A Woman

He is a such good actor.He make you laugh till got tears in your eyes for laugh so hard.Take sip of a guy drink and spit it out. Take the father from his cane push in the water and the other guy is in the water. When he goes with the ladies goes outside with no pants and try to find a place to get away goes upstairs put on a dress,shave his moustache and prissy around and the father pull the skirt off of Charlie. You can see what Charlie look like without his moustache and he look handsome without the moustache.That all of I knew of Charlie with his moustache big shoes and baggy pants, derby hat.The way he run and try to turn the corner he hop on one foot the other one is up.

I am very glad I saw this Chaplin film, though it isn't exactly great. That's because it still is a funny film and I was absolutely amazed watching Chaplin in drag. He actually made a rather pretty woman--far more fetching than Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in SOME LIKE IT HOT! The film begins with Chaplin having a run-in at the park and tossing a guy and a cop into the lake. He then meets the man's wife and daughter and charms them. He doesn't know they are related to the man he assaulted so he isn't afraid to accompany the women home (I guess they just forgot about Dad). Well, once home, things seem to be going pretty well for the Little Tramp and he is quite smitten with the daughter and vice-versa. However, Dad finally returns and Charlie dressed as a woman to remain there and be with his new girlfriend. It's really cute when Dad begins making passes at Charlie and the film is a lot of fun.

Let's be serious, it's not funny, I did not laugh. Chaplin is the same as in all his short films, before his great masterpieces. It is charming, indeed, but all we see are the same "gags", a lot of kicks in the ass, hat-pins that are also stuffed in the ass, again and again. Grimaces, exaggerated gestures and punches galore. The end!

The Essanay short pictures were for the most part a period of development and experimentation for Charlie Chaplin, but every now and then he just liked to do a bit of old fashioned mucking about. A Woman, his ninth film at this studio, begins with a mischievous, Keystone-ish farce-in-the-park, followed by a sequence based around one simple but very memorable gimmick.

In spite of its basic outline, A Woman does show the advances Chaplin had made and the professionalism with which he now crafted his pictures. He sets up the location and the main characters in a couple of economic introductory shots before having his tramp character invade the scene. Charlie himself then appears in the distance, his now-familiar silhouette all that is needed to announce that the mayhem can now begin. Throughout, Chaplin uses a lot of close-ups of faces, something he was doing a fair bit around this time, which perhaps shows a lack of confidence in the impact his gags had in full body shot. Here however I feel all these close-ups act as a build up to that startling (and I must say absolutely gorgeous) shot of "Nora's" feminised face.

Because of the set-up, we see the tramp at his cheekiest, perhaps a step back for the character, but an enjoyable step back. A Woman lacks the pathos and commentary of the more story-orientated Chaplin shorts that were starting to appear around this time, but it shows how much fun and funniness Charlie could create out of the simplest of elements.

… which brings us to that all-important statistic –

Number of kicks up the arse: 3 (1 for, 2 against)

While much of this is fairly simple comedy, it's interesting and worth watching for a couple of reasons. The first half is a slapstick sequence that could have come from any number of Chaplin's early short features, but it is a little better than average for knockabout slapstick, because the timing is generally pretty good and the situation is developed enough to make it amusing. The second half, for which the movie is better known, focuses on Charlie's appearance as "A Woman", and it is carried off pretty well. Unlike many such sequences, it doesn't try to get more out of the situation than is there, so it works pretty well. Overall, this movie is a little better than average among Chaplin's earlier short comedies.