Fresh and Exciting

Absolutely Brilliant!

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

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

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!

A ship owner intends to scuttle his ship and asks his Captain to round up a crew. The Captain in turn hires a Tramp (Charlie Chaplin) to help him 'Shanghai' (forcibly conscript) some sailors. This backfires for the tramp though as he himself is Shanghaied. On board ship the Tramp attempts to help out with a variety of different tasks but unsurprisingly is useless at all of them. Meanwhile the ship owner's daughter (Edna Purviance) has stowed away aboard ship in an attempt to stop the crime of scuttling and save her lover, the Tramp.After the wonderful highs of The Bank, this film was a huge come down. It is by far my least favourite Charlie Chaplin film to date although there are inevitably some good moments to be found.The only joke that made me laugh out loud was Chaplin's ridiculous naval salute which was somewhere between blowing a raspberry and a high five. While that is hilarious, the rest of the film isn't. The only other joke that made me even smile was when Chaplin throws a rescue rope behind him by accident. The rest of the gags were mediocre. Chaplin was to find success with a nautical theme just a couple of years later in The Immigrant and you can see the workings of some of the jokes from that classic film during Shanghaied. The most notable of these was the dinner during choppy seas. In addition to one or two decent jokes there is also some nice close-up work, something which was rare for Chaplin at the time. In one scene the fuse of some dynamite is shown in very close zoom rather than the traditional wide shot of the whole set. This marks further development of Chaplin's ever expanding film craft. The one final aspect of the film that I enjoyed was Chaplin's incredible tray handling skills. This is something he revisited years later in Modern Times but while it is more spectacular there, it feels much more real here.As well as The Immigrant the film also has shades of Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill Jr in that both central characters are bumbling buffoons in love with a ship owner's daughter. Keaton's later film undoubtedly takes some elements from Shanghaied but adds much more and is a far superior film.My main problems with this film were that the story felt under developed and there weren't enough jokes. It feels like Chaplin got an idea of 'the Tramp on a ship' and just made it up as he went along (something that was often the case in early Chaplin films). While this was sometimes very successful, here it is far less so.www.attheback.blogspot.com

This is another early Chaplin film made for the Essanay Studio, and while it has its moments it certainly isn't one of Chaplin's best. It's difficult to sympathise with his plight when he finds himself shanghaied into service on a boat because he was responsible for most of his equally reluctant shipmates being there as well. More important than this though, is the fact that it just isn't that funny, with too many gags running for far too long and therefore outliving the laughs they originally generate. There's also a curious lapse in spatial awareness when Chaplin is seen to exit left from one room then enter left into the next room. Given Chaplin's reputation for perfection, this might be down to the print I saw being made up of two prints spliced together with one unintentionally reversed. Or maybe I just imagined the whole thing – it was a couple of weeks ago

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!