The Top Ten Films of 1916
Previously in our “Best of the 6s” series we’ve looked at Flickchart’s Top Ten Movies from 1966, 1946, and 1996, and now it’s time to step in our Flickchart time machines and head back a full century, to 1916! This puts us in the heyday of silent short comedy, at the dawn of feature filmmaking, and in the midst of serial adventures. It was a wild time in film history, as no one quite knew what form the future would take – would epic adventures serialized in half-hour-long episodes take hold? Would 20-minute shorts stay in vogue, as they had for several years? Or would the new fad of two-hour long features become the new normal? I think we all know the answer to those questions, but in 1916, much was up in the air.
What wasn’t up in the air was who owned the silver screen – that was undeniably Charlie Chaplin, who had become the most recognizable celebrity in the world thanks to his hugely popular shorts at Keystone and Essanay studios. In 1916, he made the move to Mutual Studios, where he would make twelve two-reelers (20 minutes long) which many Chaplin scholars and film fans agree are among his finest work. He also secured the largest salary ever paid to anyone in Hollywood up to that point. The Mutual films show Chaplin moving out from under the creative direction of others and experimenting with his own style. The Little Tramp already existed as a character, but here we find Chaplin trying other characters, giving the Little Tramp various jobs, melding old-school slapstick with longer-form jokes, and beginning to call upon that pathos that would be his hallmark throughout the rest of his career.
Chaplin features heavily on our list, but we’ll also see a serial from Louis Feuillade, an epic version of a Jules Verne classic, and what is arguably D.W. Griffith‘s masterpiece. One note: You’ll see we have eleven films on this Top Ten, because Judex and Burlesque on Carmen switched spots in the global rankings at the eleventh hour of preparing this post. We wanted to be accurate to the Flickchart rankings, but couldn’t bear losing the unique nature of Judex for yet another Chaplin film, so we included both.
11. Judex
The serial Judex is broken up into twelve chapters. The title character, whose name is Latin for “judge”, is a wealthy avenger out to punish the evil banker who ruined his family. With his brother, Roger, and a scrappy young boy called the Licorice Kid, Judex fights greed and corruption through myriad twists and turns. There are at least four kidnapping attempts, a suicide, a murder, and an attempted murder with a motor vehicle during the course of its 300-minute running time. At one point Judex charges in to rescue his love interest lead by a large pack of dogs. It’s all very silly and melodramatic, yet one can’t help but get caught up in the soapy action. Judex may be of particular interest for those who are fans of comic book films, as the character is considered one of cinema’s earliest superheroes. – Chad Hoolihan
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10. Burlesque on Carmen
In a way, this is a 1915 film, but it gets through on a technicality. A two-reel Burlesque on Carmen was released in December 1915, but in April 2016 an expanded four-reel version was released, so this longer version is the one that makes the list. This is the only one of the Chaplin films on this list made at Essanay Studios, before he moved to Mutual, and you can tell the difference instantly. This is meant to be a parody of the famous opera Carmen, but apparently that mostly means all the characters mug for the camera a lot, it’s more melodramatic, and the fights are staged to be ridiculous. The story is the same as the opera (with a happy ending), and the comedy not nearly broad enough to really hit – by and large, this is Chaplin doing not-Chaplin, though the tramp figure does emerge a bit at the very end, almost like a cameo. – Jandy Hardesty
https://youtu.be/mpcUfuECzD0
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9. The Fireman
It’s easy to see Chaplin both using and lampooning the stock figures of silent comedy of the time – the firemen here are almost Keystone Kops, incompetent and interchangeable except for the Chief (Chaplin’s stock player Eric Campbell). Chaplin himself, though, is the MOST incompetent, missing alarms, leaving firemen behind, running them over, etc – and Campbell spends a good deal of time literally kicking Chaplin’s butt and shaking him severely by the neck. It’s a wonder Chaplin didn’t suffer lifelong whiplash, but I digress. The film culminates in a well-done send-up of the very popular “last-minute rescue” genre that contemporary D.W. Griffith perfected a few years before this, which Chaplin doing a climb up the outside of a house – seven years before Lloyd’s famous ascension in Safety Last (though not as long or heartstopping a climb, to be sure!). Some notable effects run the film backwards, a technique Chaplin pioneered and used well throughout his career. – Jandy
