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4 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
Forced, 29 August 2005
Author: Cineanalyst

"A Day's Pleasure" has a story and plot. In this one, Charlie Chaplin plays a family man, and they have a day of misadventures beginning with some trouble starting their automobile, then sea sickness on a cruise and, finally, they have difficulties passing a traffic crossing. The problem with the story and plot isn't that it's simple or episodic; the problem is that it's uncharacteristic of Chaplin. It would be a completely acceptable, perhaps even above average, two-reeler for any lesser comedian. Although everyone was a lesser comedian (at least in 1919), I mean those who didn't rise above these kinds of slapstick shorts.

Those like Laurel and Hardy would become masters of them, but films such as "A Day's Pleasure" were no longer the best Chaplin could do. He was already working on "The Kid", and it seems he wasn't very interested in shorter and simpler films anymore. First National demanded product, however, and so Chaplin rushed and forced out "A Day's Pleasure". And, it shows.

This is still pleasant to watch (it'd have been difficult to make this kind of picture unpleasant), and one may find plenty of laughs in it, but Chaplin was aiming, by now, for more than humor, and he could also be a lot funnier. His breakthrough, "The Kid", reflects that.

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3 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
Good Short Comedy, With a Slightly Different Feel For Chaplin, 2 December 2002
Author: Snow Leopard from Ohio

This is a good short comedy, and it has a bit of a different feel to it than most of Chaplin's shorts. Instead of his familiar tramp character or some other underdog, this time Charlie is a family man taking everyone out for a day of fun, along with some misadventures on the way there and back. There isn't much of Chaplin's usual social commentary, as it focuses instead on trying to get as much mileage as possible out of a few basic gags. Most of the time this works pretty well, although it bogs down a bit in the middle when a couple of the gags start to wear rather thin. Among other things, it's interesting in that the approach this time - the story line, and especially the milking each gag for all it is worth - is what you would expect from Laurel and Hardy, rather than from Chaplin. Overall, it's amusing and interesting, and worth a look.

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2 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
A DAY'S PLEASURE IS A PLEASURE TO SEE!, 7 February 1999
Author: Matt Barry from Baltimore, Maryland

A DAY'S PLEASURE is a pleasure to see. It's not on the same level as Chaplin's A DOG'S LIFE or SHOULDER ARMS, but it might be a step above SUNNYSIDE. It really is funny. Chaplin plays a married man. First, he has a time trying to get his car started, then has a load of mishaps aboard a pleasure cruise ship. Finally, the traffic jam sequence is a laugh riot. The usual Chaplin players-Edna Purviance, Tom Wilson, Henry Bergman, Albert Austin, Loyal Underwood, even Jackie Coogan-are all as great as usual. A DAY'S PLEASURE is worth seeing if you're a Chaplin fan. For comedy lovers alone, it might not be as big a treat. Either way, it's funny.

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3 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
Early Chaplin frolic that would be more searchingly examined in Bunuel or Godard., 8 December 1999
Author: Darragh O' Donoghue (hitch1899_@hotmail.com) from Dublin, Ireland

Chaplin's shorts are beginning to look very thin - aesthetically, philosophically, comically - especially in comparison to Buster Keaton's melancholy fantasies, but A DAY'S PLEASURE has much to recommend it. Usually the Little Tramp - a disruptive rebel - Charlie is a model bourgeois here, with family and modern appurtenances. Foreshadowings of Bunuel and Godard as the family take a trip, and adverse circumstances force worst bourgeois instincts to surface: especially savage violence. Ship sequence hilarious, especially the woman with pram who dives for an embarking boat.

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1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
"Three minds with but a single thought", 28 July 2010
6/10
Author: Steffi_P from Ruritania

Charlie Chaplin's pictures at First National studios vary immensely in quality. He was at the peak of his comic professionalism, and by and large his output at the time reflects that. And yet, he was also making preparations for his debut full-length feature, and as a result a handful of his shorts appear to be simple potboilers, rough compilations of whatever material he had left over.

A Day's Pleasure is a case in point. The story could not be really described as a plot, more a mere sequence of events. While the various little episodes all relate to a day trip of Charlie and his family, they could really be cut-offs from a longer picture. And while Chaplin is inventive and distinctive as always, this lack of focus means the gags never really get to build to anything or have the of kind of wider relation to story and character that would make them screamingly funny. For some reason, perhaps in compensation, there are far too many "witty" title cards – verbal humour always having been Chaplin's Achilles Heel.

Neither does A Day's Pleasure make the most of Chaplin's regular crew of supporting players. Edna Purviance is introduced as Charlie's wife, not a love interest to be won over, and as such she becomes little more than a human prop, never centre stage for a second. There is no main antagonist for Charlie to play off, and so the gags of him winding up some pompous adversary are a bit thin on the ground.

And yet, A Day's Pleasure is still an example of Chaplin's care and craftsmanship in constructing a comedy picture. During the hold up at the crossroads, easily the funniest segment, there's a great use of space. We have the traffic cop in the foreground, while all the business with Charlie's car is going on in a far corner. So why not the other way round? Because it is important we keep our eye on the cop as well as the car. Chaplin is effectively balancing out our levels of interest. If the traffic cop was in the background we would ignore him, whereas Chaplin knows he can safely put himself in the background as we will focus on him wherever he is on screen. This is intelligent comedy direction.

