Wordiezett So much average

JinRoz For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

Fatma Suarez The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Lela The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Steffi_P Between his first two feature films, and in his final days with First National studios, Charlie Chaplin kept on producing a handful of short pictures to keep things ticking over with the studio bosses. Reeling off a quickie such as Pay Day was now a simple affair for the professional comic, but the fact that they were no longer his main focus is often evident.Like a few of the First National shorts, Pay Day seems to have been cobbled together from a number of ideas, none of which was substantial enough to be fleshed out into a picture in its own right. So we have the day at the building site, followed by the drunken stagger home, tentatively linked by the idea of it being a payday binge. However both parts yield a fair number of gags, even if the lack of running gags or recurring characters never allows anything to build.Unusually, the only other significant character of this little short is Phyllis Allen playing Charlie's wife. At the age of sixty-one, she is a bit old for Chaplin – about 45 years too old if you consider his choice in real-life wives – but considering he had recently been through his divorce from Wife Number 1 Mildred Harris, the appearance of a frumpy, bossy trouble-and-strife has some explanation. As it is though, her inclusion adds little, and is the kind of cheap characterisation one would expect from the early Keystone pictures. Speaking of which, Pay Day also features ex-Keystone Cop Mack Swain, who in a roundabout way had now ended up as part of the Chaplin stock company. It's good to see Swain, nicely filling in the large burly hole left by the legendary Eric Campbell.As with his previous short The Idle Class, Chaplin seems to be doing a little experimenting with his technique as well, possibly with an eye to using things in his features. There are some very elaborate gags based around split-second timing, something which was already starting to become the domain of Buster Keaton and thus perhaps not advisable for Chaplin to get too much into. Then there is the business with the bricks being thrown up to Charlie, which relies on camera trickery. Again, this is not something which he would have been wise to pursue, as it could soon get gimmicky. Finally there are some close-ups, one of them revealing the obvious falseness of Loyal Underwood's beard, exploring the possibilities of silly faces. These fail simply because they aren't very funny.All in all a bit of a mediocre Chaplin short, providing laughs only because it seems Chaplin could now real off jokes and pratfalls with minimal effort, but lacking in the dedication to make it anything more than a time-filler.

CitizenCaine Chaplin edited, wrote, produced, and directed this film for First National Pictures, his last short film before focusing exclusively on feature films. In it, Chaplin plays an industrious worker with an amazing ability to lay bricks at lightning speed. There are numerous sight gags, especially at lunch time when the workers take their break involving an elevator and discarded food items. Chaplin feels he's been cheated out of some pay, but the boss let's him in so many words that it's a closed issue. Edna Purviance is the boss' daughter, but she has nothing to really contribute in this film. Chaplin tries hiding his pay from his Philistine wife played by the behemoth Phyllis Allen, but she's quick to discover his hiding place. Chaplin ends up smuggling some money back from his wife and heads to a Bachelor's Club and stays out drinking most of the night. He has a heck of a time trying to catch a trolley ride home, and when he does stroll home in the wee hours, he almost fools his wife into thinking he was never out all night until the alarm clock goes off at just the wrong moment. Of course, with a wife like his, sleeping with a rolling pin in hand, can we blame him for drinking? This was supposedly Chaplin's favorite short film, and it's understandable in that it contains some common themes that find themselves in many of his films. It's a tale of a workingman, everyman with a nagging wife, trying to just make it day to day in a world that seems stacked against him. However, the film is not really as funny or as good as many of his other films from this period. **1/2 of 4 stars.

MartinHafer This film has some highly imaginative and well-timed stunts--all revolving around Charlie's job at a construction site. All the near-falls and accidents remind me of Sweet Pea from POPEYE cartoons--as the baby is nearly killed again and again but miraculously escapes. In Chaplin's case, it involved a funny sequence when he ALMOST falls down an elevator many times, dropping objects accidentally on those below and a really interesting sight gag involving guys throwing bricks up to Charlie who catches this with complete ease (it was done by running the film backwards). Later, Charlie's hideous and scary wife is introduced and it goes from a work comedy to a domestic one. In a way, this was a minor disappointment, as I preferred the faster paced work stunts, but all-in-all this is a funny and well executed short.

pichlerj When the group of fellas (not unlike my buddies) stroll out of the bar and start singing, I nearly p**sed myself when the lady dumped water on them. They were so drunk they thought it was raining and broke out the umbrella...Anyway, for anyone whose got drinkin' buddies, this is a must see. The brick laying is pretty good, an early use of playing the film backwards to create spectacular effects. Great thinking for the time this was filmed and I wonder if this was the first use of this technique.I wasn't too clear on what Charlie was up to when he reached in his pocket, lifted his leg, and then did the reach around...turns out to be a hilarious lighting of a match that just floored me.