The Tramp, No. 6 - Modern Times (1936)

Oh multitudes of ironically ironic ironies! The final silent film made in the silent film era is called Modern Times. And that titular dichotomy is no accident.

Charlie Chaplin persisted in his refusal to kowtow to the overwhelmingly popular “fad” of talking pictures, with their vulgar verbiage, for if anything would destroy the Tramp (synonymous with Chaplin himself), it’s sesquipedalian loquaciousness. To release a silent picture in 1936 is a work of dog headed ludditism, but surely Chaplin knew that time was coming to an end for his Little Tramp. The Tramp’s so-called franchise was dated, not for a loss of popularity or quality or inspiration or proliferation (all these things it excelled at – quite possibly among the most triumphant film franchises ever), but by technology itself! Thus Modern Times doesn’t simply stand as a final farewell to the Tramp, but to an entire form of filmmaking he represented.

With technology (sound technology) making the Tramp obsolete, Chaplin chooses for the theme of his little guy’s final outing technology itself. Though have no doubt that with the Great Depression still in full swing, the Tramp’s position as the silent spokesman for an entire class of underprivileged makes him as potent as ever. But once again, as with City Lights, the march of time changes the nature of poverty right underneath the Tramp’s comically oversized shoes. No more bindles and apple cores, like some John Schwartzwelder script. Progress has come for our Little Tramp, and with it industrialization, atomization, and the dehumanization that implies.


Modern Times thus opens in a lovingly designed Art Deco factory floor, all oversized steel gears and degraded laborers performing repetitive tasks upon the assembly line. Oh, and the Tramp’s there too, working the assembly line like Donald Duck and Lucy Ricardo would do after him. As always with Chaplin’s films, the humor comes directly from the Tramp himself, an alien creature in a more recognizably human world, acting in ways humorously divergent from proper behavior. An abstract grotesque like the Tramp is a good way to engender yuks, but it’s pretty hard to critique an entire system of production with such a tool. (That’s what she said!)

Make no mistake, Chaplin intends a Grand Sweeping Statement with Modern Times, his most overtly political film yet – until he’d take on ze Nazis. It’s kinda hard to miss Chaplin’s point about the drudgery of the capitalist industrial complex when the movie opens by juxtaposing sheep with factory laborers. I suppose at one point that was a clever comparison, and not a fallback for internet trolls. And while some of Chaplin’s past efforts have begged us to consider his politics, it’s practically impossible not to now. Okay…Chaplin was a leftist. To ask the FBI, he was a Communist. He is undoubtedly critical of capitalism, for all the inhumane worker conditions and whatnot. Former filmic efforts have dramatized the plight of the poor, but at last, by directly addressing the system, Chaplin discovers satire, and can have an impact – not with sympathetic, humanist portrayals of the poor, but with specific criticisms of the Robbers Baron (or is that Robber Barons?).


All this places Modern Times squarely in a realm of propaganda…sort of. The image of the Tramp and his coworkers struggling against anti-human forms of machinery recalls many a Soviet effort. Metropolis, a similarly minded German Expressionist masterwork, presents similar imagery. There’s possibly a bit of Dziga Vertov in here too, but with the irony that Chaplin cannot celebrate his adopted nation’s (that’d be the U.S.) technical might, because he is somewhat ideologically opposed to it. I feel this is becoming an ugly summary.

One of Chaplin’s most potent filmic techniques for condemning technology (oh the ironies in that statement!) is quite perfect for his chosen format: the use of dialogue. Say wha?!?! In a silent film?!?! Oh yeah, Modern Times one ups City Lights as a pseudo-silent, building on that film’s synchronized soundtrack by adding in actual chatter...but with a point. The only comprehensible verbiage is spoken through machines, be it via telephone or recordings or oddly retro-futurist tell-o-visual-matic device machineries (i.e. TVs). Genuine human discussion is still rendered, when needed, through title cards. This is a clever means, very in keeping with City Lights, to disregard sound film, even if there’s no particular persuasiveness to this argument.

The Tramp’s time on the factory floor is, while politically loaded, comedic gold – a wholly realized combination of setting and gags and Chaplin’s celebrated pantomime. It climaxes as the Tramp is sucked down into the machine’s innards, made so insane by his repetitive job that he can no longer physically control himself (note the over-your-head message).


