"Actor: Chester Conklin"

• Chaplin Classics Vol 1 | DVD | (22/09/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £71.99

  Modern Times: In this delightfully madcap comedy Chaplin plays a hapless factory worker who cracks under the strain of his job and runs amok. Unemployed on the streets of Depression America he joins forces with a young woman fleeing the childcare authorities and they embark on a misadventure-filled search for happiness. The Great Dictator: Tomanian dictator Adenoid Hynkel has a double a poor Jewish barber who one day is mistaken for Hynkel and comic catastrophes ensue! Gold Rush: The Tramp goes to the Klondike in search of gold and finds a whole lot more! Limelight: Fading comedian Calvero (Chaplin) and suicidally despondent ballet dancer Thereza (Bloom) look to each other to find meaning and hope in their lives... Charlie: The Life And Art Of Charles Chaplin: Richard Schickel's new documentary Charlie chronicles Charles Chaplin's brilliant career as an actor writer director producer and composer as well as his controversial and much publicised private life - his love affairs and four marriages his paternity suit scandal and persecution by the FBI culminating in a self-imposed exile from the United States. With its brilliant observations rare footage interwoven with scenes from Chaplin's greatest films and a remarkable series of newly recorded interviews Charlie is the definitive documentary overview of Chaplin and his Little Tramp.

• Charlie Chaplin Marathon - The Rink, The Immigrant, Tillie's Punctured Romance, The Vagabond | DVD | (01/11/1999) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  “The Rink”: Chaplin plays a waiter who spends his time at the skating rink where his skill and grace lead to possible romance and unfortunate mishaps. “The Immigrant”: En-route by boat immigrant Chaplin tries to make the best of the rough seas. He befriends a woman and appoints himself her protector. “Tillie’s Punctured Romance”: This is the first feature-length comedy ever made and features Chaplin as a con artist who talks Marie Dressler an innocent lass into taking her dad’s savings and running off to the city with him. “The Vagabond”: This is the story of The Little Tramp a pathetic fiddler that makes a scanty living and rescues damsels in distress. One of the first films directed by Charlie Chaplin.

• Charlie Chaplin Collection 1 | DVD | (12/10/2009) from £11.99   |  Saving you £-2.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Charlie Chaplin Collection 1 contains: Kid Ayto Races In Venice: Charlie dressed as a tramp for the first time goes to a baby-cart race in Venice California. He causes a great deal of trouble and confusion both on off the track (getting in the way of the cameraman) and on (interfering with the race). He succeeds in irritating both the participants and the public. Cruel Cruel Love: A rich lord loves a girl. A maid who has seen the two accosts the lord in a park and embraces him. This is seen by the girl who calls off their relationship. The lord decides to commit suicide but the butler replaces the poison with water. The girl her love now restored rushes to what she thinks is the lord's deathbed. A Film Johnnie: Charlie goes to the movie and falls in love with a girl on the screen. He goes to Keystone Studios to find her. He disrupts the shooting of a film and a fire breaks out. Charlie is blamed gets squirted with a firehose and is shoved by the female star. A Night Out: After a visit to a pub Charlie and Ben cause a ruckus at a posh restaurant. Charlie later finds himself in a compromising position at a hotel with the head waiter's wife. The Rival Mashers (AKA Those Love Pangs): Charlie and a rival vie for the favors of their landlady. In the park they each fall different girls though Charlie's has a male friend already. Charlie considers suicide is talked out of it by a policeman and later throws his girl's friend into the lake. Frightened the girls go off to a movie. Charlie shows up there and flirts with them. Later both rivals substitute themselves for the girls and attack the unwitting Charlie. In an audience-wide fight Charlie is tossed from the screen.

