Shoulder Arms (1918, Charles Chaplin) – Classic Film Review 1055

Producer-writer-director-star Charles Chaplin’s classic 1918 silent comedy is another one of his masterpieces. At 46 minutes, it is his shortest feature film. Originally planned at five reels, it was edited down and outtakes were preserved in Chaplin’s private collection.

Chaplin’s witty and inventive World War One comedy sees him in his usual guise as the Little Tramp, in which he’s a boot camp private stuck in the trenches in France, dreaming of wooing a mademoiselle (Edna Purviance) and of being a hero who goes on a daring mission behind enemy lines to seize Kaiser Bill.

He goes over the top and captures 13 Germans (‘I surrounded them’), then volunteers to go through the German lines disguised as a tree trunk. With the help of the French woman, he captures The Kaiser (Sydney Chaplin) and the Crown Prince (Jack Wilson) and is rewarded with a statue and a victory parade in New York. But then fellow soldiers wake him from his dream.

The clever Chaplin provided the score, as well as wrote, produced, directed and starred in the film. It’s one of his best, most inventive and cleverest short comedies. Chaplin’s half brother Sydney Chaplin plays Charlie’s comrade and The Kaiser. Henry Bergman, Albert Austin, Tom Wilson and Lloyd Underwood also star.

Hollywood was nervous about Chaplin tackling the subject of WWI, though not as nervous as it later was about him tackling Hitler in The Great Dictator. Shoulder Arms was released shortly before the Armistice so it was too late to help boost national morale. But it proved to be Chaplin’s most popular film, critically and commercially, up to that point. It’s now digitally remastered on DVD with new music and new sound effects added. The TCM print runs only 36 minutes.