ONE MORE THOUGHT ABOUT "THE RINK"

There's more to say about "The Rink," if you're up for it! I thought it would be fun to talk about the story. I don't have much space, so I'll just talk about the first half.

You could almost have called the story "The Restaurant" because so much of the first half takes place there. Why the split locales? Shouldn't a story about a rink take place mostly in a rink? Maybe there was some practical reason. Anyway, I have a pragmatic view about it. Doing it this way resulted in a great film, end of argument.

The story in the restaurant sets up the conflict between Chaplin (the waiter) and Eric Cambell (the big, burly customer). Actually the conflict was Chaplin's fault because he tried to cheat Cambell out of his change, but it doesn't matter. We sympathize with Chaplin because he's cute. I guess the logic of the heart is what counts here, not the logic of the mind.

The writer could have written to heavily favor the main conflict between Chaplin and Cambell, instead there were constant digressions into funny subplots about secondary characters like the cook and the head waiter. In a way this sequence is about the zany life in the restaurant as much as it's about Chaplin. The action is fast and furious with people getting into fights, flirting, getting fired, etc. at a rapid pace. A modern writer would simplify the story to focus on the Chaplin/Cambell conflict...and he'd be wrong. Subtext means a lot.

The full name of the film is something like, "The Rink: The Story of an Amorous Waiter." That's odd because the first half of the story hardly ever puts Chaplin in a romantic situation. You get the feeling that Chaplin had trouble deciding what the film was about. The scene that starts the film sets up the girl in the story but it feels tacked on, as if it was added later as an afterthought. Amazingly, faults like this don't seem to harm the film at all. The pace, the acting, and the strong intuition of the director carries it.