Easy Street
Charlie Chaplin, USA, 1917o
Heavily overwhelmed by the conditions in "Easy Street", where the mob beats up policemen and a giant bad guy has seized power, the police are looking for new forces. The newly converted tramp Charlie reports in and is unsuspectingly sent to the trouble spot, where he passes the fight with the giant and becomes a benefactor by interpreting the law quite freely.
Like many slapstick comedies of the 1910s, "Easy Street" exaggerates the conditions in the poor immigrant neighborhoods of American cities of the time, where poverty forced people to engage in petty crime and the law and order officers had a hard time fighting the law of the jungle. But while in the simple, immensely successful comedies of a Mack Sennett, the legendary Keystone Cops, the pack of cops primarily fails because of their own idiocy, Chaplin equips his anti-hero in a lost position with a talent for improvisation and highly precise choreographed gestures and gags. Moreover, the completely unheroic law enforcement officer interprets the law on his part quite loosely and succumbs himself to the malice of the objects each time he want to rest on his laurels.
Andreas FurlerGalleryo
