Very well executed

Did you people see the same film I saw?

Brilliant and touching

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

I really enjoyed this Chaplin short. It's by no means his best work but I love it when Charlie is at sea (I'm a sailor), it just cracks me up because I can identify with things like sea sickness and things flying around on a boat. I mostly wanted to write a review to let you know there are several versions of this online, and most are really bad versions. So if you are trying to watch this online and hear ragtime music, that will tell you this is a bad version to watch. Look for the version that has a nautical music track to it and that is the restored version (it is available on an "official" youtube channel). By now we probably all know this but anytime you hear random ragtime music to all of these silent comedies I would look again to see if there is a restored version available with a proper score and restored video, FYI. I'm giving this one a 7 out of 10 because it made me laugh pretty good and some of those stunts looked pretty brutal too!

While the Keystone pictures made Charlie Chaplin a star, the Essanays made him world famous. With such success comes great confidence. Shanghaied is a real confidence picture.If you look at the first series of real gags, when Charlie is hitting his soon-to-be crewmates over the head one after the other, the whole thing is done in a single shot. And it is essentially just the same gag repeated several times. The comedy actually lies in the fact that we know exactly what is going to happen, we just don't know exactly when it will happen and how each man will react. For the final mallet blow, the moment leading up to it is stretched out as long as possible for maximum funniness. To be able to pull off a sequence like this, you need to have faith in your own ability to make people laugh, and this is something Chaplin now had.Aiding and abetting Charlie are the usual rogues' gallery of supporting players. Among the notables here are Leo White, appearing without his usual "Frenchman" get-up, but still very funny, and John Rand as the ship's cook. This was Rand's second picture with Chaplin, and the way he brilliantly plays off the tramp without stealing the scene would earn him a long-term placement in the comic's stock company.In fact throughout this picture, it is the other performers who actually do the most, while Charlie appears as a fairly insignificant figure amongst it all. And yet he always remains centre of attention. For example in the scene where he directs the crane which has inadvertently hooked the rest of the crew, he is orchestrating the chaos. To be able to pull this off again requires not only skill but overriding confidence in that skill.And so, we come to the all important statistic – Number of kicks up the arse: 17(!) (3 for, 9 against and 5 other)

Chaplin edited, wrote, directed, and starred in Shanghaied, a comedy at sea. A shipowner, played by future director Wesley Ruggles, wants to destroy his own ship and its contents at sea in order to receive a huge settlement. Chaplin gets mixed up in recruiting sailors for the ship unaware of the plan. Chaplin gets caught aboard the ship as well, and soon he is forced to work on the ship to make do. Meanwhile, the shipowner's daughter, Edna Purviance, stows away aboard the ship. Chaplin falls for the daughter of course, but not before he endures several hardships at sea working as a dishwasher and cook's helper. The film is quickly paced, again with restrained slapstick in favor of a plot; however, the camera's see-saw effect is hopelessly phony. The camera movement changes speeds at times during these scenes, and the sea is obviously no where near as rough as the camera movement would have us believe. Chaplin has several neat bits of physical movement in this one, and get a load of the shipowner's sideburns! **1/2 of 4 stars.

Shanghaied is one of Chaplin's early short films that begins in a more ambiguous way than most, meaning that early on, it is pretty hard to tell what's going on, seeing how the film is obviously silent (this is 1915, after all), but as always, by the end of the film the story becomes clearer, and this one is particularly memorable. Evidently, Charlie is hired to knock out a bunch of drunks with a wooden mallet, which is not brilliant in terms of narrative, but it makes room for some of the endlessly amusing fighting scenes that are commonplace in Chaplin's films. Another thing that is traditional is for the majority of the comedy in each individual film to be derived from one main source, and here, it is a crane that causes all sorts of trouble for Charlie and the other men as they try to clean up a ship. But as funny as this part of the film is, it REALLY gets good when the dishwashing scene starts. Not only is there some hilarious mishaps involving Charlie confusing the soup pot with the dishwater, but he also slips in some very characteristic moves, dancing around the room in the comical, carefree way that only Charlie can really do. Also, while watching this scene, look for a quick shot of him doing the very same backwards sliding move that he did very extensively in the spectacular song and dance number that he performed at the end of his film Modern Times, which he made more than two decades later.I think this is the most advanced of Chaplin's earliest films that I've seen so far. It is longer than most of the ones before it and probably has more sight gags and stunts that later became famous in Chaplin's much better known full length films. We see the little tramp as a dishwasher, waiter, lots of fights, the tilting set with sliding dishes and angry sailors, the tramp thumbing his nose at authority, showing a comical eagerness to obtain a job for which he is clearly totally unqualified, sharpening his knife and fork before while the men next to him shovel food in their mouths like cavemen, meanwhile Charlie gives up his impeccable table manners because the heaving ocean is making him seasick. The story is more complex than previous films but still very simple, although it clearly foresees a lot of the style and imagery of The Immigrant, even down to the eating scenes and the on deck love interest. Stay tuned for the action packed ending, which I think is also one of the best endings that Chaplin had made in his films up to that point. Outstanding!