When I'm faced with challenges in my life, I am somewhat heartened by something I learned as a child, that an oyster has to be irritated by a grain of sand in order to eventually make a pearl. That knowledge always made the load I was carrying seem less significant, and helped me to see the light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak. Cinematically speaking, at least in the fine age of silent movies, one of the most difficult gestation periods for the birth of a great film was the highly traumatic 11 months of production for one of Sir Charles Chaplin's masterpieces, 'The Circus'.

I love both silent cinema and early filmic comedies, and though I prefer Buster Keaton to Chaplin, I always enjoy his great works, up to and including 'The Great Dictator'. Particularly close to my heart is 'The Circus'. Considering all of the brutal disasters Sir Charles Chaplin was facing during the movie's elongated production (ruined film negative, studio burning down, Lita Grey's divorce papers [and the related sex-scandals hitting the papers], nervous breakdown, mother dying, IRS demanding a million in back taxes, one of the circus wagons being stolen, just to mention a few), it's miraculous that a film was released at all, let alone one as gracefully hilarious yet contemplatively mature as 'The Circus', and that he was able to both recover and rebound from this bad spell to have a superlative career as one of the greatest actor/directors ever to grace cinema. His life was basically a three-ring circus, and he was still able to retain his dignity and escape virtually unscathed.

Because of the aforementioned trials and tribulations he endured in those eleven months of the film's making (which IMHO would be worthy of a fine film itself, in its documentation and chronicling), though it may not be as side-splitting in its hilarity as 'The Gold Rush' or 'Modern Times', it will probably hold the closest place to my heart of Chaplin's films.

A rather tight, simple premise that blossoms under the influence of Charlie Chaplin's expert touch, like a majority of his timeless classics. This go-around, he happens upon a traveling circus, inadvertently stumbles his way into becoming a star attraction, falls for the trapeze girl and finds trouble with her father, the ringmaster. Sprinkled along the way are frequent doses of brilliant physical comedy, inventive and original as ever, which playfully goof around with the trappings of daily life around the carnival grounds.

Chaplin suffered several personal hardships during filming - a messy public divorce, a ruinous studio fire, the death of a parent - and tucked in amidst all the hijinx and gags I found a tinge of quiet sadness and reflection. Particularly late in the picture, when the plucky Tramp falls into the friend zone and struggles with jealousy over his girl's new fling, he emits an air of desperation, then acceptance, that organically develops into a sweet, unexpected climax. It's easy to get the sense that he worked through quite a bit with this picture, both behind the camera and before it, which elevates the product from a very good silent comedy into something more significant, something lasting. The parting shot, in which the show noisily rides off to the next town while Chaplin is left in the dust, serves as a potent metaphor for his fears over the steamrolling arrival of sound cinema (The Jazz Singer opened a mere three months before The Circus) and adds yet another layer to the complex emotional undercurrent. A phenomenal, and oft-overlooked, bit of understated work from one of Hollywood's brightest stars.