Silent Sunday: Sunnyside (1919)

Charlie Chaplin's 1919 short Sunnyside is a highly weird little film, full of typical Little Tramp-tics and sight gags, but with a couple of digressions into fantasy and a completely inscrutable ending. One doesn't expect to leave a Chaplin film wondering if the Tramp kicked the bucket in the end (unless it involves a real bucket, of course), but here we are nonetheless.

The bulk of the film is what we expect from two- or three-reel Chaplin. He plays a farmhand who spends most of his time getting kicked in the butt by his employer; he also runs the desk at his boss's hotel, cooks all the food, and cares for the livestock. The best gags involve his attempts to save time by having the chicken lay her eggs in the frying pan and milking the cow directly into a coffee cup. He's in love with the neighbor's daughter (Edna Purviance)—a plot development so inevitable that it's announced by a title that reads "And now, the 'romance'." Two things complicate his wooing. First, after a run-in with a renegade bull, he's knocked unconscious, an interlude in which his spirit cavorts in a field with a troupe of faerie ballerinas. Soon after he wakes, a rich guy from the city arrives, gets into a car accident, then starts macking on Edna, who seems taken with the guy's spats. Charlie attempts, in his inimitable way, to imitate the wealthy heel, but when it fails, he tosses himself into the path of an oncoming car, and kablam! He's dead.

Or is he? There's a quick fade to the hotel, where his boss is kicking him awake; he's fallen asleep in a chair, and Charlie's suicide over Mr. Rich and Edna's romance was just a dream. Before leaving, Mr. Rich smiles at Edna, who spurns him, and she and Charlie waddle off happily. The end.

Except I don't buy it. The whole suicidal despair segment doesn't fit with the film's already-demonstrated dream world, which is much lighter in tone—remember the faeries. It seems like too much for a 30-minute film to make a bunch of "dream rules" and then break them. And Charlie's behavior and the gags he's involved in during the "second dream" are completely consistent with reality—there are no visitations, but he does attempt to make spats out of a pair of wool socks, resulting in hilarity.

Of course, if the suicide is real then what comes after is one of those Jacob's Ladder-style "at the moment of death" dreams, which isn't entirely satisfactory, but is at least novel. The suicide angle might seem a bit dark for a Chaplin film, but the other option is that the film is kind of sloppy and thrown together. I realize this was surely the case in many, many instances, and probably is the correct answer here, but I like my ending better.