This image somewhat recalls Buster Keaton’s great moment of despair in The General, when he is carried away unawares on a train’s spinning rod. Man against machine was always Keaton’s favorite theme, with the whole world presented as a mathematical device pitted against the hero – who could only overcome through technical superiority. Keaton’s comedy is deadpan and relatively rigid, most unlike Chaplin’s fluid, often overacted cartoonish lunacy. Thus pitting Chaplin against a gewgaw yields a very different end result, one focused upon his outsized physical gyrations – Chaplin becomes a part of the machine, and retains those traits upon leaving the factory, while Keaton makes the machine a part of himself.

At this point, Modern Times would make for a fantastic short film, with the Tramp’s time in the factory almost exactly two reels long. The movie has peaked, with still an hour to go and nothing nearly so pointed to do with it.

Unemployed and out on the streets, the Tramp reverts to his usual hobo ways. Much of that sleek set design, so striking against the Tramp’s old-fashioned frame, gives way for a more blandly realistic look at industrial slums – like something from the Italian neo-realist school. There are social problems to explore, like picketing and riots – resulting in the Tramp leading a Communist parade. While this is potentially an honest mistake, one can kind of see where the FBI’s suspicions arose. The Tramp is tossed into prison, where a new set of comic set pieces can arise to no ultimate end (be it narrative or thematic), and so on.


The rest of Modern Times is a largely disparate collection of comic moments, some of them notably stronger than others – with only a rather light basting of industry and “modern” technology to connect them. (A frankly stronger version of the same notion can be found in Jacques Tati’s Play Time.) Narrative fragmentation is a common feature of Chaplin’s, er, features, owing to his sporadic and improvisatory means of working (also his peculiar perfectionism). Somehow this episodic construction feels more damning in Modern Times, which doesn’t have as strong of an emotional through-line as some of Chaplin’s more overtly melodramatic works. It’s simply assorted random settings:

- The department store
- The shack
- The dance hall
- The prison
- The docks
- The suburbs
- A brief return to the factory

There is a larger connective tissue than simply assorted misadventures. Any guesses as to what that will be? Yup, a Girl. Specifically, a Gamine, which is (I suppose) a rather more specific generic appellation – “gamine” meaning a female hobo, but somehow also meaning what Audrey Hepburn once was, which is a difficult thing to reconcile. As usual, Chaplin casts his…er, let’s say “girlfriend,” because it’s unclear whether he was ever actually married to Paulette Goddard, unless a legally questionable and possibly apocryphal ceremony in China counts. Anyway, Paulette Goddard plays the leading lady, and I must say, she is easily the best gal in a Chaplin picture!


Goddard’s Gamine is a feisty young woman, self-dependent as she steals bread for herself and her fellow hungry wharf rats. Her poverty rivals – nay, exceeds – that of the Tramp’s in any picture, possibly because it comes across as infinitely more realistic. The Gamine is a thoroughly believable person, and thankfully separate from the standard silent film tactic of wilting violet female leads. The Gamine is anything but naïve, and makes a remarkably strong impression in her introduction, an extended dramatic sequence of survival entirely removed from the Tramp’s tomfoolery. Though Chaplin the director does insert some rather cloying melodrama into this section, Goddard nicely sells it.

It helps that Goddard seems, visually, quite out of place in a silent feature – or really any film from its period. Her facial structure, hair and expressions all seem – to excuse the obvious word – modern. There is nothing of the twenties’ doe-eyed waifs in her appearance, no period signifiers of attractiveness – nor does Goddard overplay her beauty. Covered in oil and rags, with sneaky little sideways glances throughout, she rather acts against her beauty, which comes across through a rambunctious energy instead.

It is inevitable that she shall share a romance with the Tramp, though it’s surprising just how equal that romance is. Both are of the same class, put there by social conditions. They are on a surprisingly equal footing in every sense, so Modern Times completely skips any “getting to know you” period (which Chaplin’s films often don’t move beyond). Tramp and the Gamine are a couple from the outset. A lot of the set pieces that follow are then centered upon their domestic life, be it in poverty, in fantasy, or hidden in the department store.


