Chaplin at Essanay (1915-1916)

d. Charles Chaplin / USA / Four selected shorts, 118 mins.


Conventional wisdom would lead one to expect Charles Chaplin's short comedies at Essanay Studios to be better than his work for Keystone but still not as tight and brilliant as his work for Mutual; for once, conventional wisdom doesn't disappoint. Frustrated with the rules of Keystone, Chaplin left the studio for a lucrative contract at Essanay, which afforded slightly more of the creative control he desired. In effect, Essanay was as particular as Keystone's Mack Sennett, but Chaplin could more easily ignore and avert their story demands as long as he stayed punctual in production. (Trying to shape Chaplin's output to their own preferences is seen as somewhat ironic today because, as Gary Johnson notes, "If not for Chaplin's comedies for Essanay, it's doubtful if more than a handful of people would now recognize the Essanay name.")

At Essanay, Chaplin's short films grew from one reel to two, he began developing a cast of regulars, and without the pressure to abandon story for silliness, he amplified the narrative and brought what would become one of his signatures — a healthy amount of pathos — into the daylight. What speaks to that fact the best is the sense that in his first film for Essanay, His New Job, the Tramp is already fully formed. We follow the Tramp taking up employment at a movie studio and is a not-so-veiled riff on leaving Keystone for somewhere new. It is one of his two great short films at Essanay, and a proper appreciation of it comes after watching undeveloped films like The Rounders and Tillie's Punctured Romance from Keystone.

His New Job shows a Tramp virtually indistinguishable from the character who would appear through the 1920s: tricky, naive, klutzy, ready to make a fool of himself or of anyone else. Like many plots involving the Tramp and work of some sort, he makes the job miserable for everyone else involved. There are antics you would expect to occur when you give the Tramp a two-by-four or a sword to go with a Renaissance costume, but already the difference from Keystone is made clear: Chaplin realized the Tramp had become strong enough to warrant time on screen alone, small moments of quiet comedy that could nevertheless make us smile. Chaplin does take full advantage of multiple person slapstick, particularly in the Tramp's relationship to a rotund director and a leading prop man, but His New Job does something remarkable off the bat by allowing us to observe the Tramp in solitude. What Chaplin gained by increasing the running time from one reel to two reels is an ability to include a scene of like the one in His New Job where the Tramp wanders curiously around inside a star's dressing room and eventually dons the costume intended for the star. It delivers insight into the Tramp but fits into the narrative in preparation for antics that will arise when the star arrives on set looking for his costume.

Chaplin never had much of an interest in dazzling technique as a director (which speaks well to how great they are, relative camera stasis aside), but there are a couple moments in His New Job that are important enough to illustrate that his mind was nonetheless thinking about technique. For starters, the camera moves — simply, of course, but the effect is lovely. As the later portion of the short shifts to focus on the crew characters trying to make their movie, Chaplin keeps the director character and the cameraman character in the frame. The lone exception is a splendid dolly in where you can see the director and cameraman on the left side of the screen until the frame tightens exclusively on the actors, creating a splendid illusion of the actors now performing for Chaplin's camera as well as the now-unseen camera out of frame. And Chaplin is able to surprise us with locations, too. His Now Job occupies approximately five sets, and the relation of one to another is generally clear; but Chaplin earns a big laugh in the second half by cutting back and forth between two sets that it's possible we have forgotten are actually separated by a thin curtain. Once somebody on the other side of the curtain gets the tip of a sword into his rear end, it all clicks in marvelous timing.

At Essanay Chaplin also produced what many believe is his first masterpiece, albeit a minor one: The Tramp. Chaplin resembles more of a vagabond than ever in The Tramp, where he saves a young woman (Edna Purviance, who Chaplin first began casting and wooing in these early comedies at Essanay) walking along the road from a band of bullying hobos, and as a reward earns the hospice of the young woman and a spot on the workforce of her father's farm. Like His New Job, the superficial appeal of The Tramp is what sort of trouble can Chaplin cause with a pitchfork, with a ladder, with a bucket of cow's milk, etc. But on a deeper level, The Tramp allows Chaplin's character to lovable good guy we know him to be. When the hobos finally track down the woman and her father, it is up to Chaplin's Tramp to save the day.

The Tramp ends with perhaps the most iconic images we associate with the Chaplin: walking down a lonely road by himself. By the end of the short, the young woman's beau has returned to the farm and it becomes clear that the Tramp had mistaken her kindness and thankfulness for love. Losing the girl that was never really his in the first place is a motif that recurs regularly through Chaplin's films, and it is an ending we often conclude is bittersweet. More appropriately, we should consider it a form a cinematic courage; these endings where the hero doesn't get the girl bear a stronger semblance to reality than many Hollywood films would dare. And the fleeting final shots in The Tramp, as the iris is in the process of shrinking inward, instruct us how to read these finales. We assume the Tramp must be forlorn, and perhaps he is, but suddenly he shakes himself and does a silly jump. It allows the ending to remain ambiguous and open-ended, and lends an unexpected sense of continuity between the Tramp films. There's always something else down the road — more trouble, more police officers, more unrequited love, and always more laughs.

Many of the Chaplin shorts at Essanay (aside from the two already mentioned) feel calculated to an extreme, revealing an underlying formula that is functional enough with a wide array of stories. Police (1916), for example, shows the Tramp being released from jail only to anger patrol officers on the outside and fall back in with his old cellmate who convinces him to help rob a woman (Purviance). But of course we know the Tramp will come around, and when the cellmate threatens the woman, the Tramp fends him away and saves her. It ends with the aforementioned patented Chaplin loneliness: the woman rewards him for his bravery with some money and sends him on his lonesome way.

The lone standout among the Essanay crowd in strict terms of subject matter is The Burlesque on Carmen, a strange and unmoving parody of Georges Bizet's opera and contemporaneous film adaptations. Chaplin doesn't play the Tramp, but uses that perception of aloofness in his character Corporal Darn Hosiery, who is seduced by Carmen (who else but Purviance?) in an effort to distract him from the nefarious deeds of gypsies. It is sort of a mishmash of slapstick and swashbuckling that doesn't deliver, and I would assume those unfamiliar with Bizet would most likely have a difficult time gleaning the humor of the parody. In the sense that it's largely different from Chaplin's other films at Essanay, watching it as a Chaplin fan might be satisfying — but His New Job and The Tramp are more rewarding and more representative of the high-quality filmmaking that would soon be in store for Chaplin.

Note: The Chaplin short films at Essanay are in public domain and are widely available, but the transfers from Kino are the best there are. If you're interested in The Burlesque on Carmen, the Kino transfer is particularly important because it most closely resembles the two-reel version originally envisioned by Chaplin instead of the four-reel version created by Essanay after he had parted ways with them to go work at Mutual Studios.

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Chaplin at Keystone (1914)

d. Various / USA / Four shorts, one feature: 145 mins.


Mack Sennett, founder of Keystone Studios, plucked Charles Chaplin from Fred Karno's touring American troupe in 1913, but the path to stardom of the man many consider the greatest silent comedian of all time was anything but easy. To begin with, Sennett — the founder of American slapstick — almost immediately regretted the decision. Chaplin was a replacement for Ford Sterling, one of the original Keystone Cops, and apparently didn't live up to the high hopes of Sennett. It was director and comedienne Mabel Normand who apparently argued for Chaplin to stay, and thankfully she did or the name Charles Chaplin might have been lost to the ages.

