Chaplin's "Laughing Gas"

2007-03-07 21:36:52

“Laughing Gas” (1914, USA, Chaplin)

“Laughing Gas” is Chaplin’s 20th film as an actor and 6th as director. There isn’t much of a plot here and Chaplin seems to just float from situation to situation where he is mostly pulling off violent pranks and there is little to no room to develop any sense of likeability in his character. He tries to get a man’s attention by swatting him on the ass with his cane which inevitably starts a situation which ends up with Charlie throwing bricks at people, one of whom ends up in the dentist’s office where he is ‘employed.’ Charlie takes a turn faking his role as the dentist when a female patient shows up. He uses large pincers to grab her nose and pull her face towards his and gives her a kiss. I suppose this prank is worth a turn, but four turns? And one wonders what this skit would involve in today’s world. In other scenes, Charlie physically picks on the other (and much shorter) assistant and jumps right into slapping the patients waiting for the dentist.

Charlie seems awfully violent in this short. The draw of his better films is his downtrodden character and socially relevant themes and here there is none of that. It is necessary that there be a frenetic pace to these shorts of Chaplin’s, given their slapstick antics and usually simple plots which aren’t built to sustain but rather come and go with quick laughs. The pace in this film is sometimes not fast enough to get us to the end. “Laughing Gas” registers pretty low in the Chaplin canon.

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