Charlie Chicken

I have been writing about the American Film Institute's Top 100 for well over a year now. My goal has been to watch all 100 movies. Last week I was down to 3 movies to go, all of them Charlie Chaplin silent films. That number was reduced to 2 once I got "City Lights" from Netflix. It was odd to have a 90-year old movie on Blu-ray, but I guess it had been digitally restored (and beautifully, I may add). Just by chance one of the movie networks was showing "Chaplin" which was the biopic about him starring Robert Downey Jr. In one scene he is shown wearing a very nice chicken fursuit. Did Chaplin make a movie in fursuit? The answer was "yes!" It was from the movie "The Gold Rush" which was one of the 2 remaining movies on my list. Fortunately it was available on YouTube. So I watched it. Now only "Modern Times" remains on my list. It's on YouTube as well! So back to the chicken fursuit. Here is the scene from the movie. It's from a narrated version of the movie.

I was very impressed with his performance. Then I had a "well, duh!" moment because of course he would be a great fursuit performer. His whole career was built on pantomime and exaggeration.