This Chaplin was pretty coherent in story, although one can still feel his extremely strong focus on single scenes, and his longer films always lack something of an arc for me. But here the whole movie is short enough to keep me posted on the story.
The centerpiece for me was the chase routine, which seemed like an enormously tuned door-in/door-out scene. But the tempo is still amazing to watch even after a hundred years. I felt a lack of this pace in Lloyd's film and in other slapstick comedies from the era and later. The general perception of comedic rhythm seems to have changed substantially over time, but Chaplin's stuff seems to work great in all eras.
His arch-enemy, the fascinating Eric Campbell is a delight to watch and works as the archetypical thug.
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