Film review: The Circus

The Circus (dir. Charles Chaplin, 1928). In what is possibly Chaplin's most pleasant feature film, the Tramp accidentally becomes the main attraction of a floundering circus (though for most of the film he is not cognizant of this); sight gags, sentimentality, and spider monkeys ensue. Though Chaplin's films lack the imagination and intelligence of the work of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, he remains more popular than them both because of his willingness to submerge his films in pathos. He attempts to emphasize every frustrated expression, every kind gesture, every longing glance as if it were the focal point of the film, and in doing so, he uses his films as tools to draw his audience into a shared emotional experience—they establish an immutable empathic bond between reel and real life. This bond became problematic in his later films, where Chaplin's use of pathos in social commentary slips sometimes into emotional fascism (social commentary should appeal foremost to the intellect rather than preying upon the emotions; see The Great Dictator), but The Circus works because of its much more modest goals. A