The spark that lit Charlie Chaplin's The Circus, his wonderful follow-up to The Gold Rush, was actually rather minor. It began with a note about a gag that had yet to be filmed or performed on stage: A man, elevated high, beset by a group of monkeys that nearly cause his demise. Henry Bergman, a close friend, warned him that the gag would never work on stage but gave him the idea to set it under the big top. Bergman would later teach him to walk a tightrope in under a week.

As in nearly all of his work, Chaplin came up with the set-pieces and drive of The Circus, which is being screened in a new print as part of Film Forum's Chaplin retrospective, through a series of notes (what he referred to as "suggestions") on gags that he dreamt up while walking around his dual homes of Los Angeles and New York with his co-star and assistant director Harry Crocker. Around the dozen or so gags, Chaplin went about constructing both a love triangle and a meditation on the art of comedy and how self-awareness, success, and ambition refract and inform a performer.

The end result had the director deploying his classic alter-ego, The Tramp, as the unknowing savior of both a fledgling big top and the step-daughter (Merna Kennedy) of a heartless ringmaster (Al Ernest Garcia). The opening gag ranks with one of Chapdin's best: Unknowingly wrangled into a pickpocket scam, The Tramp finds himself evading the cops, the thief and the mark in a funhouse inside a mock Jonah's Ark. In terms of sheer physicality, this is as challenging a gauntlet as Chaplin ever dared himself to come out of with his mustache intact, and the image of him recreating the precise movements of a wooden figurine is reward enough.

The chase concludes in the center ring of the humdrum circus, a fact that infuriates the ringmaster until he realizes that the crowd is eating it up. Hopelessly unaware and falling for the hunger-stricken step-daughter, The Tramp eventually realizes his talents and becomes demanding towards the ringmaster, an act that coincides with a decline in the reception of his performances. All seems on track for The Tramp to win his beloved's heart until he is upstaged by Rex (Crocker), a well-groomed tightrope walker.

What might have been a genteel parable, concluding in a sort of B-grade alternative to City Lights' miraculous ending, becomes something more complex as The Tramp plans to become a tightrope walker to win back the stepdaughter, leading to the gag which The Circus was meant to encapsulate. Though the film went into production in January of 1926, some eighteen months before The Jazz Singer began shooting, The Circus bluntly allegorizes the fickleness of the motion picture audience and, by extension, the elusive nature of popularity and stardom. Rex, for both the audience and the stepdaughter, becomes the new show and The Tramp, despite attempts to catch up with the new wave, eventually faces the fact that the art, at least for him, has met its expiration date.

This is how The Circus ends, but it obviously made little difference to Chaplin. His two subsequent films, City Lights and Modern Times, continued to evade sound and (rightly) remain his best-regarded works. Released through a raging typhoon of personal turmoil -- his second wife, Lita Grey, filed divorced and released an unprecedented 52-page summation of their turbulent marriage, including sexual proclivities -- The Circus will perhaps always be considered minor, eclipsed by the films that directly followed and preceded it. Minor or not, the film remains, by all means, a refined and personal work by a great artist.  

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