Chaplin's year at Keystone Studio, his first year in cinema, is as historically important as his later years at Essanay (where he grasped creative control for the first time) and Mutual (where he produced what many consider his first truly great short comedies). Once saved from firing, Chaplin's rise was meteoric. He appeared in 35 films at Keystone — all shorts except one, all released to the public at the rate of nearly one per week throughout 1914. More than half of those films he directed, and later he began to trend away from Sennett's superficial focus on mere slapstick and begin to insert genuine emotion into his characters. At Keystone there was also the genesis of Chaplin's Tramp character, which appeared in Chaplin's second short, Kid Auto Races at Venice (directed by Henry Lehrman). The short thrives as a literal showcase of Chaplin's new character: as a cameraman attempts to capture an auto race (often in point-of-view shot), the Tramp continues to wander in front of the lens and anger the crew. In this early incarnation the Tramp is a little scruffier than we're used to, but still naive and innocent in the ways we know and love, and the short, while narrowly imagined, is effective.

By the time Chaplin began directing himself, he'd starred in ten shorts. He rubbed many directors the wrong way and they didn't sit well with him (ironically, although Normand saved his job, Chaplin resented being directed by her because she was a woman). His directorial debut is the throwaway one-note short Twenty Minutes of Love, in which the Tramp marauds around in a park and makes passes at women in front of their men. The Rounders, directed by Chaplin and co-starring Fatty Arbuckle, is among the first films where Chaplin roots nearly all of the laughs in his character being drunk — or, in silent cinema parlance, being "thirsty." At times it feels like a rough draft for the sort of drunk humor Chaplin sharpened later in his career, most notably in Pay Day and City Lights. The jokes here are fairly typical: missing chairs, feuding with his wife, going to a restaurant and causing a commotion. Aside from its minor authorial importance (and the co-starring of another prominent comedian, something that wouldn't happen again until the appearance of Buster Keaton in Limelight), the short is only adequate.

The film that proves itself worthy of all audiences is Chaplin's best at Keystone, The New Janitor. Not only is it quite funny (without question I laughed aloud for the first time watching the Keystones in the scene of the Tramp attempting to clean a window high from the sidewalk by sitting on the sill and leaning outside), but it served as a general outline for the direction Chaplin would take silent cinema. While Sennett focused almost exclusively on nearly anonymous slapstick, in The New Janitor Chaplin slows down the antics and lets the story lead the way. The comedy — and our empathizing with the Tramp and understanding of the supporting characters — is rooted back into the narrative in a way that Keystone hadn't yet accomplished. Though certainly no masterpiece, it does pack multiple layers into its brief 16-minute running time, as opposed to other Keystone shorts that feel as if the material is being stretched perilously thin to merely fill a reel.

* *

Under different circumstances I'd give a full review to Tillie's Punctured Romance, the Sennett-directed slapstick-fest that is widely considered to be the first feature comedy in American film. But the film has more in common with the shorts Chaplin starred in than it does with many other feature films. Because so many of Sennett's jokes could originate in gags practically unrelated to the underlying action, Tillie's Punctured Romance unrolls in the fashion of a few shorts surgically stitched together. In the film Chaplin plays a shameless con artist named Charlie from the city who woos a country girl named Tillie (Marie Dressler) to make off with her father's money. Once they arrive in town, however, he promptly leaves her so he and another woman, Mabel (Normand), can buy new clothes. Tillie ends up in jail for alcohol consumption and becomes a waitress. Of course, Charlie and Mabel are later visitors at the restaurant and the antics continue, driven forward by Tillie's scorn for Chaplin (one of the most heartless characters of his career). There's a hell of a gag in the first few minutes involving a thrown brick, but the comedy generally fails to rise above the level of most Keystone shorts. The Keystone Cops do show up, but it's only their scenes toward the end where numerous characters go careening off a dock that come off as fresh. It's certainly recommended for those interested in the history of silent comedy or the career of Chaplin, but otherwise mid-level Keaton or Harold Lloyd would be a better use of valuable viewing hours.

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A Countess from Hong Kong (1967)

d. Charles Chaplin / UK / 108 mins.


Charles Chaplin's last film, A Countess from Hong Kong, provided him with many of firsts. Some of them are positive: his first film in color, his first film in anamorphic widescreen, his first film starring celebrities other than himself (Marlon Brando and Sofia Loren). Others aren't so great: this is his first film since 1923's A Woman in Paris in which he did not star, and much like that film 44 years earlier, A Countess from Hong Kong is rather abysmal.

Brando stars as Ogden Mears, a member of the U.S. diplomatic corps and the son of the world's wealthiest oilman who many expect will become the next secretary of State but who instead becomes the next ambassador to Saudi Arabia. On his last night in Hong Kong, he meets a lovely Russian countess named Natascha (Sophia Loren), and when he wakes the next morning with a wicked hangover, he discovers that she's become a stowaway in his plush cabin aboard a regal ocean liner. She has no passport or identification and seeks only to escape Hong Kong for a better life in America. Brando, playing a stodgy diplomat, wants her out of his life, but gives in and agrees to help her reach the land of the free.

Did I mention this is a comedy? If I haven't, then certainly you must forgive me because this is also Chaplin's first since A Woman in Paris that isn't funny — which is bad news for Countess because the latter was an actual drama. A Countess from Hong Kong genuinely tries for a few laughs, following in the footsteps of romantic comedies before; early in the film most of the humor is meant to come from the chaotic scrambling of Ogden and Natascha as they try to keep her hidden from the other members of the diplomatic corps and the press. But the audience can only sustain so many "there's-a-knock-on-the-door-quick-hide-in-the-bathroom" moments before it becomes overbearingly tedious.

Part of the problem here is that A Countess from Hong Kong originated in a recycled script Chaplin had from the 1930s with Paulette Goddard meant to star as the stowaway countess. Its sensibilities are decidedly of that time, when slapstick and slight banter might have carried the day, and very little of it feels updated in any way. Chaplin could do humor that was both cerebral and silly, but in this film he abandoned almost all aspects of thinking. Before it grows sweeter and more romantic in its second half, we're treated to a pedestrian gag about seasickness where Brando, Loren, and Sydney Chaplin all vomit out the portholes. (Chaplin has a cameo in the scene as a nauseated steward.) Of all of Chaplin's later films, this one is the most problematic in basic storytelling and comedy. The best thing I can say about it is that I was able to watch Sophia Loren for a while — not exactly a stellar endorsement of a film, but when you're adrift this far out, you search the screen for whatever will give you the slightest thrill.

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A King in New York (1957)

d. Charles Chaplin / UK / 105 mins.


A King in New York is the film where Charles Chaplin gets to hose down HUAC — literally. When his character, the disposed ruler of an unnamed European country, is called before the House Un-American Activities Committee near the end of the film on the false accusation that he is a communist, he has become tangled a hose that turns on and gives the red-baiting mongers a douse of pressurized water. It is a thrilling moment, particularly when one knows Chaplin suffered his own disposal in America due to alleged communist sympathies, but it would be unfair to pronounce A King in New York has a revenge film, or even one whose overall mission is the delivery of political satire. This film is forlorn, yes, and humanist too (as they all are). In many ways it's merely a film fueled by the act of stepping back and observing the postwar world gone amok — the loud and bursting sounds of rock n' roll, a generation of cheap exploitation films, the abundance of television and advertising, plastic surgery, the squandered possibilities of atomic power, and investigations into allegiances.

In the great Chaplin tradition of inverting reality for his own needs, his first film made after he wasn't allowed back into America involves a foreign character going to America. King Shahdov (Chaplin) flees his country after a revolution and ends up in the United States, his treasury swindled and his wife in Paris. He is broke and looking for capital, which he sees as a large potential in the safe and peaceful use of atomic energy. But while he waits for the bureaucracy, he bides his time in American society, scenes in which Chaplin pokes fun at commercialism. Seated next to a rock band at dinner, he jitters and shakes from the noise; at a movie theater, he sees a trailer for an exploitation film called "Man or Woman?," in which a man as a woman's voice and vice versa. Most of these are substantially weak, but there is something eerily prophetic and witty in a scene where he is invited to a grand dinner and coaxed into performing Hamlet's soliloquy to entertain the other guests. Although broke, Shahdov has resisted offers to use his fame in commercials, but the dinner is a covert trick to have him appear unknowingly on live television. (His dining partner occasionally turns toward a hidden camera to deliver commercial messages.)

