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Purely Joyful Movie!

Absolutely the worst movie.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

In 1914 and early 1915, Chaplin did his first comedy shorts. In general, they were pretty awful--with almost no plot and consisting of him mugging it up on camera and hitting people. However, in 1915 he left Keystone Studio and began making better films with Essenay (though there are some exceptions) and finally, in 1916, to Mutual where he made his best comedy shorts. These newer films had more plot and laughs and usually didn't rely on punching or kicking when they ran out of story ideas.This film isn't bad, but it does seem a bit hard to follow thanks to a lack of title cards in the film to explain the action. My assumption is that the original version had them but they weren't in the prints used to make THE ESSENTIAL CHARLIE CHAPLIN COLLECTION set. Charlie is a tailor's assistant and his boss finds an invitation for the county to a fancy dinner. The boss decides to go in the count's place so he can try to marry the rich young lady throwing the party (though what woman in her right mind would want this creep?). Charlie also goes to the same home, but to visit with the cook. Later, he sneaks away and crashed the party and finds his evil boss putting the moves on this lady. Shortly afterwords, the REAL Count shows up and the ruse is exposed.Like another reviewer stated, this is pretty reminiscent of THE RINK, though THE RINK is a clearly superior film because THE COUNT has very few laughs. An interesting story but just not all that funny. I did, however, love Chaplin's physicality in the film--he was incredibly agile and watching him move was a treat.

Charlie and Eric Campbell are in top form is this very amusing short. Charlie plays a tailor's assistant and Campbell is his boss. They wind up by coincidence (!) at the same rich lady's party, where both compete for the daughter Miss Moneybags, played by Edna Purviance.The plot is, of course, completely ridiculous, and the whole thing is totally silly and contrived--which is just how it should be. The highlight is a hilarious dance sequence, with Charlie at his acrobatic best. There is a lot of cake-throwing and bottom-kicking. The latter is such a standard device in Chaplin movies that I wonder if there might have been some kind of underlying S&M thing going on here.Not one of his best, but standard Charlie is Grade A stuff. Still very very funny.

Another one of those mistaken-identities and chased-by-the-cops Chaplin short, but hell, that's always funny! The story starts of with Charlie working in a tailor-shop. Great gags there while measuring a woman and destroying a jacket. Because he screws up he gets fired.Him and Campbell both attend to the party of Edna's 20th birthday, while actually a count was invited. When exposed, Charlie gets chased around the place and finally leaves into the distant.Pretty funny stuff from the master of slapstick. Not his best, but not his worst either. And a mediocre Chaplin still is way better than an average movie...7/10.

There's not much subtlety in "The Count", but there is some pretty good slapstick. Chaplin regular Eric Campbell gets a big role in this one, and he and Charlie always make a good pair of comic rivals. The settings offer some good props and comic possibilities, and the story and the cast make pretty good use of them, as well as the kind of identity mix-up that Chaplin liked to use. There is pretty good detail in some of the settings as well, making them rather interesting in their own right, as a small look into the daily life of 1916.Chaplin and Campbell have some good moments in their series of confrontations with one another, getting into a series of antics first in a tailor's shop and then at a formal dinner. The first part moves pretty slowly at times, but then things start to pick up, and there is a rather manic finale. Edna Purviance also appears, but she does not get a lot of material to work with this time.It's not among the best of Chaplin's shorts, but it's still worthwhile. There are no especially imaginative or innovative ideas here, but there is enough funny slapstick to make it worth seeing.