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8. Behind the Screen
Chaplin’s take on what goes on inside a movie studio is, as so many of his stories are, a skilfull blend of social commentary and slapstick. Chaplin plays an assistant stagehand and is the bumbling architect of most of the physical comedy, from trapdoor shenanigans to an extended pie-in-the-face routine. He is also mistaken for gay at one point, in one of the explicit (albeit farcical) acknowledgments of homosexuality onscreen before the advent of the Production Code. The subplots of the supporting characters range from a young woman’s attempt to break into the film industry to the crew going on strike, but the funniest and most creative moment in Behind the Screen is largely tangential to the setting: Chaplin’s use of a knight’s helmet to block the stench of a coworker. — David Conrad
https://youtu.be/P8CIBWVinTY
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7. The Floorwalker
You know that comedy routine from classic film and television where two characters who look alike enter a room from opposite directions and each one believes the other is a reflection in a mirror? It’s possible that that old chestnut got its start, movie-wise, in The Floorwalker, when Chaplin interrupts a thief who sports a bowler hat and toothbrush mustache. The thief is the old floorwalker of a department store, and he’s making off with the contents of the store safe. Rather than trying to stop him, Chaplin takes the opportunity to usurp the thief’s job, and becomes the new floorwalker. Of course, Chaplin isn’t much good at helping customers, being accident-prone, and his aiding and abetting of larceny comes back to haunt him when the thief’s partner and the police show up. The short features elaborate costumes for the shop’s female customers as well as some simple but effective set-pieces on those modern contraptions, escalators, and elevators. — David
https://youtu.be/A_IAZ714L1M
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6. One A.M.
Chaplin’s Little Tramp character had been well-established since 1914, and he stuck pretty close to the character – all of his major features from 1921 to 1936 featured the Tramp – but in the Mutual films, he experimented with some other characters, notably a sophisticated man about town. In One A.M., this man arrives home at the titular time greatly inebriated, and the entire film is basically his attempt to get into his house and into bed. And it is hysterical. He can’t get the car door to work, nor his front door (he comes in a window), his bearskin rug attacks him, he has a run-in with the chandelier, and he’s not even up the stairs yet. There’s no pathos in this one, no characters even besides the Man, but it doesn’t matter. Chaplin here brilliantly uses the environment itself as a character, and while this stands as one of his most unconventional shorts, it’s also one of his best. – Jandy
https://youtu.be/t0rQbcQY_Dk
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5. The Pawnshop
You know that old gag where one guy’s got a ladder and keeps swinging it around and accidentally knocking someone else down? This is possibly the most extended, creative, and original version of it, with the ladder gag filling probably a third of the film’s running time and going through several stages – not just knocking people over, but also trapping them, rocking back and forth with Chaplin on top, getting a policeman involved, etc. It never ceases to be funny. This also one of the most consistently combative of the films on the list, with Chaplin and his pawnshop coworker engaging in fisticuffs whenever they get the chance (that is, whenever the owner isn’t watching), and that’s also surprisingly well choreographed and continues to be interesting even though it’s sprinkled so liberally through the film. Chaplin is definitely The Tramp here, but he’s not necessarily the good-hearted innocent that we mostly see in his features – he’s a hard-headed, lithe brawler who’s as likely to be the antagonist as the victim. – Jandy
https://youtu.be/Vpk_MC4AYgw
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4. The Vagabond
