Free Buster Keaton & Charlie Chaplin Movies to Watch Online
If you have never seen a Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin film all the way through, you are in for a treat, and you don’t need a subscription to do it. Their silent work is in the U.S. public domain, and a big selection of it airs around the clock on Laugh Track, our comedy channel. Every silent title plays with a public-domain piano score, so there’s no need to watch in silence.
People like to set these two up as rivals. It’s more useful to think of them as opposites. Chaplin’s Tramp wants you to feel for him. Keaton, the "Great Stone Face", never asks for sympathy at all; he just keeps solving problems, usually with his body, usually at real risk. Watch one of each and you’ll see what I mean.
Where to start with Keaton
Start with The General. Keaton plays a Southern railroad engineer during the Civil War whose locomotive – and girlfriend – are stolen by Union spies, and the rest of the film is one long chase in both directions. It was inspired by a real 1862 raid, and Keaton co-directed with Clyde Bruckman. The trains are real, the stunts are real, and the whole thing is staged with a clarity that action filmmakers still study.
Sherlock Jr. is the one to show anyone who thinks old films are slow. Keaton is a cinema projectionist who dreams himself into the movie he is showing, literally stepping into the screen while the scenery cuts around him. It runs well under an hour and it is packed.
Steamboat Bill, Jr. has the most famous stunt of his career: during a cyclone, the front of a house falls on him and he survives because he happens to be standing exactly where an open window lands. It wasn’t a trick. You’ll find yourself rewinding it in your head for days.
There’s plenty more. The Navigator strands Keaton and a wealthy young woman alone on an ocean liner adrift at sea. In Seven Chances he has to get married by seven o’clock that evening to inherit a fortune, which eventually leads to an avalanche of boulders down a hillside. Our Hospitality drops him into a Southern family feud, with a river-and-waterfall rescue at the end. Go West is a western in which his best friend is a cow. College has him as a bookish student trying every sport to impress a girl, and Three Ages tells the same love story in the Stone Age, ancient Rome and the modern day – a parody of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, which also airs on Starlite TV.
Don’t skip the shorts. One Week, in which newlyweds assemble a build-it-yourself kit house from mixed-up parts, is one of the great two-reelers. Cops ends with what looks like the entire police department chasing Keaton through town, and The Scarecrow opens with a gadget-filled one-room house that is pure joy.
Where to start with Chaplin
For Chaplin, the obvious feature is The Gold Rush. The Tramp heads to the Klondike, and the film is full of scenes people remember even if they’ve never seen it: a starving man cooking and eating his boot, a cabin teetering on the edge of a cliff, the little dance Chaplin performs with two forks and two bread rolls. It is funny, and then suddenly it’s sad, and then it’s funny again.
The real gems for new viewers, though, are the short films he made for the Mutual company in 1916 and 1917. They are around twenty to thirty minutes each, and they show Chaplin at his most inventive. The Immigrant follows the Tramp on a rough ocean crossing to America and into a restaurant where he can’t pay the bill, and it has real warmth as well as laughs. In Easy Street he becomes a policeman on the toughest street in town, facing a giant bully played by Eric Campbell, his regular heavy in these films. The Cure sends him to a health spa with a suitcase full of liquor. The Pawnshop includes a famous routine in which he "examines" an alarm clock until there’s nothing left of it, The Rink shows off his roller-skating, and in The Adventurer he’s an escaped convict who blunders into high society. Edna Purviance, his leading lady through this period, appears throughout.
And while you’re there
Laugh Track isn’t only Keaton and Chaplin. Harold Lloyd, the third great silent clown, is on the schedule too: Safety Last! is the film with Lloyd dangling from a clock high above the street, and The Freshman, Girl Shy and The Kid Brother are all worth catching. Laurel & Hardy’s early sound shorts, like Another Fine Mess and Hog Wild, make a natural follow-up.
How to watch
Starlite TV works like broadcast television. Tune in to Laugh Track and you’ll join whatever is playing right now. If you want a specific film, its page shows the next few airings in your own time zone. A Keaton short might be on in ten minutes; a feature might be tonight. That’s part of the charm – you might come in for Chaplin and stay for Keaton. For more films from this era, see our guide to silent film classics everyone should see.