself.

1918-1922's Chaplin Shorts

96 minutes

A Dog's Life

The Pilgrim

Pay Day

New 35mm prints!

A Dog’s Life is not only the satisfying story of canine and human underdogs succeeding in spite of the odds against them, it's also a series of side-splitting gags and slapstick routines that are as funny today as they were when the film as released and became an instant hit. When Charlie escapes from prison in The Pilgrim, he dons a preacher's clothes. By mistake he becomes the new minister for the town of Devil's Gulch. Charlie sets out to fight fire with fire, installing roulette wheels and featuring sexy choir girls to lead the parishioners away from sin instead of towards it. Pay Day finds Charlie as an expert bricklayer with a good salary. His wife, however, frowns on his having a good time with the dough. Can he spend a night on the town and get away with it?