Conceived and made with a certain amount of labour, as demonstrated by the seventy-two days of production and seventeen days of shooting, and marked by personal problems (the loss of his first born son, his marriage to Mildred Harris), A Day’s Pleasure is perhaps the First National film that shows the most signs of a lack of artistic freedom. Under the pressure of contract deadlines and impatient to get back to the project inspired by the extraordinary meeting with Jackie Coogan, in the fall of 1919 and after a break of over two months, Chaplin returned to working on A Day’s Pleasure and completed it in a handful of days.

A parody of Sunday life in America and its middle class rituals (one of the working titles was The Ford Story), A Day’s Pleasure perhaps does not make any real addition to the Chaplin encyclopedia, but it does confirm the filmmaker’s ability with the “the unique power of the cinematograph“, to use the words of René Clair, squeezing all the comedy possible out of a foldable chair, a smoking Ford and a load of tar. Distributed in forty-three countries including the Philippines, India, Chile and Australia, A Day’s Pleasure was released in Italy along with Sunnyside years later in 1927.

Cecilia Cenciarelli