From Peep Show to Palace recounts the enchanting early years of film, beginning with the primitive motion of the "magic lantern" in the fifteenth century and continuing, most significantly, with the explosion of research from 1893 to 1913, when the modern motion picture was born. Respected film critic David Robinson offers this vivid account of the haphazard process, "like the assembly of the pieces of a puzzle," which was the birth of American film....

A hapless factory worker cracks under the strain of his job and is sent off in a paddy wagon. He then finds himself unemployed, on the streets of Depression America, where he befriends a young woman fleeing childcare authorities, and they embark on a misadventure-filled search for happiness. An imaginative, often slapstick satire on the alienating and disruptive effects of mass production and automation. Charlie Chaplin, in his last portrayal of...

When his boss demands more speed and efficiency, Chaplin goes crazy from his repetitious assembly line job. Primarily a silent film with music and sound effects, but occasional voices emanate from radios and television screens.