The Circus. A little ridiculous tramp, very hungry and without funds, was standing beside a pickpocket. The pickpocket grabbed from a rich man a watch, a wallet, saw that he had been observed, dropped the wallet & watch into the little tramp's pocket, slunk off. Pursued by the pickpocket the little tramp at last became aware of the fat purse that he was carrying. Pleased, he walked over to a hot-dog stand and bought himself a sausage; then he looked at his new watch. The proper owner of watch and wallet, approaching the little tramp, grabbed for his property. The little tramp ran away and dodged into a big tent where there was a circus. Here he amused the spectators by his foolishness, got a job as property man, amused more audiences by his inept efforts to control his props. He fell in love with the circus proprietor's daughter, attempted to fake a tight-rope act, got nibbled by monkeys, ran away, helped the circus proprietor's daughter to marry a competent tight-rope walker. Then the little tramp, gay and forlorn, walked away down a road until he was out of sight.
This is the plot of The Circus. The little ridiculous tramp is Charlie Chaplin. It is necessary now, not to say that he is funny, but to say how funny he is. It is a case for superlatives, but not for the kind of superlatives that were properly scattered at The Gold Rush. There is nothing in The Circus to match the moment in which Actor Chaplin, with all the fine frenzy of a gourmet dissecting a brace of broiled quail, ate a Christmas dinner consisting of an old, very tough, boiled boot; or that in which he amused his imaginary guests with a miniature ballet dance, furnished by two forks, each shod with a roll. But it would be very difficult not to laugh at Charles Chaplin when he finds that the wire is broken which was to have preserved his equilibrium on the high, dangerous tightrope; and when, to add to this horrible predicament, three vicious monkeys run after him and tear his clothes off. These are not, moreover, the only truly comic moments in The Circus. Scarcely any period of 30 seconds passes without supplying new and highly legitimate grounds for laughter.
A Texas Steer. Will Rogers has become an international humorist. His genial or acidulous lucubrations were once heard, between twirls of a lariat, from the stage of the Ziegfeld Follies; they have since been telegraphed to the New York Times from many odd corners of the globe; they have been accepted with positive pleasure in capitals of Europe. All this has not, obviously, made him proud. Recently, between the moments when a motion picture camera was clicking at his pleasant homely face, a stenographer trailed Funnyman Rogers around the Hollywood studios of the First National Picture Co., jotting down unostentatiously, the words which fell from his lips. These words, many of them, are now the subtitles of A Texas Steer, a cinema in which William Penn Adair Rogers (son of a Cherokee Indian) imitates the antics of a Congressman.