Watch Caught in a Cabaret For Free

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

This is another two reel comedy manufactured in Mack Sennett's comical factory out in Californy state. It caused so much laughter you couldn't hear what the actors was talkin'. Charles Chaplin was the leading fun maker. Mabel Normand, with several of the actors finished the show artistically. Sennett must have been behind the camera. Continuous laughter greeted the offering. - The Moving Picture World, May 9, 1914

Am a big fan of Charlie Chaplin, have been for over a decade now. Many films and shorts of his are very good to masterpiece, and like many others consider him a comedy genius and one of film's most important and influential directors. He did do better than 'Caught in a Cabaret', still made very early on in his career where he was still finding his feet and not fully formed what he became famous for. Can understand why the Keystone period suffered from not being as best remembered or highly remembered than his later efforts, but they are mainly decent and important in their own right. 'Caught in a Cabaret' is a long way from a career high, but has a lot of nice things about it and is to me one of the better efforts in the 1914 Keystone batch and one of his better collaborations with Mabel Normand. 'Caught in a Cabaret' is not as hilarious, charming or touching as his later work and some other shorts in the same period. The story is flimsy and the production values not as audacious. Occasionally, things feel a little scrappy and confused.For someone who was still relatively new to the film industry and had literally just moved on from their stage background, 'Caught in a Cabaret' is not bad at all. While not audacious, the film hardly looks ugly, is more than competently directed and is appealingly played. Chaplin looks comfortable for so early on and shows his stage expertise while opening it up that it doesn't become stagy or repetitive shtick. Although the humour, charm and emotion was done even better and became more refined later, 'Caught in a Cabaret' is humorous, sweet and easy to like, though the emotion is not quite there. It moves quickly and doesn't feel too long or short. Overall, far from one of Chaplin's best but pretty good and perhaps one of his better efforts from the early Keystone period. 7/10 Bethany Cox

Like all of the very early Chaplin works on this VHS, the quality is rather poor and there are dropouts -- not from the tape, but from the film elements -- sometimes enough so that the action is hard to follow. Not that it matters a whole lot, as these are for the most part very simple films with lots of knockabout action, broad humor, and very little else."Caught in a Cabaret" finds Charlie as a waiter in a cheap cabaret who, on an unauthorized "break" tries to convince a wealthy society girl that he is the Ambassador from Greece (how or why he contrives this particular scam is uncertain). He doesn't fool all of her high-society friends however and it all ends in a big ruckus back at his workplace. A bit overlong, lacking in the timing that Chaplin would bring to his efforts in as little as a year, but pleasant enough in a rough, silly way.

Unfortunately, Caught In A Cabaret, being one of Chaplin's earliest films, has deteriorated pretty badly over the last nine decades or so, and this deterioration seems to have affected the film's continuity, making it look like the editing is botched. As is the case with most of Chaplin's films, the action in Caught In A Cabaret runs slightly faster than real life, which enhances much of the slapstick comedy but also makes several short clips in the film go by so fast that they are virtually incomprehensible. (spoilers) The main theme of Caught In A Cabaret deals with rich vs. poor, a theme that Chaplin later became famous for and which he made use of so often because of his own poverty stricken childhood. This film concerns a working man who pretends to be someone else in order to get accepted into a group of wealthy people. It is not expected that at the end he does not get the girl and winds up walking down a dirt road alone, but his activities throughout the film make his point clear. As he is at a party with the rich people, he gets drunk and makes something of a fool of himself, but when he is working as a waiter, he is fairly heroic, ridding the place of unwanted ruffians and whatnot. Caught In A Cabaret has not survived too well physically, but it is an excellent example of the type of early work Chaplin did as he became famous as one of the most loveable characters in cinematic history.