Charlie Chaplin's most underrated film is given a great treatment with the Chaplin Collection release of the film that got him his first Academy Award. It's a lovely comedy with a love triangle built in. Since I leave the actual review of the film in my film page and I don't consider picture and sound when I buy a DVD, I will go straight to the special features.
All the special features appear on Disc 2 of the DVD.
As always the first feature is David Robinson's Introduction. He explains all the terrible things that happened during the making of The Circus, which Chaplin doesn't even mention in his autobiography. I like his pieces and this is one of the best.
We follow this with the "Chaplin Today" documentary which although isn't the best of the "Chaplin Today" pieces, it's still quite good. Filmmaker Emir Kusturica gives some nice points on the film, but we hardly even understand what he's saying.
Next we have the deleted sequence explained in the introduction, which is rather entertaining. It involves the Tramp and Merna having a "date", when who but Rex the handsome tight rope walker shows up. We get a very funny moment when the Tramp attempts to pick a woman's fish up. Later the Tramp is soon being pelted by little balls by a famed prize fighter. This is a very funny scene which caps off very well, and I don't know why Chaplin didn't end up putting it into the final product.
We also get some outtakes of the above mentioned scene which shows Chaplin's perfectionist ways. It's very interesting to see that a scene that didn't end up in the picture took six days to film.
We follow that with a trio of home movies which are great historical snippets that should been shown in film classes. They pretty much show Chaplin having a lot of fun on and off the set, and although not that exciting they're, like I mentioned before, great historical snippets.
We get a number of achival footage in the "Documents" area. We see the Hollywood premiere, which only gets interesting near the end when the stars arrive. The first part whos some circus acts which aren't at all that exciting. We next see a bit called "Camera A, Camera B" which isn't at all interesting, followed by another boring piece called "3D Test Footage." The latter two contribute nothing at all. This section then ends off with an excerpt of a Jackie Coogan film called "Circus Days." It's a nice feature that's rather Chaplinesque, which proves how much Coogan learnt from Chaplin while working on "The Kid." I will try to hunt down the full feature.
We finally end with some nice trailers, very interesting photographs, and a dozen posters. Finally the disc caps off with short clips from the other films in the Chaplin Collection. I consider this feature rather useless since we can watch the entire picture on the other DVDs (This part doesn't affect the final percentage).
This is a great DVD that any Chaplin fan or film buff should own. The final percentage for The Circus: The Chaplin Collection is 90%.