By this time, Chaplin’s Little Tramp signature walking style was distinctive enough to start this short with a shot of just his feet walking toward a saloon door and he’s already established before the door opens to reveal the familiar figure. The gag here with the Tramp’s violin vying with a loud brass band for the saloon patron’s favor is well-done, of course, but it’s mere preamble to the meat of the story, which follows a young girl kidnapped by gypsies (stereotype alert) as a child and basically treated as a slave. The Tramp happens upon her and rescues her, through some hilariously well-choreographed derring-do. His burgeoning relationship with the girl, interrupted though it is by a young artist, foreshadows Modern Times’ treatment of the Tramp and Gamine, and this short captures everything that makes Chaplin timeless: flawless visual gags, pathos and emotional depth, and a willingness to let an emotional beat win out over a comedic one. – Jandy
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3. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
With apologies to D.W. Griffith, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is probably the most technically sophisticated of the ten films on this list; it was the first feature film to be shot partly underwater. Scenes of divers in gold, spherical helmets walking through Captain Nemo’s “sea garden” are, for those of us who have seen the movie, almost as iconic as Charlie Chaplin eating his boot. Drawings of the collapsible iron tube through which the underwater action was filmed are almost as ingenious and retro-futuristic as Jules Verne’s own science fiction writing. Yet 20,000 Leagues‘s narrative is as much a reason to watch as its photographic innovation. The third act of this movie reveals what Verne himself kept secret until his follow-up novel, The Mysterious Island: the secret of the antiheroic captain’s origin. Nemo, as fans of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen well know, is a former Indian prince living in self-imposed exile not only from his native land, but from land altogether. The blackface on Nemo portrayer Allen Holubar is a conspicuous sign of the film’s antiquity, but the movie’s sympathy for the captain runs deep, as evidenced by the heartwarming family melodrama that ends the movie. It is fortunate that screenwriter and director Stuart Paton chose to combine both of Verne’s Nemo novels into one work, because the film was so expensive to make that no more Verne adaptations were attempted by Hollywood studios until the late 1920s, the end of the silent era. — David
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2. The Rink
Despite this being the top-ranked of Chaplin’s 1916 shorts, in a way it feels like a throwback to his less-individualized Mack Sennett days at Keystone. He does play the Tramp, but he’s also a waiter, and spends about half the film or more in that garb, and a lot of the gags play like stereotypical silent era pie-in-the-face stuff. He does have his standard cast with him, Edna Purviance as the girl, and Eric Campbell as the heavy – and let me tell you, once they get to the skating rink, seeing Eric Campbell out there on skates pretty much makes up for anytime the film dips into cliche. Silent cinema knew how to use physical bodies very well, and the contrast between Campbell’s hulking frame and Chaplin’s slight one as they try to outmaneuver each other on the rink (no spoiler: Chaplin’s the one doing the outmaneuvering) is pretty enjoyable, if not very deep. Of course, Chaplin’s prowess on skates would surface again in Modern Times. – Jandy
https://youtu.be/Fquc83Z7lZk
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1. Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Through the Ages
One would like to think that Intolerance was D.W. Griffith’s apology for Birth of a Nation – “hey, folks, sorry for being so racist and intolerance before, here’s a movie about how crappy intolerance is and I’ll never do that again.” But no, he was actually hurt and outraged by what he saw as intolerance toward HIMSELF in the backlash against Birth, so in that sense, Intolerance is kind of a petulant “quit being mean and intolerant of my movies” reaction. But, I mean, whatever reason Griffith had for making this film, it turned out pretty spectacularly. Not only is it a technical marvel with enormous sets like the gates of Babylon, but it weaves together four different stories from different time periods on a thematic level, using the cross-cutting tension-building technique that Griffith perfected in his shorts across all four stories to build them all into a simultaneous crescendo. This isn’t an uncommon narrative technique today, but no one had ever done it in 1916 – Griffith was the first to do anything this narratively and thematically complex, and it’s a huge leap even over Birth. And with much less, you know, overt racism. – Jandy
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