The Pink Panther (1963)

Conventional wisdom tells me that it's generally not a good idea for a comedy film to be overlong. running gags can really only work well 2-3 times before they get stale, and with a single setup and set of characters there is typically only so much iteration you can do before you start to repeat your self. Imagine my surprise then that The Pink Panther (1963), a movie I've seen a few times and generally regard as a light quick comedy, is actually a nicely plump 2 hours. It certainly feels a lot quicker.

The Great Dictator (1940)

Having done a bit of research on this film (actually just glancing at the wikipedia page) I learned that in his biography Charlie Chaplin stated that he would not have made The Great Dictator (1940) if he had known the true extent of the violence committed against the Jewish people in Germany. Perhaps this would have been the right decision in 1940 when Hitler was still in power and the threat he represented wasn't widely known. Trivializing dangerous people can give them power by disguising their threat, however in 2019, to quote Mel Brooks, "Of course it is impossible to take revenge for 6 million murdered Jews. But by using the medium of comedy, we can try to rob Hitler of his posthumous power and myths."

The Circus (1928)

Genre is an interesting thing. There are very often blurred lines separating works into genre classifications. The more closely you examine any work the more difficult it becomes to lock it down to a specific genre. Very often this distinction comes down to a wishy-washy "I know it when I see it approach".

The Pawnshop and A Dog's Life

When you go back far enough into the history of popular art you reach a point where works get increasingly hard to talk about due to the almost alien cultural context within which they were created and initially seen. This is not to say that art can't be timeless, many paintings, music, books etc... are received in much the same way now as they were when they were created, but many popluar works lose or change their meaning over time and this can be alienating. This is very evident when viewing the cinema of the early 20th century today. The tools filmmakers had to work with were more restrictive and that certainly does have an alienating effect, but there were also vastly different cultural expectations as to what moving pictures were expected to accomplish.