Welcome to Public Domain Theater, your home for the wonderful world of films that have (in the United States, at least) fallen into the public domain, and are free for everyone to see!

This month we’re going all in on slapstick comedy from the Silent Era! For our feature film, we have the Charlie Chaplin classic The Circus – as you might imagine, it’s set at a circus, providing elaborate and over-the-top venues for Chaplin’s physical comedy. It also gets a bit meta, with the circus boss realizing that all the pratfalls that Chaplin’s “The Tramp” performs are sure to delight the circus audience … but since the Tramp only gets into those comedic blunders by accident, they must be kept from knowing they’re actually the star performer.

There’s more to the story than that, but it adds a unique spin to Chaplin performing some of the most inspired stunts of their career, and producing one of their most celebrated pictures.

Fun fact: The Circus was originally nominated for Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Story at the first ever Academy Awards, but since Charlie Chaplin was director and writer and lead actor on the movie, the Academy decided to give Chaplin a “Special Award” for this trifecta achievement, and free up some awards for other people to win.

But there’s more to Silent Film slapstick than just Charlie Chaplin, and we’ll prove that with our opening short: “Number, Please”, starring Harold Lloyd. What starts as a simple story of “The Boy” (Lloyd) trying to impress “The Girl” (Mildred Davis) turns into an escalating series of hijinks involving the frustrations of old-timey payphones, tussles with pickpockets, running from the law, and even the two-kids-in-a-trenchcoat one-kid-and-one-full-grown-man-in-a-trenchcoat gag.

If you like to laugh, I urge you to stop on by and marvel at some of the masters of physical comedy, right here at Public Domain Theater!

Opening Short:

Feature Presentation:
Watch “The Circus” at this link – because WordPress is being a dick about embedding it.