His Musical Career (1914)

What a waste of my time!!!

Dreadfully Boring

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Am a big fan of Charlie Chaplin, have been for over a decade now. Many films and shorts of his are very good to masterpiece, and like many others consider him a comedy genius and one of film's most important and influential directors. He did do better than 'His Musical Career', still made relatively early on in his career, generally a period where he was still finding his feet and not fully formed what he became famous for (though he is definitely more settled feeling here). Can understand why the Keystone period suffered from not being as best remembered or highly remembered than his later efforts, but they are mainly decent and important in their own right. 'His Musical Career' has a lot of nice things about it and is to me one of the best efforts in the 1914 Keystone batch. 'His Musical Career' is one of his funniest and most charming efforts from this period. Sure the production values are not as audacious. Appreciated the busier story than most from some other 1914 efforts of his, though occasionally it was a bit hard to follow and still a bit flimsy. 'His Musical Career' for early Chaplin is pretty good and it showed that Chaplin was starting to settle.While not audacious, the film hardly looks ugly, is more than competently directed and is appealingly played. Chaplin looks comfortable, with more shades than before of his distinctive style here, and shows his stage expertise while opening it up that it doesn't become stagy or repetitive shtick. There is more sympathy and emotion than most of his efforts from this period.Although the humour, charm and emotion was done even better and became more refined later, 'His Musical Career' is still very funny, cute and hard to dislike. It moves quickly and doesn't feel too long or short.Overall, pretty good. 7/10 Bethany Cox

Chaplin and Mack Swain are piano movers for Charley Chase in this fast-moving film. Of course they get the addresses mixed up and deliver a piano to the wrong address while also repossessing one from another customer by mistake. The comedy here isn't slapstick so much as it is gags, mainly sight gags. Chaplin lifting a piano with ease from one end on a sidewalk, and maintaining the same back-breaking shape after carrying a piano are two. The funniest is what happens with the donkey-pulled trailer they use to haul a piano. Still the film is not as developed as several other early Chaplin films. The same premise was later reused by Laurel & Hardy in The Music Box several years later. ** of 4 stars.

His Musical Career, or Musical Tramps, reminds me of my days as a furniture mover in Los Angeles. The company I worked for did work for interior designers, so most of our time was spent delivering astonishingly expensive designer furniture for the rich an famous. I remember one day we had to move a piano across a room in house in the Hollywood Hills so we could get a new table in, and the piano was so heavy that it took six of our guys to move it, and even then we could only move it a few feet at a time. Because of this, I have a feeling that some of the comedy might be lost on a lot of the audience, because most people don't really realize how heavy pianos really are. For now I'll just say that there are moving companies that do nothing but move pianos (they're called "piano movers," surprisingly enough), which is why it's so funny to see Chaplin carrying that piano around the room by himself. Musical Tramps was made in Charlie's first year making short comedies for Mack Sennett, so it's pretty simple, although there is the amusing premise that the diminutive tramp gets a new job as a mover and then messes up his first assignment, which is to deliver one piano and repossess another. He mixes up the order, of course, and goes to repossess the piano of a wealthy man who had just purchased it.(spoilers) But strangely enough, the film ends just when that premise is supposed to come into play. Charlie and his oafish co-worker get to the man's house and repossess it, and when the angry man finds out, he demands to know where they're going with his piano and then they proceed to roll down the sidewalk and into a pond. It seems to end before it's supposed to, but there are some good sight gags here ,such as Charlie carrying the piano around on his back and the donkey getting lifted off the ground by the load he's trying to pull. Also watch for Charliedoing his baseball pitch gag, which was done much more effectively but almost exactly the same in The Immigrant a few years later.Notice, by the way, that when they are repossessing the rich man's piano out of his stately mansion in what looks like Beverly Hills, at one point they bump into the wall, shaking the whole house!

I've seen quite a few Chaplin shorts from early in his career and I've noticed that his early stuff (done for Keystone Studios) is pretty dreadful stuff. Unlike his wonderful full-length films from the 20s and 30s, the films from 1914-1915 are incredibly poorly made--having no script but only vague instructions from the director. In most cases, the films had almost no plot and degenerated to people punching and kicking each other.In this film, Charlie gets a job working for a company selling pianos. While the plot never gets all that deep, there are some unexpectedly funny moments--particularly involving the poor donkey who is pulling the cart filled with people AND a piano as well as the sight of Charlie single-handedly toting what had to have been a prop piano. A cute film but not especially great either.