But commercialism is a rather broad topic, and while the first half of A King in New York is relatively humorous and a moment like the dining party is relatively sharp, it lacks a central focus to help all the pieces come together. Once the second half arrives, Chaplin selects politics as his singular cohesive theme, but now at the sake of sharpness. To connect Shahdov to HUAC, Chaplin uses a boys' boarding school. As the king tours the facility, he meets an exuberant young man, the son of left-wing activists (and Chaplin's actual son, Michael) who argues politics with the king. Shahdov develops a soft-spot for the little spunky radical, who he later sees wandering the winter streets of the city, and he takes him in to warm him while trying to get him back to his parents. But when the parents are called before HUAC, Shahdov is guilty by association and pulled in as well. Although Chaplin could have a fine ear for satire, the political edge here is nowhere near as sharp as The Great Dictator, Monsieur Verdoux, or Modern Times. Never one to prance around subtly, the young leftist becomes an exceedingly transparent surrogate for Chaplin's own views. The choice of making the child the moral epicenter is interesting in its dichotomy — the boy represents a hopeful future and also a static and meek force at the mercy of others; but the child also invokes a level of naivete that works against Chaplin's message, and worse, the kid is often rather irksome in his self-righteousness (just as Chaplin's own pontifications could become, and this is coming from a guy that typically doesn't mind the director's long-winded pedantries).

McCarthyism provoked numerous responses in the creative arts, from Arthur Miller's The Crucible to the film High Noon, but never had it been called a spade a spade before this film, believed to be the first to use HUAC by name and stand in direct opposition to it. Like The Great Dictator, which fought against the Nazis and fascism, there is a certain brazenness in his approach (although certainly easier to accomplish filming in Europe with the penalty of going unreleased in America). When that hose is unleashed on the committee, it should be a triumphant moment. Instead it's a bit of a letdown.

Although Chaplin was born and raised in England, he'd never made a film there until A King in New York. But his involuntary exile from America (after having his reentry visa was revoked during his publicity tour in London for his previous film, Limelight) forced him to work in England if he wanted to continue making movies. Neither Limelight (1952) nor A King in New York weren't shown in the United States until 1972. Of course the great irony in all of this is that Chaplin was one of the most creative forces working in America during the early part of the twentieth century, a man who did more to launch the comedy movement in Hollywood cinema than many and a man who will probably be known centuries from now. By the time he reached A King in New York, he lacked the astute humor or the rousing occasion. There's enough to admire here, particularly some of the antics in Chaplin's last on-screen leading role, but it feels only significant in terms of completing an entire viewing of Chaplin's works.

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Limelight (1952)

d. Charles Chaplin / USA / 137 mins.


This review discusses details of the film's ending.

Although infrequently screened and often derided in contemporary conversations, Limelight is Charles Chaplin's most personal and autobiographical film. He would go on to make two more films after this 1952 comedy-drama, but this is unmistakably his swan song — and what a graceful and touching goodbye it is. In it he plays an aging music hall comedian named Calvero who helps a young and suicidal ballerina (Claire Bloom) appreciate her life and her art. They form a bond, and she falls in love with him; but knowing he is in the twilight of his life, he bows back so she can form a relationship with a younger man. The only thing left is to take a final curtain call.

It says a great deal about Chaplin that he would try something as brazenly self-reflective as Limelight. Perhaps he believed he owed it to himself, or perhaps he believed he deserved it (his large ego could have simply wanted it). Whatever the reason, I'm not sure many other artists could pull this off as well as Chaplin does. The film is set it in England on the eve of World War I — 1914, to be exact, the year Chaplin himself debuted. His aged comedian Calvero (which, like Chaplin, is a C-name with seven letters) is inhabited so wholly by Chaplin that even those unfamiliar with the man can sense an immediate connection between the actor and his character. Limelight was one of the earliest Chaplin films I saw as a teenager, and there is a surprising amount of visibility in the emotional closeness of the two, both of whom have a prime that seems far behind them and whose audiences has abandoned them. Chaplin was often not given the credit he deserved for his acting, and when you consider how laudatory audiences can be when an actor or actress seemingly adopts a character persona similar to their own (Mickey Rourke in last year's The Wrestler, for example), it's a shame more credit hasn't been given to Chaplin for this touching and seasoned role.

Certainly it is no mistake that Calvero is the only Chaplin character to die on screen; other Chaplin incarnations have stepped back and allowed others to experience happiness (the Tramp does in The Circus, for example), and still others go to their deaths (Henri Verdoux, most notably), but as Chaplin was so in control of every aspect of his films, we must give proper consideration to the on-screen death of Calvero. The plot would work without it, but the meditation on life, death, art, and impression would be null.

Chaplin has success as well in what are his final set pieces of slapstick, odes to his early silent days. Like The Great Dictator, Limelight returns to the structure that alternates between the progress of the plot and the timeouts for sideshows. It's a quality to most of Chaplin's sound films that many dislike, but when executed well, the sketches can be timeless — Adenoid Hinkel dancing with the inflatable globe in The Great Dictator, or the most famous sequence of Limelight, the pitch-perfect pantomime routine performed by Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Limelight is the only narrative film both men appeared in, and indeed, the scene alone might singularly justify a screening of the film. Reportedly Chaplin's urged Keaton to join the film when he learned how down on his luck Keaton had become (although it's also been said Chaplin just wanted someone good at pantomime; others contend Keaton appeared after realizing how depressed Chaplin was). Over the years the scene has generated a great deal of rumors and controversy — whether Keaton was better than Chaplin, whether Chaplin selfishly cut Keaton's screen time, etc., all questions that originate in the unsolvable argument of which comedian is better. People familiar with production, as well as Keaton and Chaplin themselves, have practically squashed all the rumors as nonsense. I've always thought it showed maturity on Chaplin's part to share the necessary scene of Calvero's final triumph with Keaton.(But then again, it might be the only bit of maturity Chaplin showed toward Keaton; in Keaton's autobiography he called Chaplin the "greatest silent comedian of all time," and in Chaplin's autobiography he doesn't even mention Keaton.)

Outrage over Chaplin's politics prevented many in America from seeing Limelight for nearly two decades. While traveling in Britain for the premiere of the film, he was infamously denied reentry on the suspicion that he was a Communist. (In his autobiography, he corrected the U.S. government's paranoia: "My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a non-conformist. Although I am not a Communist I refused to fall in line by hating them.") Many theater owners, still angry about Chaplin's critique of capitalism and the Western war machine in Monsieur Verdoux, picked up on this line and did not screen it. It failed to meet the distribution standards for the Academy Awards in 1952, but when it was given a proper screening in Los Angeles during 1972, Chaplin, Ray Rasch, and Larry Russell won the Oscar for Best Score — the only competitive Oscar Chaplin ever won. The score is arguably Chaplin's best, memorably haunting and wonderfully expressive.

