Solemplex To me, this movie is perfection.

Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.

Dirtylogy It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Kirandeep Yoder The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

isajademarilyn In short I wanted to highlight the wonderful work of the 2013 restoration. I have discovered again this gem that gives a glimpse at old time film studios settings; when noise on set didn't matter, and movies could be shot close to each other.Chaplin surely used his personal experience in this one. Making fun of the artificial magic of cinema. Unlike his firsts silent shorts that only showcases a succession of gags, this one has a decent plot. His chemistry here with co-star Edna Purviance is even better than with Paulette Goddard.I am very found of the bear scene, my favorite. Highly recommended to watch the restored copy, to fully enjoy it as Chaplin intended to show viewers when it was released.

Steffi_P Charlie Chaplin sometimes repeated himself when it came to ideas for his comedy shorts, but only when his skill and technique had improved significantly in the meantime. Behind the Screen treads similar ground to Dough and Dynamite (made at Keystone) and His New Job (made at Essanay), being a comical expose on the film-making process itself, but it demonstrates all the development his style had made since those older pictures.One major difference is the audacity and satiric bite of Chaplin's comedy by this point. Unlike the earlier examples, Behind the Screen bases most of its jokes on the artificiality of cinema, with "marble" pillars being shifted by hand, an "invisible" trapdoor that causes mayhem, and eventually the dramatic department having its dignity invaded by errant custard pies from a comedy set. He also has a sly dig at pompous directors and lazy stagehands. All this from an era before the majority of people in the audience wouldn't have really known exactly what went on behind the cameras. Still there is enough broad slapstick here to entertain the viewers who don't get the in-jokes.Chaplin's management of the comedy is also now incredibly refined and to-the-point. In the earliest scenes, he shows how he can make himself the centre of attention without necessarily being in the foreground. Whilst everyone else on the set stays fairly still, Charlie bustles about all over the place leaving chaos in his wake. It's funnier this way because we see the little tramp upsetting the order of his environment.The comedian had by now also accumulated a regular crew of supporting players – comic actors who were more buffoonish and ridiculous than funny in their own right, thus providing suitable antagonists for the little tramp. Eric Campbell is as usual the burly bully – the tyrant of a small pond who it is satisfying to see knocked down. Henry Bergman, in only his second of what would be many appearances with Chaplin is the perfect awkward fat man. He must have been a real find, and Charlie seems to take every opportunity to knock him down to get that undignified and helpless flailing of arms and legs that Bergman was the master of. And of course he now has Edna Purviance – by now often the only one allowed to be a completely straight actress. Her features are too feminine to be a convincing tomboy, but at least she gets the chance to be involved in some of the comedic action this time round.Which leaves me only to give out the all-important statistic – Number of kicks up the arse: 7 (5 for, 2 against)

kagiraa I've read a variety of negative comments on this film. Nevertheless, in my eyes it's a small masterpiece, one of Chaplin's best films. The Mutual shorts are generally of high quality, with The Immigrant, The Adventurer, the Pawnshop, and Easy Street often being singled out for praise: It's easy to see why, as they are all outstanding, often in different ways. While these films do not have the kind of meticulous artfulness of the famous longer films, they have a charm that is all their own, particularly because they are not as clearly morally centered as the later films (I am not complaining about that quality of the later films, but rather saying that each way of telling a story has its own value). As such, the shorts have the feeling of giving free play to the comic imagination, which is somewhat amoral, or loosely moral, contradictory, and unbounded. Behind the Screen is a great study in that: more than that, like the other great Chaplin shorts, there is a lot of care put into the film to keep the chaos going in interesting ways, terrific gags, acting, filming, and story telling. These films really show the excitement of a new creative medium being explored: the resulting art is fresh, inspired, and confounded in a way that maybe only happens when something is still beginning.As for the film itself, I think I like it so much because of the interesting way the plot devices are tied together and serve as a vehicle for extremely zesty comic scenes. Comic reversals are the technique and the theme here, with the scene in which Charlie catches his immediate boss's head in the trap door being a great example of reversals being worked out in extremely well done, lunatic routines. The Elizabethan conceit of a young woman dressing as a boy is played against the modern situation of a workers' strike (as her subversion of the union is the way in which a woman manages to find her way into an untraditional role). This situation in turn is set against the very funny scene in which the high-strung director of a comic film (who seems to have a conception of himself as a serious comic artist) pulls his beard in frustration as his actors hurl pies across the studio nailing the bishop, king, queen, and so on who are trying to act a tragic scene on the opposite side of the studio and throwing them into a state of confusion. In the end, Charlie and his new sweetheart (the woman dressed as a boy) appear to thwart the striking workers, but in fact it is too late and the workers do succeed in blowing up the studio. The artificial world the studio represents is thus brought down, but only of course within the confines of its own lens.Personally, I am fully in sympathy with many of the moral tales Chaplin tells in such great films as Modern Times. However, amoral tales like this one are good in another way. They keep things open and unsettled. Comic stories only get going when things go wrong. In this film, they keep on going wrong all the way to the end.

Cineanalyst It's very interesting and illuminating to screen Chaplin's early short films, to see his evolution as a comedian and as a protagonist viewers could root for. As well, one can trace the recurrent themes and see him refining and expanding upon routines. The self-referential aspect of "Behind the Screen" is one such scenario he had tried before, and it's a significant advancement over those previous works, becoming the apex of Chaplin's backstage parodies on film-making.From the beginning, Chaplin was involved in self-referential comedies, of which Mack Sennett's Keystone was of the first to explore in film. Only his second film, "Kid Auto Races at Venice" featured Chaplin mugging for the camera much to the annoyance of the cameraman. While at Keystone, Chaplin was also involved in, at least, three similar shorts where he causes mayhem backstage or during a scene: "A Film Johnnie", "The Property Man" (which is set in vaudeville rather than movie-making) and "The Masquerader". In 1915, he directed a much better paced version of this scenario, "His New Job", while at Essanay. The column gag in "Behind the Screen" is elaborated from the brief one in "His New Job". Furthermore, the storyline of Edna Purviance's character trying to get work at the studio by masquerading as a male is taken from "The Masquerader", except then it was Chaplin pretending to be a woman--a reversal upon a reversal. It also fits into the structure of self-reference, as she's an actress playing a wannabe-actress who pretends (acts) in an attempt to become an actress.There are some well worked out gags here involving a trap door and pie throwing, ruining movie scenes and generally causing havoc throughout a film studio. Chaplin and Eric Campbell once again play out their antagonism of David to Goliath. Even the homosexual joke works, without being too offensive. There's also the anti-trade unions social commentary and the violent explosive finale gag, both of which didn't hamper the fun for me.Others have seen a parody of Keystone's film-making and knockabout slapstick in the film, and that certainly has credibility. As well, it's remarkable how far Chaplin had come after only leaving Keystone two years prior. "Behind the Screen" is a much-matured Chaplin short that finds its humor in poking fun at what it is and what goes into itself.