Fresh and Exciting

A lot of fun.

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

This time, Charlie Chaplin plays a drunk who has to spend some time in a health spa. Sure enough, he creates chaos everywhere he goes! "The Cure" was also one of Edna Purviance's early roles. The two of them have a couple of scenes together. But above all, this is an excuse for Chaplin to strut his stuff, and boy does he! It must have been weird for Chaplin, going as he did from being a poor boy in England to being an international superstar. Nonetheless, he gave us some of the greatest comedies of all time. That makes it all the more disgraceful that the US government - mired in McCarthyism - wouldn't let him reenter the country in 1952, forcing him to spend the rest of his life in exile. Fortunately, Chaplin got the last laugh: he won an Academy Award for lifetime achievement in 1972, and he remains one of the most beloved entertainers ever.

The Cure from 1917 is a Charles Chaplin film in which he doesn't play The Tramp character.He plays an alcoholic who enters a health spa with a big suitcase full of alcohol.There he meets a beautiful girl (Edna Purviance), who could help him become sober.At some point, all of the spa's inhabitants are loaded after the liquor ends up at the health waters.I have never been drunk in my entire life, and intend never to be, but it can be funny to watch comedians portraying drunkards on films.And Chaplin sure plays a funny drunk.And the absence of The Little Tramp isn't a problem, he was in that costume in many other movies.But how funny the movie is, that's the main issue here.And this movie is pretty funny.

I have the disadvantage of having grown up in the MTV generation so it's harder for me to really appreciate some of Charlie Chaplin's short films. They have to be pretty consistently funny to leave an impression on me, but THE CURE falls into the group of shorts that fall out of mind soon after watching it. It finds Charlie Chaplin's alcoholic arriving at a sanitarium/resort spa where men and women go to clear their minds and cleanse their bodies. But he's a drunk, and hence hi-jinks. There are a few fun gags; in my opinion, the best was Chaplin's total lack of understanding in how a revolving door functions. It's good for a few laughs before it's milked a shade too long. The same could be said for just about every gag in the movie (e.g. when Chaplin is unknowingly dumping his water cup into his hat). The rest of the movie is just Chaplin stumbling around from room to room, aggravating just about everyone he crosses. There are a few chuckles here and there, but nothing memorable. Both Edna Purviance and Eric Campbell make their usual appearances here, but Purviance disappears pretty fast and Campbell (as the man with the gout) does nothing but chase Chaplin and repeatedly stub his bad foot on furniture. I guess the whole concept was just a little too simplistic and there just wasn't much to be gleaned from it for laughs. Fans should give it a watch, but it's no EASY STREET.

This is among Chaplin's most successful shorts and is certainly one of the funniest. There's no sense in describing any of the gags, I don't suppose, because for instance how can you describe an exquisitely choreographed pratfall in print? A visual medium like film loses something in translation into language, just as written works lose in translation to film.Humor in silent films must be difficult to begin with. Because speech is conveyed only by a handful of title cards, the situations we see must be universally understood before gags can be built on them. Chaplin was a genius at showing us a situation and then turning it funny.I'll have to add a couple of more specific notes though. One is that there is a scene in which Eric Campbell, the huge guy with the gout, is rolled too quickly in his wheelchair and when it suddenly jerks to a halt he falls out of it and goes head first down a well that is barely wide enough to accommodate him. The figure isn't Campbell's. It's a stunt man, who instructed the crew to keep filming as long as his legs were kicking out of the well. When they stopped kicking, the stunt man was quickly retrieved.Another point is that Chaplin's work has been chopped up over the years and reassembled as if by the drunken character he plays here. Most available tapes are fuzzy and incomplete, but the DVD, Chaplin's Mutuals, is crisp and clear and about as good as it's likely to get. Another is Chaplin's astonishing nimbleness. Portraying a drunk in a silent movie is much harder than actually BEING drunk. The revolving door scene shows him at his most adroit. He tries drunkenly to enter the building through a revolving door, whirls around 360 degrees, and emerges at the same spot he entered. A few more staggering steps while he looks curiously around, apparently pleased at what the building looks like from the inside.Well, see, it does lose in the translation. See it if you can.