But such unfettered emotional displays fuel the typical strikes against Limelight, namely that it's too sentimental. Fair — but tell me this: what Chaplin film isn't too anything? As a filmmaker, Chaplin perfected emotion taken to the extreme; he is among the few who have made me cry from laughter (The Circus and Modern Times) and just flat out cry (The Gold Rush and City Lights). His critique of totalitarianism had him playing a blatant and buffoonish take-off of Adolf Hitler; his critique of Western society had him playing a polygamist Bluebeard who knocks off wealthy women so he can support his invalid wife and child. Chaplin was not a man to take a subtle approach to art, and if Limelight baldly teeters along the razor of sentimentality (and certainly it does), it's the sort of sentimentality and human drama that Chaplin himself thrived on and could make enjoyable in the most unabashed of ways. Stretches of Limelight are no more and no less sentimental than many of his silent films; only here emotion has been set to sound. Granted, if Limelight is guilty of anything (and it isn't perfect), it's the occasional over-reliance on platitudinous dialogue, which feels all the creakier when compared to the sharpened barbs in Monsieur Verdoux. But this is a film of warmth and remembrance, of frailty and finality, and such things are bound to offend the sterner sensibilities of others. As for me, Chaplin had my heart from start to finish.

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Monsieur Verdoux (1947)

d. Charles Chaplin / USA / 124 mins.


The following review discusses major plot points.

The appeal of Charles Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux is, I think, rooted in the dichotomous fact that it's profoundly anti-Chaplin and yet a near-pure embodiment of his philosophy and creativity. A story about a struggling banker during the 1930s global depression who marries wealthy women, coolly knocks them off, and casually pockets their money to support his invalid wife and charming son is not the sort of film an audience would expect from Chaplin, particularly because it's also a blistering post-war critique of western society. But it also makes a great deal of sense that Chaplin, whose ferocity in politics had grown to match his famously gigantic ego, would come to end up with something like Monsieur Verdoux, a curious and complex and ultimately flawed black comedy. The distance between this film and his silent films is quite remarkable; Chaplin as Henri Verdoux doesn't just kill women for their life savings — he kills The Tramp as well, once and for all.

At its best, Verdoux is methodical in its take-down of war and violence, less bombastic than The Great Dictator and more pointed than A King in New York. All three films possess urgent political messages, but only Verdoux's continues to feel crucially relevant. The lasting impression is of Chaplin's mind at work, and for sympathetic liberals what he has to say is rousing and sincere. Words matter more in Verdoux than any Chaplin film previously; although he had already done sound and dialogue in The Great Dictator, it wasn't until Verdoux that he made his first true film in sound. The film lacks the elaborate and virtually silent setpieces that are worthy many good laughs in The Great Dictator. The topic here may be murder and death — the most corporeal of subjects — but for Verdoux Chaplin took everything out of the physical realm and made it more cerebral. The dialogue is punchier, wittier, subtler than any he'd written before. The metaphor built into the man is stronger in Verdoux than The Great Dictator, and the satire is less an indictment on something singular (Hitler and totalitarianism) than it is on something more dynamic, widespread, and fragile (democratic Western societies).

"Under the right circumstances, murder can be funny," Chaplin is to have said, and Verdoux is a funny film. For long stretches, Chaplin plays his hand close to his chest, preferring to drop his jokes with dainty wit and boyish insouciance. His murders have an air of the Hitchcockian — in one he menacingly ascends a staircase after one of his wives, cautioning her that everything has been taken care of, and awakens the next day to jaunty music. Others, or rather other attempts I should say, are patent Chaplinesque absurdity. Comedienne Martha Raye plays Annabella, an ingratiating and extraordinarily lucky lottery winner who continually and unknowingly foils Verdoux's attempted slayings. (The director Claude Chabrol has suggest Annabella epitomizes the obnoxious pluck of Americanism that the Europeans were never able to kill off.)

So when Verdoux takes Annabella fishing with the intent to drown her, and just as he's about to chloroform her she rocks the boat and he falls backward, the cheesecloth landing on his own face, Chaplin's humor radar is exacting. Ironically, if Verdoux were simply a comedy of these murderous errors, it might have been more successful upon its initial release. What makes it thrive, especially today, is Chaplin's equally shrewd ability to do math. One murder can be funny; one murder repeated for a film can build rhythm; any more than that, particularly as you begin to approach the level of warfare, and there's nothing worth joking about. In that regard, although it's considerably darker and bleaker than his other films, Verdoux is no less humanistic than Chaplin's previous works. The most famous and poignant scenes come at the end, where Chaplin is as moralistic as The Great Dictator but with a softer touch. On the stand at his trial, he revels in his own homicidal amateurism compared to the industry war complex, scientifically honed and encouraged around the globe. As he awaits his beheading, a few of his final words to a reporter loom as some of the best Chaplin ever penned: "Wars, conflict — it's all business. One murder makes a villain; millions, a hero. Numbers sanctify."

The production history of Verdoux contributes to understanding how the film succeeds when it does. Orson Welles, fresh off Citizen Kane, wanted to make a film about Henri Désiré Landru, a real Bluebeard serial killer, and offered Chaplin the lead. Always one to call his own shots, Chaplin bought the idea from Welles and wrote the script for himself to direct. Although the entire script was initially rejected by Joseph Breen and his readers at the Production Code office as "unacceptable," "blasphemous" and atheistic, and guilty of trivializing murder, Chaplin only had to make a few tweaks in dialogue and scenes to gain approval. More significantly, however, is the fact that for the first time in his long career, Chaplin was forced to make certain concessions. He had previously had such broad creative control over his films that he was able to take his time, experiment on the set, and feel his way through to the end. However, the soaring cost of film stock after the war canceled his traditional creative process of improvisation and perpetual tweaking. Whereas he'd previously film a scene dozens of times, trying something new with each take until he proclaimed he'd found it and was ready to move on, Verdoux forced Chaplin to be completely prepared — he began filming with storyboards, a finished script (which was new to him), and a shooting schedule. Writing the film took years; all told, making it took less than three months.

The controversy that followed, however, would last a lifetime. Chaplin planned the film's Washington, D.C., premiere to follow the day a close friend was scheduled to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, intentionally stoking the flames already burning around him. Because the film pulled no punches in its critique of war and mass murder, throngs of sore post-war Americans came out in protest. (Incidentally, it was a hit in Europe.) United Artists caved and withdrew it from circulation. Congress called Chaplin a communist, senators called for his deportation, and in the coming years his reentry visa would be revoked and he'd spend the rest of his life living in Europe. (Still, Chaplin's script, which had originally been rejected in toto, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, which went to the decidedly happy Miracle on 34th Street.)

And certainly one of the more intriguing footnotes is that Verdoux has a cinéaste favorite, even more than his silent masterpieces. Bosley Crowther of the Times, writing in a retrospective of cinema's 50th birthday, called it "the most extraordinary of all Chaplin's films." André Bazin and Federico Fellini embraced as a masterpiece. Jonathan Rosenbaum and others count it among the century's finest comedies. The great James Agee devoted three essays to it in The Nation, continuing to praise it even after it closed. (I've even seen it sitting in the cushy #1 spot on a reproduction of Agee's list of favorite films.) All of this praise doesn't surprise me — film criticism can sometimes serve as a necessary corrective to previous artistic misunderstandings. But the greatness of Monsieur Verdoux, if it's there, continues to elude me. The wit is sharp, yes, and Verdoux's failed attempts at murdering Annabella do provide some belly laughs, but the strongest sections of the film bookend a soggy middle, which I think keeps it from true greatness. But this is still a wicked and important film, and above all, a testament to the fact that there was and will only ever be one cinematic mind like Chaplin's. You can't ignore a fact like that; as Verdoux himself says, numbers sanctify.

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The Great Dictator (1940)

d. Charles Chaplin / USA / 124 mins.


