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Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

No one would confuse Charlie in drag with a woman or would they? While the tramp is not here there is plenty of physical comedy in this split-reeler with Kids Auto Races. It has all of 6 minutes to go through the action.One important thing is one of the early pairings of Charlie with Mack Swain. Mack would do several films with him in these formative years and very often Swain was a good support foil for Charlie. I had this film on 8MM film for many years from when I was young.The history of Charlie doing this is more important than the quality of the film. This was one of those early pieces that started to get him an audience. This would be important later when he became a legend.

Although Chaplin edited this film and it does move at a nice pace, it is certainly one of his lesser efforts. He is also credited with directing it, but that seems unlikely given the aforementioned reasons by one of the other reviewers. Chaplin dresses in drag and plays the wife of a parade spectator and ends up kicking and fighting several spectators, including a policeman of course. This is one of the many incidences in early silent films where experimental films were done on location unbeknown-est to the real spectators of this parade. Chaplin was fairly well known already and it's possible he dressed in drag in this film to go unnoticed by the public during shooting. As it is, he appears to be just some obnoxious woman who may be trying to interfere with the parade; this film echoes the Auto Race In Venice film in that respect. Chaplin edits between what appears to be two different locations in the film as well. Other than that, this film has little to recommend itself. * of 4 stars.

In 1914, Charlie Chaplin began making pictures. These were made for Mack Sennett (also known as "Keystone Studios") and were literally churned out in very rapid succession. The short comedies had very little structure and were completely ad libbed. As a result, the films, though popular in their day, were just awful by today's standards. Many of them bear a strong similarity to home movies featuring obnoxious relatives mugging for the camera. Many others show the characters wander in front of the camera and do pretty much nothing. And, regardless of the outcome, Keystone sent them straight to theaters. My assumption is that all movies at this time must have been pretty bad, as the Keystone films with Chaplin were very successful.The Charlie Chaplin we know and love today only began to evolve later in Chaplin's career with Keystone. By 1915, he signed a new lucrative contract with Essenay Studios and the films improved dramatically with Chaplin as director. However, at times these films were still very rough and not especially memorable. No, Chaplin as the cute Little Tramp was still evolving. In 1916, when he switched to Mutual Studios, his films once again improved and he became the more recognizable nice guy--in many of the previous films he was just a jerk (either getting drunk a lot, beating up women, provoking fights with innocent people, etc.). The final evolution of his Little Tramp to classic status occurred in the 1920s as a result of his full-length films.In this film, Charlie is dressed (awfully convincingly) as a woman. And, unfortunately that's really about all there is to the movie. No real plot other than Charlie in drag slugging people. The movie gets a 3 just because of its historical value and because it's cool to see how pretty a girl he made! These reasons alone are NOT enough reason for you to see this film.

A Busy Day is probably one of Chaplin's first comedies (it's at least in his first year of screen acting, 1914). He is not the Tramp, but actually playing a woman, a henpecking wife who drives her husband to another woman. Alas, film comedy had not matured yet, so, like many of its kindred films, A Busy Day contains only the broadest slapstick comedy: woman hits man, man hits woman, woman kicks man in butt, repeat. However, scrolling through this film's alternate titles, I came upon something utterly interesting: one of those alternate titles was The Militant Suffragette!!! I'm not exactly sure when women got the vote (I know that the first presidential election they voted in was 1920), but, judging from that title, this film may have been criticizing (humorously, not seriously) women who wished to have political rights! Now how's that for history!