One of the newer additions to the featured Letterboxd Lists is top films by decade. This week, that took me back to the Top 50 Films of the 1910s, where I found Behind the Screen.
Title: Behind the Screen
Director: Charlie Chaplin
Released: November 13, 1916 (Theatrical – United States)
Runtime: 24 minutes
Behind the Screen follows David, the assistant to a prop master who spends most of his time sleeping on the job. While his boss naps in a chair, David is left doing all of the work as he navigates a chaotic film set, a workforce on strike, and an aspiring actress who disguises herself as a stagehand to get a job.
Some of the biggest laughs come during the lunch scene, where David measures the prop master’s stomach against the size of his meal before trying to avoid the smell of a nearby stagehand’s onion. The trapdoor sequence and pie-throwing chaos are equally funny, and at one point Chaplin carries ten chairs on a single arm, which is as ridiculous as it is impressive.
While it might not be among the best Chaplin films I’ve seen, it’s still an entertaining one. The strike subplot and budding workplace romance help the film feel like more than a collection of gags, and at just twenty-four minutes it manages to tell a complete story without ever feeling rushed.
A smaller Chaplin short, but a tightly constructed one.