The Great Dictator was Charles Chaplin's first film with spoken dialogue, and boy, did he have a lot to say. Audiences knew from his previous film, Modern Times, that he had a few political bones in his body, but the difference between the degree of politics in Modern Times and The Great Dictator is as loud as the difference between silence and sound. This film blows out the doors and windows as far as satire is concerned: the world's most recognizable comedian unleashed his scorn on the world's most treacherous tyrant.

Chaplin had been told he and Adolf Hitler had more than a few physical similarities. Both were short, with dark hair and the toothbrush moustache that the latter stole from the former. Both were actually born within days of each other, too, but that's obviously where the similarities end. You couldn't have two more unalike characters, which is precisely why Chaplin was the best person to sharpen his harpoon and set course to deflate the tyrant. In the film, Chaplin plays two characters: one is a Jewish barber, injured during World War I and stricken with amnesia that metaphorically resonates when he is reintroduced to society. When he returns to his old barbershop, he finds the word "JEW" painted in the windows and police patrolling the ghetto. This is thanks to Adenoid Hynkel (Chaplin again), the infantile, pompous, and ruthless dictator of fictitious Tomania. With a wink and a nudge, the credits coyly warn us in the beginning that "any resemblance between Hynkel the dictator and the Jewish barber is purely coincidental," as if after seeing Hynkel we're going to be concerned with the fact that he looks like the barber; by the time we meet Hynkel, similarities with the barber are the last things on our minds. It's an utterly unveiled send-up of Hitler, with Chaplin caricaturing all the megalomaniacal qualities to the nth degree.

I've read a large selection of criticism that suggests The Great Dictator isn't as good as Chaplin's earlier films, specifically The Gold Rush, City Lights, and Modern Times. Well, of course it's not. There aren't many films out there that can claim to be as good as that trifecta of silent masterpieces — and "silent" might be the imperative word there. Comparing Chaplin's silent oeuvre to his sound films is a logically flawed starting point. We're tempted to say that the romance of The Great Dictator doesn't blend as seamlessly into the film as a whole as the romance in The Gold Rush or City Lights. That's a perfectly acceptable complaint (and one that I'll actually second), but at the risk of sounding like a Chaplin-in-sound apologist, I don't re-watch The Great Dictator for the romance, just as I don't watch A Night at the Opera for its silly romance that distracts from the genius of the Marx Brothers. In a way The Great Dictator is doing things Chaplin had always done and also never done before. He pantomimes, he gets hit on the head with a cast-iron skillet, he dances until he falls down; that is the Chaplin standard, something he did better than almost anyone in his silent films. But Chaplin's humor became Chaplin's humor because it had a certain heart to it; that heart is unmistakably romantic in The Gold Rush and City Lights, and partially romantic in Modern Times. Between 1936 and 1940, his heart (like many in the western world) re-situated itself. The Great Dictator is a satiric dirty bomb. Now he could rely on dialogue to move the plot, and for once, dialogue to make a joke. What this film shows is that Chaplin hadn't yet found the perfect way to write the dialogue of innocent love (he'd never fully reclaim it, but Limelight comes close), but he had discovered more important ways to let his comedy speak for itself, literally.

So, as Chaplin's first film with spoken dialogue and full barrage of sound effects, The Great Dictator shouldn't be expected to keep the same company as his earlier silent works. Certainly Chaplin employs a few nice bits here that would have played as well in a silent film (a dud artillery shell spins around and follows the barber as he inspects it; Hynkel and the graceful ballet with the globe balloon; the barber shaving a man in perfect rhythm to Brahms; etc.), but aside from the very skillful slapstick, most of the humor here is strictly dialogue driven. The key to the joke lies in the vocal inflections: the innocent wonder in the barber's dialogue; Hynkel's germanic-based rants of pure gibberish and the meek translations that follow, followed by the dictator's trying-too-hard-to-be-indifferent voice later. Other characters are blessed with good voices, like the overblown high spirits of the idiotic Herring (Billy Gilbert, in a parody of Hermann Gorring); the deadpan delivery of Garbitsch (Henry Daniell, in a parody of Joseph Goebbels, in a name that must be said outloud to truly enjoy). These are characterizations and jokes Chaplin was not able to do before. In one scene, Garbitsch visits Hynkel to discuss the complaints of the masses. Hynkel wants to know what they have to complain about.

"The quality of the sawdust in the bread," Garbitsch says.

"What more do they want?" Hynkel responds. "It's from the finest lumber our mills can supply."

It seems to be requisite in every review of The Great Dictator to mention Chaplin's own thoughts about the production. He became increasingly uncomfortable as production went on and Hitler began to squeeze Europe tighter and tighter in his vice grip. Chaplin wrote later that if he had known the full extent of the Nazi Party's evil, it would have been impossible to make The Great Dictator. But that sort of analysis has always set a little uneasy with me. Would the film have really been impossible to make? I doubt it, and although I'm no Chaplin biographer, I doubt Chaplin meant it would be truly impossible. For a man as gifted as Chaplin, nothing seemed impossible, but I'll grant him it would have been more difficult, just not for the reasons we most commonly assume. It's because Chaplin would have been more self-conscious, and self-consciousness limits comedy. The fact that he wasn't entirely bound makes the film as casually acidic as it is. (This is not to say he wasn't bound at all; to the same extent he was, as others were, since the closer it came to 1940, the more information about the inhuman horror reached the citizens of the world).

There's nothing inherently offensive here (at least to me), only an awful lot that's tremendously sad. Although his satire on Hitler is a bit one-sided, it often brushes the edge of darkness. When Hynkel says after the Jews he's going after the brunettes, it's impossible not to cringe at how close Chaplin's joke was to the truth. Taken as it is, in its 1940 incarnation, it's perfect for what it does, and wanting anything else is wading out too far into a catch-22 where we want Chaplin to deliver commentary on events of which he doesn't know the extent. It simply can't be both ways, and that's where I think The Great Dictator trips up many who do want it both ways. What's evident then is that, even if Chaplin didn't know the brutal and atrocious horrors of the European ghettos, he knew the projected path of fascism and what resulted is a movie as ridiculous as it is fearful of the bleak reality had been descending on Europe's Jews.

The film ends with an impassioned speech from Chaplin, delivered from the barber who has been mistaken as the tyrant. It stretches credulity—why doesn't anyone try to stop him? where did he find these words after so much innocence? Many think it shifts the film in a fundamentally large way and mucks up the ending; after two hours of making us laugh, Chaplin the professor takes over and delivers a lecture criticizing authoritarianism, tyranny, and senseless bigotry that ends in the deaths of too many. "It didn't work then, and it doesn't work now," Roger Ebert writes. Mark Bourne says: "Whether it's underwritten or overwritten is hard to say. Yes, Chaplin's appeal for reason and kindness is inarguable, yet as the speech rambles forth trying to open our eyes to too many ills at once, it's punctuated less by plain-speaking Lincolnesque oratory than by naive kumbaya. Its truths are swamped by airy truisms. His intent is honorable, no question. It's the execution that's so damned frustrating."

But I love the speech. It raises my pulse, and it makes me proud to love Chaplin. When the end of the film comes, Chaplin, as he did with the romance of The Gold Rush and City Lights, manages to convince me to turn off all the centers of my brain that deal with logic and the intricacies of filmmaking. When he takes that stage, confused to be Hynkel, he gives us a version of the world as it could be, and that bypasses my brain and speaks to my heart. Although I've read a tremendous amount of criticism against it, I've never read a proposal that moves me even a fraction of how Chaplin can.

