Easy Street Movie

Arguably the best of Charlie Chaplin's 12 Lone Star/Mutual comedies, Easy Street gives us a look at the environment in which Chaplin grew up, the slums of South London. Indeed the title of the film is likely a reference to the street where Chaplin was born, East Street in Walworth. Charlie begins this film as he seldom does, as a truly down-and-out derelict, huddled sleeping at the steps of the Hope Mission. The sounds of a service in progress draws him wearily inside. After the sermon, he is entranced by the beautiful mission worker and organist, Edna Purviance and stays after the service. Inspired by their ministrations he vows to reform, returning the collection box he has slipped into his capacious pants. Out on Easy Street a gang is pummeling members of the police department, removing their uniforms for the coins in their pockets. Toughest of all is the Bully, Eric Campbell, who menaces the other toughs, taking the spoils for himself. Charlie, passing the Police Station sees the recruitment sign outside and eventually builds up his resolve sufficiently to apply. His beat is Easy Street. He encounters the Bully who threatens him and is impervious to the blows that Charlie delivers with his nightstick. In a display of his great strength, the bully bends a gas streetlamp in two, whereupon Charlie leaps on the Bully's back, covering his head with the lamp and turns on the gas. (Chaplin was injured during the filming of this scene; the lamp hit him across the bridge of the nose, holding up production for several days).

As the Bully slumps to the ground, Charlie takes his pulse and decides to give him one more shot of gas for good measure. The squad is called to retrieve the unconscious Bully and Charlie is, for the moment, cock-of-the-walk, frightening away the other street toughs by simply spinning around to face them. His work also entails charity, as he helps a woman, (who turns out to be the Bully's wife) who has stolen food from a street vendor by stealing more food for her. Edna happens by and helps Charlie get her upstairs to her tenement flat. He's rewarded for his efforts by her ingratitude, nearly dropping a flower pot on his head. Edna takes Charlie across the way to another apartment where a couple have a large brood of children whom Charlie helps to feed by scattering bread crumbs among them as if he were feeding chickens. Meanwhile, the Bully awakens at the Police Station and despite multiple blows from the collective nightsticks of the cops, he escapes and returns to Easy Street. His fight with his wife draws Charlie from across the street and a chase begins, the Bully seeking revenge for his earlier capture. Charlie drops a stove on the Bully from a second-story window, knocking him out, but the street toughs capture Edna and toss her down some steps into a subterranean speakeasy. She is threatened there by a dope addict who injects himself with cocaine. Exiting the Bully's flat Charlie is mugged by the gang and himself tossed down into the cellar. Landing accidentally on the addict's upturned needle, Charlie becomes supercharged, defeating the junkie and all the denizens of the cellar, rescuing Edna. Peace is restored to Easy Street and a new mission is in evidence. The Bully and his wife, dressed in their finest, make their way to the services, under Charlie's approving eye. Edna approaches and Charlie greets her joyously and the pair stroll arm in arm towards the welcoming minister and missionary of The New Mission.

One of Charles Chaplin's most famous comedies, Easy Street is a superb example of the comedian's early work, a period in which he displayed an astounding streak of creative genius, making a series of stunning and deeply original comedy shorts on an absolute assembly-line basis. And yet, when he made Easy Street, Chaplin was coming to end of his two-reel period, and would soon embark on the series of feature films that would solidify his early reputation.
Easy Street was made for the Mutual Film Corporation only four years before Chaplin directed his first feature, the deeply sentimental melodrama The Kid (1921), in which he co-starred with a young Jackie Coogan (who enjoyed a brief career renaissance in the '60s on the Addams Family TV series as Uncle Fester). In Easy Street, which Chaplin starred in and directed (albeit without screen credit) in addition to having created the story and worked on the screenplay with Vincent Bryan and Maverick Terrell, Chaplin's Tramp character winds up on the right side of the law for a change, as a policeman patrolling one of the toughest districts in town. The usual members of the Chaplin stock company are well in evidence; Edna Purviance is back as a mission worker whom The Tramp is smitten with; Eric Campbell plays the toughest bully on the block; and future Warner Brothers director Lloyd Bacon has an uncredited bit as a drug addict. The key set piece of film is undoubtedly the sequence in which The Tramp, unable to beat Eric Campbell's bully in a fight, finally resorts to sticking the bully's head in a gas street lamp. The bully is thus forced to inhale the gas and is knocked unconscious. Beating the bully up makes The Tramp the ruler of the district; suddenly he is a hero and takes to his new role with great satisfaction. There is a last-minute setback for The Tramp, however, as the bully escapes from jail and kidnaps The Tramp's precious mission worker. But then, accidentally sitting on a stray hypodermic needle left behind by one of the district's drug addicts, The Tramp is suddenly filled with the strength of ten men and cleans up the town in short order. One of Chaplin's best and most accomplished early shorts, Easy Street demonstrates again his keen skills as a farceur and his almost balletic movements as an actor. After Easy Street, Chaplin's status as a screen presence was iconic.