thinbeach It's lowbrow slapstick and they knew it, with one of the actors walking off the set after a pie throwing scene saying, "I don't go for this highbrow stuff."Still, thank God for the pie throwing sequence, for its the only genuinely humorous sequence here - with the two "actors" - Charlie and his senior - going against script and throwing pies at each other out of contempt. Elsewhere there are a few chuckles, Chaplin brushing the bear rug's hair for the sets finishing touches comes to mind, but in the early sequences with the totem pole and the trap door, you can see the jokes coming a mile away. Later in his career - in films like 'Pay Day' and 'City Lights' - to name a couple of examples, Chaplin would set up an obvious trap for a slapstick comedian to fall into, but would cleverly find ways to avoid it, thus maintaining the element of surprise. No such cleverness is present here however, and they fall into that trap over and over again.This kind of silliness is run of the mill for 1910's comedy and Chaplin could have written this stuff in his sleep.

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.

MartinHafer In 1914 and early 1915, Chaplin did his first comedy shorts. In general, they were pretty awful--with almost no plot and consisting of him mugging it up on camera and hitting people. However, in 1915 he left Keystone Studio and began making better films with Essenay (though there are some exceptions) and finally, in 1916, to Mutual where he made his best comedy shorts. These newer films had more plot and laughs and usually didn't relay on punching or kicking when they ran out of story ideas.This film is one of these later Mutual Films and has a pretty decent amount of plot. Charlie is a carpenter's assistant on a movie set and his boss mostly sits around doing nothing--making Charlie do all the work. Later, the crew goes on strike and Charlie gets to act (although in real life, Chaplin's sympathies would have definitely been with the workers). In addition, a lady sneaks onto the set and disguises herself as a male laborer. Charlie realizes this and falls for her, though everyone else thinks she's a guy. I particularly liked the scene where Charlie is making out with the lady and really smooching it up good--and his boss looks on with horror! Overall, this is a pretty typical Mutual film--neither better or worse than the average one and worth a look if you get the opportunity.An interesting scene was the one where Charlie picks up the MANY chairs and then the prop piano. This exact same scene was replicated by Syd Chaplin (Charlie's half-brother) years later in THE BETTER 'OLE.