As expected, Hitler and all Axis powers banned the film, although the tyrant's curiosity got the best of him and he procured a copy through Portugal and screened it twice. ("I'd give anything to know what he thought of it," Chaplin later said.) In places such as Franco-controlled Spain, the film stayed banned as far into the 1970s. But what may be unexpected is that it was Chaplin's most commercially successful film, and it secured five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Original Screenplay, but won none. That's a bit of a shame, but it does disprove claims that it was a film ahead of its time. True, the full measure of its humor might only be recognizable this far removed from the age of propaganda and from the war, but it was by no means a failure upon its initial release. I think with time it's gotten better. For the absurdity of tyranny, I'll take Duck Soup, and for subverting Nazism with ridiculousness, I'll take To Be or Not To Be. But The Great Dictator is a film I simply cannot leave behind. It's an impassioned and courageous satire, balancing humor with tragedy, pathos with rationality, all while championing a world of peace and tolerance. Chaplin has a voice, a real voice in sound and in politics. He's brave, he's earnest, he's a prophetic dissident of the highest order. He wants nothing less than to the change the world. He didn't, but he was among the first to shoot an arrow into the eye of evil. As far as I'm concerned, that's a hell of an accomplishment.

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Modern Times (1936)

d. Charles Chaplin / USA / 87 mins.


Modern Times is the funniest of Charles Chaplin's many great films, an endorsement that parallels it with City Lights, his film of greatest emotion, and The Gold Rush, his most deftly balanced work of art. It was also his last silent film – sort of. Made almost a full decade after spoken words began filling cinema, Chaplin kept this film mostly silent, sans a few moments (we'll get to those later). I commended him for holding out on sound in City Lights because its entire essence is enriched with pantomime and silent staging; but the silence of Modern Times, in service of a message rather an emotion, is in many ways more remarkable.

Chaplin made the film in the middle of the Great Depression, after he had taken a tour of Europe. Its plot was pitch-perfect for the time: a man-versus-machine parable that finds his Tramp character working in a factory. His boss treats him like an inanimate object, valued solely for the job he performs, and after tightening one too many bolts, a few of own come lose and he goes crazy from the monotony. He ends up out on the street, unemployed and looking for a job all while trying to stay out of trouble with the law. Paulette Goddard enters as a poor street urchin (who nevertheless is still incredibly beautiful), and together she and the Tramp struggle to fulfill the American dream in one scene after another. (They married the same year the film was released, and like other Chaplin leading ladies, he featured her prominently and gorgeously. She appeared in one more of his films before their divorce in 1942.)

After years of swipes and sneers at the establishment – evading police officers, being kicked out of department stores, sleeping in the gutters, hobnobbing with the wealthy through mistaken identity – Chaplin made Modern Times a cornucopia of his political ideals, a sliced vein from which he bleeds populism, liberalism, and humanitarianism. Many Americans caught in the perils of the Depression could no doubt relate to the class struggle sentiments and the depreciation of their own talents in the burgeoning Industrial Revolution. Chaplin's films never patently avoided politics (he tackled unemployment and poverty in A Dog's Life from 1918, and even his earlier shorts made room for social commentary), but they also weren't this obvious. Yet the effect is sublime because it is keenly aware but in no way polemical. This theme would continue into his 1940 satire The Great Dictator and, in a few respects, his 1947 black comedy Monsieur Verdoux, but his humor and passion never again reached the height of Modern Times.

The strength of the film, more than seventy years on, is still its humor: pure, simple, manic, brilliant humor. It's a damn funny film, and it contains many of Chaplin's most celebrate comedy sequences. The Tramp is force-fed lunch from a haywire machine that promises to "help" assembly-line workers so they don't lose a minute of productivity. The Tramp is sent through the cogs and gears of a machine on the assembly line, a sequence you've already seen even if you've never had the pleasure of watching Modern Times. He is mistaken for a Communist protester, he is sent to prison, and accidentally foils a prison escape. When he and the street girl seek refuge in an empty department store, he amuses her by roller-skating, often coming perilously close to rolling off a ledge. And when the Tramp accidentally snorts cocaine while in prison, I believe I laughed as loudly as I have ever have while watching a movie.

Any review of Modern Times would be remiss not to treat it as well as an obituary for Chaplin's Tramp character. Chaplin debuted the Tramp character in 1914 while working with Keystone Pictures, and the character became the dominant image of silent comedy, in America and abroad. It is hardly an exaggeration to suggest the Tramp was at one point perhaps the most recognizable cinematic character in the world: the derby, the ill-fitting clothes, the ever-present cane, the toothbrush moustache. The Tramp's exit from Chaplin's films marked as much of an end of an era as Chaplin's transition into sound cinema with his next production, The Great Dictator.

As mentioned above, the film isn't entirely silent. Chaplin's score is brisk and delightful, and an overwhelming multitude of sound effects populate the scenes. Chaplin gives speaking roles to both the factory boss, who appears on a gigantic screen and harasses employees in the factory to get back to work (this is before George Orwell's 1984, mind you) and a salesman's voice appears on a phonograph to pitch the force-feeding lunch machine. The use of sound dovetails into the film's politics and the demise of silent cinema; when we finally hear the Tramp's voice in a song at the film's ending (after twenty years of silent cinema), he sings nothing but utter gibberish. The point is explicit: those who have a voice have power and those without will struggle. Modern Times is a good vehicle for that belief, and it comes across smartly. It is one of the real jewels of American comedy – one of the best films of cinema – and it's truly a triumphant demonstration of Chaplin's genius.

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City Lights (1931)

d. Charles Chaplin / USA / 87 mins.


In 1931, nearly four years after spoken dialogue had been introduced into Hollywood cinema and to the public, City Lights didn't have to be silent. Indeed, Charles Chaplin is rumored to have considered making it as a "talkie." The film has technological advancements that were impossible in his earlier work (specific sound effects, namely), but Chaplin held his ground and defiantly included no speaking. Some have called it stubbornness, arrogance, or artistic elitism on Chaplin's part that he released a silent film so far into the talking age; but just as directors continued producing films in black-and-white after the popularization of affordable color, I think it best to view Chaplin's decision through the lens of artistic vision. It could have been anything: maybe he was afraid and unready, maybe he knew his Tramp character worked best as a mime, maybe he wanted one more shot to make an unforgettable silent film – whatever it is, it doesn't matter. City Lights is not only a better film because it is a silent, it is one of the all-time great silent masterpieces.

It is the film most frequently submitted as Chaplin's magnum opus, but I won't be lured into a ranking of it against his many other excellent productions. Unlike other directors whose works seemed to ebb and flow throughout the course of their careers, Chaplin's work defies expectation and builds into a tsunami. Quality aside, I will say it is not as well balanced as The Gold Rush and it is not as funny as Modern Times. Without a doubt, however, City Lights is the director's greatest foray into pathos, and whether that makes it his best film overall is up to the subjective viewer. (It's the only film of his that makes me openly weep; more on that in a moment.)

It is a remarkable in many ways, most of all in its cohesiveness, obtained somehow in a blur of disparate elements. Chaplin's creative method could be mildly described as chaotic – often he used only outlines and wrote his films as he was in the process of filming them, a fact that makes them all the more amazing – and City Lights is no exception. The film takes numerous detours and tangents, which keeps it lively and fresh and almost a visual representation of how Chaplin thought. In fact, there is something deliberately and self-consciously old-fashioned about City Lights and is undercut consistently with a breathtaking and subtle originality.

What ties it all together is, of course, a love story, perhaps the greatest Chaplin ever wrote. The Tramp falls for a blind girl (Virginia Cherrill) who sits on the sidewalk selling flowers. He is poor but occasionally living the high life in the company of a drunken millionaire (Harry Myers) whose life he saved. The millionaire befriends and rejects the Tramp, only to befriend again and reject again – all depending upon how sober he is at the time. The Flower Girl mistakes the Tramp as someone who is wealthy (Chaplin's politics begin to show here: she and the millionaire both "see" the vagabond Tramp as the person they want him to be instead of the person he is), and he vows to pay for her to have a procedure performed that promises restore her sight. Along the way, as he struggles to earn the money for her. He works a rather stinky job cleaning up after horses and elephants, performs a deft-footed boxing match (where he uses the referee as a blocking device to hide himself from his brutish opponent), and feuds with the millionaire's butler and the police.