• Comedy Greats | DVD | (03/02/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  A "two-plus-one" package from Siren, Comedy Greats features classics from the two greatest silent-screen comics, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, plus a rather dreary effort from Danny Kaye. Never the most scintillating of comedians, Kaye's personable talents are thinly spread in 1949's The Inspector General. Distantly(!) based on a short story by Russian satirist Nikolay Gogol, this tale of mistaken identity enables Kaye to indulge in obvious wisecracks and not-so-smart dialogue. Sylvia Fine's songs are mildly amusing, and Henry Koster draws capable support from Walter Slezak and Elsa Lanchester, but it's a long haul. When he made Tilli's Punctured Romance in 1914, Charles Chaplin had yet to perfect the "little man" routine which made him the most popular 1920s screen star. His loveable rogue is well displayed opposite Marie Dressler's formidable country maid, whose unexpected windfall becomes the real object of his desire. Mabel Normand contributes an attractively period chic, and if, in the hands of Mack Sennett, the humour tends to fall back on music-hall slapstick, the historical significance of the film is undoubted. Yet it's Buster Keaton's 1928 classic Steamboat Bill Jr which comes out on top here. Keaton is perfectly cast as the put upon student, whose bravery saves both his father and his steamboat-owning rival, and wins the hand of the latter's daughter. Solid support comes from Ernest Torrence and the winsome Marion Byron, with Charles Riesner getting maximum drama from the cyclone sequence, but it's Keaton's soulful expression and breathtaking stuntwork which are the most potent reminders of a talent only later to receive its due. On the DVD: Comedy Greats is acceptably remastered, with 1.33:1 aspect ratio and 12 chapter headings per film, and decently packaged, this is worth acquiring--even though Keaton's film is the only one you're likely return to often. --Richard Whitehouse

• Charlie Chaplin - Modern Times | DVD | (01/06/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £13.99

  Modern Times marks the last proper appearance of Charles Chaplin's iconic Little Tramp, and finds our hero struggling to make ends meet in the Depression of the 1930s. Along the way he takes up with a juvenile delinquent (actually 24-year-old Paulette Goddard) and plays a prison incident with "nose powder" for drug-induced laughs--both plot elements seeming quite innocent here, though both would provoke controversy today. Modern Times' most famous sequences portray the dehumanisation of factory labour to fine comic effect, balancing satire with slapstick to perfection in several superbly executed set-pieces. While the film has sound-effects and musical score, speech is only presented through mechanical means, via a gramophone, or through wall-sized TVs far more futuristic than in those in HG Wells' Things to Come (also 1936)--it's an interesting footnote that the comic and the SF visionary were friends. Chaplin famously not being a fan of sound cinema acknowledges the need to move with the times, yet hilariously spoofs the exploitation of man and machine while doing so. Amid some great laughs, the political message comes though clearly: the boss is making a fortune while doing jigsaw puzzles in his luxury office, the workers are toiling ever harder on the production line for their pittance. On the DVD: Modern Times is offered in the original 4:3 black and white with good mono sound evidencing just a little distortion and a very clean, clear picture with minimal grain to give away its age. Also included are French and Italian dubbed versions and a pointless and ineffective English Dolby Digital 5.1 version of the soundtrack. The disc features multiple subtitle options, including English for hard of hearing. Disc Two begins with a six-minute introduction by David Robinson. Next comes a very worthwhile 26-minute documentary by Philippe Truffault, Chaplin Today, centred around a perceptive subtitled discussion between French filmmakers Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne. There are three trailers, beautifully reproduced posters, an eight-part photo gallery and one entertaining deleted scene, as well as Chaplin's "nonsense song" from the film in isolated form and in a "Karaoke" version. The Documents section begins with a silent 42-minute 1931 documentary/propaganda film, In the Machine Age made by the US Dept of Labor. Along similar but more entertaining lines is Symphony in F a 1940 colour film combining music, manufacturing footage and animation celebrating the Ford motor company, while also included is a sequence from the Liberace Show (1956) with the star performing the vocal version of "Smile", the theme from Modern Times. Demonstrating the truly universal appeal of Chaplin is a 1967 short For the First Time, documenting what happens when the people of the remote Baracoa mountains in Cuba see their first ever movie, Modern Times. This is a remarkable collection which does a great film justice. --Gary S Dalkin

• Charlie Chaplin - Modern Times | DVD | (17/11/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £44.99

  Chaplin's last 'silent' film filled with sound effects was made when everyone else was making talkies. Charlie turns against modern society the machine age (the use of sound in films?) and progress. Firstly we see him frantically trying to keep up with a production line tightening bolts. He is selected for an experiment with an automatic feeding machine but various mishaps leads his boss to believe he has gone mad and Charlie is sent to a mental hospital... When he gets out he is mistaken for a communist while waving a red flag sent to jail foils a jailbreak and is let out again. We follow Charlie through many more escapades before the film is out.