The Worst Film Ever

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Highly Overrated But Still Good

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Chaplin is groomed like the tramp and he looks like the tramp but he could be anybody in this disjointed tale about three mashers, a puddle, and an umbrella.The editing is poor enough to lose the plot from time to time, if there is a plot that extends beyond the individual slapstick-filled scenes.The film has a certain slight charm as an historical curiosity. Here it is -- 1914 in Los Angeles, and what looks like Echo Park might have looked in 1914 Los Angeles.A dog wanders innocently in and out of a scene but nobody cares. The pratfalls are backward somersaults. It's all very casual and lacks poetry.

In Kid Auto Races at Venice, Chaplin first tried on the costume of the little Tramp, and was clearly unsure what to do with it. He wandered around and made himself seen, making it clear that he wanted to be noticed and had something to show the world, but he still wasn't sure what the personality of his character was. In Mabel's Strange Predicament, he tries something new, and finds that it went wrong. Now, in Between Showers, we have another example of the incredible, almost prophetic foreshadowing and symbolism that we saw in Kid Auto Races. Whereas in his last film, he was an obnoxious, belligerent drunk, in Between Showers he decides to try helping people. Not only that, but within the first few minutes of the film, he is literally testing out the waters. And as we would see in the years to come, the experiment worked with phenomenal success.What Chaplin also largely discovers in this film is the hyperbolic fight scene, exaggerated to cartoonish proportions for the benefit of the slightly fast motion and the absence of close-ups, which provides a comic effect sufficient to inspire years of including similar scenes in future films. The plot is simple, as they were in those days, and concerns the varying degrees of possession of an umbrella, with hilarious results, as they say. Between Showers probably marks the last major change for the Tramp that we would ever see, since Chaplin got it nearly perfect here. Let the show begin

In this comedy short we see a man steal an umbrella from a police officer. After a big shower the man who stole the umbrella wants to help a woman cross the street without getting her feet wet. While he is looking for things she can walk on, Charles Chaplin enters the film. He also wants to help the woman. While Chaplin is looking for useful things as well the woman is carried across the street by a police officer. Chaplin and the man who stole the umbrella have a fight.With some of the usual Chaplin moments 'Between Showers' is entertaining enough to watch, but it misses the magic of Chaplin's later work. We see some little things from his famous tramp, one moment when he is walking away with the umbrella in particular, but it is not enough to really recommend this short. There are many better Chaplin shorts, but if you like his work you probably enjoy this one as well.

Although Chaplin still had many kinks to work out of his Little Tramp character by the time he made this, his fourth movie, Between Showers nonetheless shows tremendous improvement over his first attempts at developing a screen persona. In the first, Making a Living, he played a rich villain. In Kid Races at Venice and Mabel's Strange Predicament, the Tramp made his debut, but was portrayed as a rather mean-spirited, and in the Mabel Normand film, almost lecherous, jerk.But Between Showers, for the first time, presents the Little Tramp as a somewhat noble, almost heroic character, who comes to the aid of a damsel in distress (here portrayed by an Edna Purviance prototype). He still has rough edges, but Chaplin was starting to flesh out the character.The plot of Between Showers is an illustration of how delightfully simple and high concept early silent comedies could be. A man steals an umbrella -- that's pretty much the plot, with a little (attempted) romance tossed in for good measure. It's a fun little film, and fascinating to watch from the perspective of observing how Chaplin is slowly crafting his most famous character.