Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Best movie ever!

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Like all of the very early Chaplin works on this VHS, the quality is rather poor and there are dropouts -- not from the tape, but from the film elements -- sometimes enough so that the action is hard to follow. Not that it matters a whole lot, as these are for the most part very simple films with lots of knockabout action, broad humor, and very little else."Caught in a Cabaret" finds Charlie as a waiter in a cheap cabaret who, on an unauthorized "break" tries to convince a wealthy society girl that he is the Ambassador from Greece (how or why he contrives this particular scam is uncertain). He doesn't fool all of her high-society friends however and it all ends in a big ruckus back at his workplace. A bit overlong, lacking in the timing that Chaplin would bring to his efforts in as little as a year, but pleasant enough in a rough, silly way.

In 1914, Charlie Chaplin began making pictures. These were made for Mack Sennett (also known as "Keystone Studios") and were literally churned out in very rapid succession. The short comedies had very little structure and were completely ad libbed. As a result, the films, though popular in their day, were just awful by today's standards. Many of them bear a strong similarity to home movies featuring obnoxious relatives mugging for the camera. Many others show the characters wander in front of the camera and do pretty much nothing. And, regardless of the outcome, Keystone sent them straight to theaters. My assumption is that all movies at this time must have been pretty bad, as the Keystone films with Chaplin were very successful.The Charlie Chaplin we know and love today only began to evolve later in Chaplin's career with Keystone. By 1915, he signed a new lucrative contract with Essenay Studios and the films improved dramatically with Chaplin as director. However, at times these films were still very rough and not especially memorable. No, Chaplin as the cute Little Tramp was still evolving. In 1916, when he switched to Mutual Studios, his films once again improved and he became the more recognizable nice guy--in many of the previous films he was just a jerk (either getting drunk a lot, beating up women, provoking fights with innocent people, etc.). The final evolution of his Little Tramp to classic status occurred in the 1920s as a result of his full-length films.This film is atypical of early Chaplin work in that it features a real plot and is much more coherent and watchable than other Keystone efforts. Charlie works as a waiter in a cabaret. He later meets a rich woman and lies to her about himself--pretending to be rich, too. She has no idea that he is just a lowly waiter. However, later in the film she and her friends decide to go "slumming" and Charlie's ruse is uncovered. Instead, however, on relying on pathos at this moment (something that surely would have happened in later Chaplin shorts), a pie fight breaks out and the film concludes. Not great but a MAJOR improvement over his other early Keystone films.

It's rather chaotic (at least in the form in which it has survived), but "Caught in a Cabaret" includes some good material. It is also interesting to see some of the plot themes (identity mix-ups, interplay between different classes) that Chaplin would use in more refined ways in his later comedies. Finally, having Mabel Normand in the cast is always a plus.While a good portion of the film is just simple knockabout slapstick, it also has an interesting setup, with Charlie working as a waiter but also trying to pass himself off as someone else so that he can move into high society. The complications that follow may not be unexpected, but they are amusing enough. Both Chaplin and other silent comedians soon learned to get much more out of this kind of premise, but this one is not bad, and it makes pretty good use of the two stars. There is more than enough to make it worth seeing for any fan of silent comedies.

Unfortunately, Caught In A Cabaret, being one of Chaplin's earliest films, has deteriorated pretty badly over the last nine decades or so, and this deterioration seems to have affected the film's continuity, making it look like the editing is botched. As is the case with most of Chaplin's films, the action in Caught In A Cabaret runs slightly faster than real life, which enhances much of the slapstick comedy but also makes several short clips in the film go by so fast that they are virtually incomprehensible. (spoilers) The main theme of Caught In A Cabaret deals with rich vs. poor, a theme that Chaplin later became famous for and which he made use of so often because of his own poverty stricken childhood. This film concerns a working man who pretends to be someone else in order to get accepted into a group of wealthy people. It is not expected that at the end he does not get the girl and winds up walking down a dirt road alone, but his activities throughout the film make his point clear. As he is at a party with the rich people, he gets drunk and makes something of a fool of himself, but when he is working as a waiter, he is fairly heroic, ridding the place of unwanted ruffians and whatnot. Caught In A Cabaret has not survived too well physically, but it is an excellent example of the type of early work Chaplin did as he became famous as one of the most loveable characters in cinematic history.