Chaplin was a perfectionist, and it's fitting that the film called his best had him acting his worst behind the scenes. Production was brought to a standstill because he couldn't figure out a plot device that would make the blind girl think the Tramp was wealthy (it would be the sound of an expensive car slamming shut), and he shot the scene 342 times. Cherrill, with whom Chaplin did not have a happy working relationship, was fired halfway through, and he intended to re-shoot the film with the romantic interest from The Gold Rush, Georgia Hale. (It proved too expensive; he was forced to rehire Cherrill.) In the end, his hard work saw success; although the film was silent in an area of dissonance, it was still widely popular with audiences. In 1931 it was not honored with a single Academy Award or even a nomination, but it has won a more telling and more valued award: continued appreciation over time.

And now, the ending: what more could a person ask for? I don't wish to discuss it in depth here, even though the film is more than 75 years old and it is one of the most talked about and imitated endings in the history of cinema. I find it regrettable that many reviews of City Lights are accompanied by a screen-shot of the ending; even if you've never seen the film, just by catching sight a screen-shot you can figure out what's coming. (I don't know how we expect to get people interested in silent films if we go around spoiling the endings for new viewers.) But what I can say about the ending without ruining anything is that is a tidal wave of impeccably staged emotion. While there is no doubt that film is sweet throughout, I don't think I've ever watched the end without suddenly crying with the happiness of it all.

And again, it's the silence that makes it what it is. Imagine for a moment that Chaplin had moved into sound too quickly, forcing the final confrontation between the Tramp and the Flower Girl to be dependent upon dialogue instead of pure pantomime. It doesn't require a scholarly approach to realize the power would be zapped from the frame. By the time "The End" fades into view and you're wiping away the tears away with the edge of your palms, it's not difficult to see why City Lights is rightly touted as the tour de force that it is.

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The Circus (1928)

d. Charles Chaplin / USA / 69 mins.


If you have a favorite director, or a few favorites, then odds are you have the answer to this question forever resting on the tip of your tongue: What is his or her most underrated film?

With regards to Charles Chaplin, one of my favorite directors, the answer is his 1928 film The Circus. Perpetually underrated in ways I've never quite seemed to fathom, The Circus contains some of the biggest laughs in any of Chaplin's films – more laughs, I'd argue, than City Lights (although the latter is superior overall) and nearly as many as Modern Times. In fact, there might be more laughs packed into the first twenty minutes of The Circus than the first twenty minutes of any other film I've ever seen, and I like to think I've seen my fair share of comedies.

Perhaps The Circus is lost in the shuffle because it came three years after The Gold Rush and three years before City Lights. When something quite good is stuck between two somethings that are always bandied about in the discussion of greatest motion pictures, it is inevitable that it might become lost or passed over. The Circus is hardly mentioned in official discussions of Chaplin, and Chaplin himself failed to mention it in his autobiography (it was made during one of the many tumultuous times in his life). Again, let me say that this is a shame. Although it can't compete with the charm of his more romantic and heartbreaking films, and it doesn't possess the famous set-pieces of dancing dinner rolls or a factory worker spooling through machinery, that doesn't mean it's worth brushing aside.

Possessing one of his sturdier plots, The Circus opens with the penniless Tramp, who is accused of pickpocketing and runs under the local big top to escape. His manic evasion of the police inadvertently breathes new life into a failing circus, particularly ruining a lousy magician's routine in a spectacularly funny way. The audience wakes up and suddenly starts laughing, and the sound of laughter might as well be the ringing of a cashier's machine for the stern ringmaster (Allan Garcia). Convinced the Tramp must join the show, he hires him on the spot only to realize when the Tramp attempts to be funny, it's painfully not. The ringmaster keeps him on anyway, hoping chaos will ensue as long as the Tramp is somewhere near the circus. The ringmaster's step-daughter (Merna Kennedy) steals the Tramp's heart, and all seems well until a tight-rope walker (Harry Crocker), who also has eyes for the step-daughter, butts into the Tramp's life.

The jokes are priceless: the ruined magic show, the botched session where the Tramp tries to learn how scripted clowns work, becoming caught in the lion's cage, battling monkeys on the high-wire. The drama however, especially toward the end, is not as effective. The Circus reminds me a great deal of The Kid, which used drama more effectively than humor and is admirable for doing so. The inverse is true for The Circus. It and The Kid are both second-tier Chaplin, precipitously close to hitting the bull's-eye but still missing one or two elements. As has been said many times and many ways though, a second-tier work from a great director is a hell of a lot better than a first-tier work from an average director.

When discussing Chaplin there is a running motif of what-went-wrong-behind-the-scenes, and I think it's so interesting because he had an uncanny knack of looking remarkably graceful on-stage while his off-stage world fell apart – the crying clown literally personified. The Circus might be his most disastrous experience making movies, including fires that burned down sets, development laboratories that accidentally destroyed negatives, and the onslaught of his second divorce, this time from Lita Grey. (Having learned his lesson during The Kid about what divorcing wives might try to take from him, he hid the negatives of The Circus.) The parallels are haunting; as Combustible Celluloid writer Jeffrey M. Anderson notes, the film was "perhaps more personal than anyone might have suspected at the time." A distraught funny man forced to be funny – are we talking about the Tramp in The Circus or Chaplin making The Circus?

Although he is better known and more highly praised for other films, The Circus was one of two films that garnered Chaplin an Oscar. Originally nominated for Best Actor and the defunct Best Director of a Comedy, the Academy ended up giving him an honorary award "for versatility and genius in acting, writing, directing and producing." It was his only Oscar for quite some time. Chaplin openly disdained the Academy Awards, not unjustifiably I believe, and according to his son he reportedly used his statuette for The Circus as a doorstop. Needless to say, it didn't sit too well with the Academy, which was apparently as hoity-toity in 1929 as they are today. City Lights and Modern Times were not nominated for a single award. He wouldn't win again until 1972, when he was given an honorary award for his entire career, and then one more in 1973, for the score of Limelight, finally given a U.S. release.

I will probably find myself for the rest of my days as a Chaplin-loving film-goer giving the "Rah-rah-rah!" to The Circus. You're more likely to see his better known movies, and those are better than no Chaplin in your life. But if you haven't seen it already, I urge you to dig a little deeper into the man's work because a gem like The Circus lies right below the surface.

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The Gold Rush (1925)

d. Charles Chaplin. United States. 94 mins.


What impresses me most about The Gold Rush is how it maintains a precise equilibrium of comedy and pathos. Of Charles Chaplin's three agreed upon masterpieces (all of which I love equally), this is the one that seems to do this the best. City Lights tilts more toward the pathos and Modern Times tilts more toward the comedy, but The Gold Rush gently and seamlessly slides back and forth between hilarity and touching romance.

Released in 1925, The Gold Rush kicked off what would become Chaplin's most sustained period of brilliance (which would run through Limelight in 1952). He said this was the film for which he wanted to be remembered, and arguably it has become that film. Even those with a passing interest in the movies can recognize Chaplin's work in The Gold Rush from the brief clips they've either seen or from the comic reverberations that have affected innumerable comedies. There's the Tramp serving up stewed leather boot to a starving fellow prospector and twirling a boiled shoelace like a piece of spaghetti. Then there's the Tramp charmingly using forks and dinner rolls to create an impromptu dance for the woman he loves. Chaplin's take on the humor of cannibalism – where one starved man sees the other as a gigantic chicken – has been repeated endlessly. The climactic set-piece of a cabin teetering off the edge of a cliff might seem familiar, but watching Chaplin choreograph it, you can't help but sense its total uniqueness in its execution.