And so to the all-important statistic – Number of kicks up the arse: 8 (8 for – pity poor Tom Wilson)

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1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
Solidly amusing with a couple of real good laughs, 4 May 2008
Author: bob the moo from Birmingham, UK

With a fun day ahead of them, a man, his wife and two young sons load up the car and prepare to head out. After some significant problems actually getting the car to go, they board the pleasure boat for an exhausting but fun voyage. And f course what fun family outing would be complete without traffic chaos to close it out? I've not actually watched that many Charlie Chaplin films you know. I can think of a handful off the top of my head that I saw a year or so ago but other than that not really and certainly I'm remiss in seeing some of his classic films. Fortunately an arts channel recently gave me a full afternoon to catch up, showing several classic film as well as some shorts – one of which was this. A Day's Pleasure takes a couple of situations to make for a family outing and produces some genuinely funny moments out of them. Sad to say that the film is not funnier but when I wasn't actually laughing (which was the majority) it was still amusing.

This is almost entirely down to Chaplin himself, who did everything but make the tea in this film according to the credits. Physically he has great comic movement and just the sight of him coming down the steps at the start warmed me. Not all the routines are that funny but all of them are well delivered by him, while the supporting cast of Wilson, Bergman and others all do well. The end result is an amusing short film that is consistently amusing with a few good laughs. Modern viewers not interested to begin with won't be won over but regardless it is amusing and has stood up well in terms of entertainment value.

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1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
Chaplin on his way out of the short comedy., 7 April 2007
7/10
Author: Michael DeZubiria (miked32@hotmail.com) from Luoyang, China

I have heard that Chaplin rushed to produce A Day's Pleasure because the studio was demanding product while he was working on The Kid, but I have to disagree that it is a below-average comedy. It is a little different from the fare that we have come to expect from him in his short comedies, but I think this is as much a reflection of his desire to do something different as it is of the fact that he rushed through the production to satisfy the studio while he made another film, which he was more than likely more interested in.

It should be kept in mind that Chaplin had been involved in the production of nearly 100 short silent comedies by the time A Day's Pleasure came around, so I can forgive him a little distraction in it's production. If nothing else, I find the film to be particularly interesting, especially at the beginning, because the building that Chaplin and the family leave from at the opening of the film is Chaplin's office in Los Angeles, where I live. It's hard to mistake those mountains in the background!

One thing that I found to be interesting is that at one point in the opening sequence, a man walks into the frame in the background, and the trivia on the IMDb claims that he was most likely a studio employee, which seems like a preposterous notion, since the man not only walks right into the frame during shooting, but also pauses to see what's going on after he turns back. If he was a studio employee, it must have been his first day!

Also of some note is a rather disturbing portrayal of the black characters. Granted, 1919 was a very different time than now, but like Hitchcock's The Ring, which featured a sadly slave-like black man grinning gleefully as dirty, backwards-looking white people dunked him in a tub of water, A Day's Pleasure features a band of black musicians which doesn't say anything good about Chaplin's idea of black people (what is the meaning of "Three minds with but a single thought?").

While I agree that some of the material is a little different from many of Chaplin's other short films, the sequences here are certainly not without merit, particularly a hilarious bit with an uncooperative deck chair midway through the film. Some of the behavior of Chaplin and his other actors in the film is a little odd (at one point the family is on a crowded passenger ship on which everyone seems to be falling asleep on their feet in the middle of the day), but I should think that Chaplin made a graceful exit from the short silent comedy, if not an eventful one.

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1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
Sea Sick, 23 September 2004
Author: caspian1978 from Boston, MA

More like a day with the family, it appears that The Tramp is married with children. Here, he spends the day with the family as he drives them to and from the boat ride. While the movie deals with situation after situation that the 'Tramp's' get themselves involved in, the majority of the movie takes place on the boat ride. It is here where Chaplin uses some early fantasy camera work to make the boat ride less enjoyable than it really is. Back and forth Chaplin sways the camera from left to right, making the boat look like it is being rocked back and forth by the ocean waves. A nice little comedy with a minor blooper in the background. In the start of the movie when Chaplin is trying to start the car, if you look behind in the open street you will see a man walking down the sidewalk toward the car. He stops half way when he sees that there is a camera and that they are shooting a movie. He quickly stops and turns around to walk out of the shot. Before he does, he stops again and looks back to get one final look. He then hurries off to get out of the shot.

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3 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
Charles Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy, 8 March 2002
Author: The Black Englishman from London, England

This film was so influential that even Laurel and Hardy did a talking version of it in 'A Perfect Day'. Even if you don't enjoy this film when you watch it now, what you got to understand is the influence he had on the people of his time. A person's work may not stand the test of time but their influence does.

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2 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
not particularly interesting but not bad, 13 April 2006
5/10
Author: planktonrules from Bradenton, Florida

This movie reminds me of the later Laurel and Hardy film A PERFECT DAY, though the Stan and Ollie film was an awful lot funnier. Part of this is that Chaplin's character is not exactly the "nice guy" he played in later movies and part of it was the choppiness of the film. It was a lot of little vignettes pieced together during a days' outing with the wife and kids. The delicate and artistic touch of his longer and later films just isn't there and, while okay, it's difficult to score this movie as anything other than average. In particular, the very poorly done sequence of the rocking boat was way overdone and and poorly assembled as well. The boat is simply rocking too wildly--most ship-wrecks rock much less. And, at the same time, the water in the background is way too calm. It just looked sloppy.

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