Charlie Chaplin's perfect film about the First World War
Amid the commemorations of the start of the First World War, you might like a bit of respectful levity, so here is Charlie Chaplin's Shoulder Arms. It's one of my favourite films, made at a point where Chaplin was peaking, with a perfect balance of sheer inventiveness and just the right amount of sentiment. Before he was a little too nasty and liable to kick people in the ass and leer at ladies; after he increasingly tended to the cloying. But in 1918, when he made Shoulder A