There's not much to speak of in terms of a plot, but that is the reality for so many of Chaplin's movies. Plots are merely ropes, strung from point A to point B and upon which the comedian could hang his entertainment. For The Gold Rush, Chaplin's standard Tramp character is off in the snow-topped mountains of Alaska and seeking his portion of nature's fortune, billed only as the Lone Prospector – a.k.a., the Tramp with a backpack. All the other characters are bundled in parkas and hiking boots, but the Lone Prospector is decked in the Tramp's standard apparel, from the oversized pants and shoes to the shortened jacket and well-placed derby, even carrying his cane (useless in the snow). A snowstorm traps the prospector up in the mountains and he becomes forced to share a paltry cabin with fugitive named Black Larsen (Tom Murray) and hardened explorer named Big Jim McKay (Mack Swain), leading to, what is in my mind, the most underrated joke in the entire film: as Larsen and McKay duel for dominance of the cabin with Larsen's shotgun between them, the barrel follows the Prospector, who is unable to escape it no matter he tries to hide.

The film comes to establish a pattern that the genuine humor will be most firmly rooted in the desolate cabin, while the pathos and romance finds itself directly correlated with a neighboring small town. After eventually leaving the cabin, the Prospector finds himself pining after Georgia (Georgia Hale), a dance hall girl whose affections are accidental but nonetheless warm the Prospector. The romance is familiar, but not cliched; Georgia and her friends look down on the Prospector with amusement and transform his sincerity into their own cheap giggles. Georgia has her own beau, too, whom the Prospector must go up against (as if the blistering elements of the Klondike and his already neglected heart weren't enough hindrances). From even these brief plot descriptions, it's possible to sense how The Gold Rush is rooted firmly in the Chaplinesque tradition of powerful themes disguised with ribbons and bows as entertainment. Two of his most common themes – the pain of unrequited love and the damage of arrogance and greed – are nestled at the base of the film's rich spring.

It's been said of Chaplin that he was never much interested in expanding physical ways movies were made – that he had no particular value for innovative cinematography and all that was required was that the camera simply be pointed in his direction and he'd fill up the frame with his antics. I'll admit that this is relatively consistent across many of his films, but I find one particular shot in The Gold Rush brimming with excellence in construction and excellence in its powerful outpouring of emotion. It occurs about halfway through, when the Prospector has left the remote cabin and come into town, and he has entered the dance hall. Dozens of people are drinking, singing, laughing, and dancing, but the Prospector – steady but unsure – stands outside the action, perfectly staged in the middle of the frame and filmed from behind so his black wardrobe pops against the lights and merriment of the dance hall. Chaplin's masterpieces all have an affecting shot like this (in City Lights and Modern Times, the emotionally charged sequences come at the end), but it's notable in The Gold Rush for coming in the middle and encapsulating the outsider nature of the Tramp, a man who represents all that is good with society and stuck perpetually in its periphery.

Like many of Chaplin's films, the behind-the-scenes story is almost as interesting as what's on-screen. Chaplin acknowledged that the film was inspired in part by the story of ill-fated Donner Party, and while the fifteen-month shoot didn't end nearly as disastrously as the Donner Party, production was still beleaguered with a multitude of problems. Chaplin had taken all of the crew to Northern California and the Sierra Nevada mountains (where, without mere coincidence, the Donner Party had come to its end) and shot reels and reels of footage until the original leading lady (Chaplin's 16-year-old girlfriend-quicky-turned wife, Lita Grey) became pregnant. Everything was relocated back to Hollywood for re-shoots on man-made sets, Hale was cast in Grey's role, and very little of the Sierras ended up in the film.

Few filmmakers would be blessed enough to produce a film as good as The Gold Rush, but Chaplin is among the pantheon of artists who left us many masterworks. There are even two versions of The Gold Rush available – the original 1925 version and Chaplin's 1942 "revival" of the film for audiences accustomed to sound. The differences are none too subtle. The revival is twenty-seven minutes shorter – shorter because of cut title cards but also missing some of the more romantic passages – and the revival includes an Oscar-nominated score Chaplin composed and a narration he provides (not only of the action, but dubbing in words into character's mouths). As far as DVD releases and television broadcasts are concerned, the 1942 revival seems to be recognized as the canonical and Chaplin-preferred version of the film, and for many years it was the only copy of the film available on DVD. But when MK2 and Warner Bros. released the "Chaplin Collection" editions of his films, their release of The Gold Rush wisely includes both versions of the film, restored with great care. I find the 1925 silent version to be a more satisfying and pure experience (not to mention less distracting), but honestly, don't let availability stop you one way or the other. See one, see the other, see both, see them once or see them a hundred times – just see The Gold Rush because it's certainly among the best films ever made.

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A Woman of Paris (1923)

d. Charles Chaplin / USA / 78 mins.


TO THE PUBLIC:
In order to avoid any misunderstanding, I wish to announce that I do not appear in this picture. It is the first serious drama written and directed by myself.
- CHARLES CHAPLIN

So says the first title card of Chaplin's A Woman of Paris, for better or for worse. Conceived as a film to showcase the talents and appeal of his frequent leading lady Edna Purviance, A Woman of Paris is a unique entry in Chaplin's catalogue of films. By 1923 he had made many wonderful comedies (with his best still to come) and even films that dabbled in the dramatic and sentimental, but nothing fully realized as a drama. The result is a film without much resounding emotion and one of Chaplin's weaker productions.

Purviance's relationship with Chaplin began in 1915, and the two appeared on-screen together in thirty-three of his productions, including all but one of his films with Essanay Studios and all of his films with Mutual Studios and First National. Chaplin undeniably saw something in her (the two were romantically linked for a couple of years), but as an actress I've always found her performances relatively flat. Perhaps it's because she's continually cast as the straight-woman against his slapstick shenanigans and she never had much of an opportunity to stand out. Her best role was in Chaplin's The Kid (1921), but even then she doesn't steal anything away from Chaplin (arguably Jackie Coogan was the one who did that). In A Woman of Paris she plays Marie, a girl from a small French town who loves an artist named Jean (Carl Miller). Their engagement is ill-fated (he has an unhealthy attachment to his parents) and she ends up as a mistress to a wealthy man in Paris. When Marie and Jean cross paths again, their romance is rekindled but obstacles still stand in their way.

A Woman of Paris was Chaplin's first film for United Artists, which Mary Pickford, D.W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, and he founded together. He was a true renaissance man, and as with all of his films, he directed it, wrote it, produced it, and composed its score. (And contrary to the title card, although he does not star, he does appear on-screen in a cameo at a train station.)

It's said audiences expected a traditional Chaplin comedy and their poor reaction to this drama disappointed him. I sympathize, yet must admit the film is a disappointment not for its lack of comedy (Chaplin was capable of great drama; for example: Limelight) but for its lack of core emotion. There are touches of Chaplin's regular satire on the bourgeois class, but none of the emotions or sentiments go very far – most problematically, you never really believe Marie and Jean love each other as much as the film would like you to believe they do.

Although the idea behind the film was to launch a career for Purviance independent of Chaplin's, she starred in only two more films after A Woman of Paris – A Woman of the Sea, an unreleased and now-considered-lost film directed by Josef von Sternberg and produced by Chaplin; and Education de Prince, a French film totally unaffiliated with Chaplin. She retired from acting in 1928 but remained on Chaplin's payroll until her death in 1958, and Chaplin would not venture into straight drama again for decades.

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