English Revue

Conrad Nagel, representing the Hollywood movie community, and Jack Benny, representing the Broadway stage community, act as the interlocutors of a musical comedy revue. A plethora of chorus boys and girls are featured front and center in some of the song and dance numbers, and provide back-up to some other acts. But the revue primarily is a vehicle to highlight a cavalcade of Hollywood movie and Broadway stage stars. One early running gag has both Nagel and Benny playing straight man to Cliff Edwards, who just wants a nice introduction to his act. Edwards would return later to be featured along with the Brox Sisters in one of the highlights of the second act, a production number around the song "Singin' in Rain", complete with rain soaked stage. A reprise of the song with the entire cast acts as the revue's finale.

Gabrielle (Helene Hallier), an ambitious but innocent would-be young chorine, trumps a music hall publicity stunt to become the new Parisian nightclub Cinderella. But this lighter-than-champagne-bubbles story is only a pretext for LA REVUE DES REVUES's white-hot, non-stop procession of outrageously and scantily attired exotic dancers, showgirls, and acrobats including the Tiller¹s Follies Girls, Ruth Zackey and the Hoffmann Girls, and danseuse russe Lila Nikolska. But it's Josephine Baker, "the high priestess of primitivism" (J. Hoberman Village Voice), who triumphs in two show stopping numbers in which "her clownish backfield-in-motion Charleston shimmy is unlike anything else in the movie and perhaps unlike anything anyone ever did."

Three classic silent comedies from Charles Chaplin - A Dog's Life (1918), Shoulder Arms (1918) and The Pilgrim (1923) - are here strung together to form a single feature length film with new music, narration and connecting material.
In A Dog's Life, The Tramp and his dog companion try to survive in the city. Shoulder Arms features Chaplin as a boot camp private who has a dream of being a hero, and in The Pilgrim, he becomes the new minister for the town of Devil's Gulch by mistake. This DVD edition features a restored version of the film along with the following extras: Introduction by David Robinson, Deleted scenes from Shoulder Arms and Sunnyside, A visit to the Chaplin studios and Shorts: A Dogs Life, Shoulder Arms, The Pilgrim, Sunnyside, A Day’s Pleasure, The Idle Class and Pay Day.