Sunnyside Is More Average But Still Pretty Humorous Charlie Chaplin Fare

Sunnyside, released 100 years ago this year, is about par for the course for a late 1910s Charlie Chaplin comedy featurette. Wacky physical comedy, Chaplin playing a kind of precursor to The Tramp character, a thinly-sketched love interest for Chaplin's protagonist to pine after, it's all here. That means Sunnyside offers little in the way of surprises but if one is watching Charlie Chaplin films from the 1910s, it's doubtful you're looking for a twisty-turny thriller on par with Se7en. If you're just looking for the kind of amiable comedy only Charlie Chaplin could deliver, Sunnyside will do alright.


In Sunnyside, Charlie Chaplin inhabits the role of an unnamed farmhand who would rather sleep all day than actually do his duties around the house. But his easily agitated boss awakens him from his slumber and Chaplin's character is off to the races, trying to get everything done in an orderly fashion. The rest of the half-hour feature depicts this protagonist engaging in a number of jobs, including helping to round up a herd of cows and mopping the floors of a hotel lobby, all while being enamored with a lady played by Edna Purviance. There's also a fantasy sequence that feels like a precursor to a similarly fantastical sequence from the later Chaplin film The Kid.

Most importantly for Sunnyside, much of Chaplin's physical comedy antics in Sunnyside are quite humorous. Chaplin had a gift for exaggerating everyday clumsiness into more pronounced and entertaining heightened comedy and that gift is put to good use in Sunnyside, most notably in a scene seeing Chaplin's lead character having understandable trouble mopping around a bunch of "lounge lizards" planted firmly in their respective seats. However, the funniest bit of comedy of the movie by far involves the consequences of Chaplin trying to wrangle up cattle. The sight of a cow jumping through a window had me in stitches. It's the simple things!

Whereas bovine leaping into houses is a thoroughly unforgettable comedic sight, the romance part of Sunnyside, which becomes the crux of the story in its second-half, is, unfortunately, pretty forgettable. The best of the love interest characters in Chaplin's films, namely the leading ladies of Modern Times and City Lights, had distinct personalities that were lots of fun to watch, they could function as engaging characters even when they weren't head over heels for The Tramp. But here, the character of Village Belle just isn't given all that much in the way of dimensions in the writing while Edna Purviance's performance is similarly lacking in distinctive qualities.

The fantasy portions of the plot aren't as uniformly successful as the comedy but they are interesting depictions of how Charlie Chaplin, despite making sure his Tramp character was very much grounded in a relatable down-on-his-luck sensibility, was willing to engage in deviations from reality itself. Sunnyside probably works best as a way to examine, with the power of hindsight, how Charlie Chaplin would fine-tune certain elements of his films (namely love interests and incorporating fantasy sequences into otherwise grounded features) for future directorial efforts, but enough of the comedy here works that it can also work as a satisfactory, though far from ideal, showcase of Chaplin's abilities as a silent film comedian.