This is Chaplin telling a domestic comedy, in a sense, though marriage is never broached (from what I can tell). That’s a surprising scenario for a silent comedy to take, simply because it feels out of place with the format’s usual regard for “boy meets girl” stories. Take it as a sign of maturity, or of changing times, but there’s a lot in Modern Times which feels out of place in silent cinema – sleek design, Goddard’s timeless appearance, suburban domesticity…cocaine (which would feel out of place in any movie prior to the 1960s, and results in the Tramp’s same basic untempered zaniness). Domesticity is the most interesting element, because there are daydream moments where the Tramp and the Gamine basically picture themselves on the set of a 1950s sitcom. How anachronistic! Obviously a spotlessly clean scene out of “Leave It to Beaver” was conceivable in the ‘30s, in order for Chaplin to parody it. Still, this mode of comedy is light-years separated from the dusty, earthy stunt work most associated with the era.


Yes, a lot of Modern Times is atypical, and while there is no doubt as to its classic status, it is difficult at times to square away with Chaplin’s main body of work (best exemplified by City Lights). Since this is meant as the Tramp’s final farewell, it pushes him to the apocalyptic limits – cocaine, the 1950s predicted, breadline riots, all material that is utterly alien to the Tramp, and perhaps an argument for his departure. How does Chaplin end such a statement?

Well, the climax comes first – in Chaplin’s work, often a bravura stunt sequence. Modern Times, true to its form, goes an idiosyncratic route instead…

THE TRAMP VOCALIZES!

Worry not, he doesn’t speak (which would violate Chaplin’s conception of the little guy), but he’s called upon to perform a song at the club he and the Gamine now work. As a fun little meta joke that wouldn’t be possible without a career of silence behind him, Chaplin milks the moments leading up to the Tramp’s singing for all they’re worth. And…the Tramp sings “The Nonsense Song,” filled with verbiage in the same sense that a James Joyce novel is filled with things that some would call words. Gibberish, in other words. Literally off the cuff, where the smeared lyrics are written. This retains the illusion of the Tramp’s verbal “otherness,” and creates a moment the character cold never improve upon.


The final shot provides closure for the entirety of the Tramp’s adventures. The classical ending sees the Tramp walking alone down the road – “The Lonely Man” from “The Incredible Hulk” optional. Only this time the Tramp is joined by the Gamine, his female counterpart – each abandoned by the ever-evolving nature of progress, but complete together. The Tramp has gotten the girl before, in The Gold Rush and assorted shorts, but this has a greater air of permanence. This is the Tramp still as the Tramp, not transformed by narrative circumstances into someone else.

As a postscript, Modern Times by no means signaled the end of Chaplin’s career, though it would be the last time he would appear as the Tramp. The distinction is somewhat academic, because in The Great Dictator Chaplin appears in two roles with arguable Tramp-like tendencies – as a Jewish barber, and as an ersatz Hitler. (Charlie Chaplin : Adolf Hitler :: Tina Fey : Sarah Palin) The Great Dictator, openly critical of Nazi Germany before it was cool, is a talkie, with a specific plot the Tramp simply does not fit into. For these reasons, it is not a part of the Tramp “continuity” – the Tramp’s essential pantomime is gone, even if Chaplin’s barber retains the Tramp’s visual appearance. Chaplin morphed his Tramp into new characters, evolved him beyond his very Trampiness. It isn’t a clean break, as The Great Dictator is still dependent upon memories of the Tramp, but it is fundamentally different.

The Tramp, No. 3 - The Gold Rush (1925)

To recap (mostly for myself), by 1921 and The Kid, Charlie Chaplin enjoyed the following freedoms: Autonomy as lead actor, writer, director, producer, editor, choreographer, composer, et cetera, free to make movies unhindered by financial necessity or the whims of a distributor, subservient solely to his muse. The only way Chaplin’s self-dictated Little Tramp series could get even more privileged would be if Chaplin started his very own movie studio.

Well, he’d already done just that…in 1919, Chaplin created United Artists (with D.W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford) to escape the standard studio system.

We are well into the 1920s now, the height of the silent film era…and Chaplin significantly slows down his output, with the assurance he would remain a draw regardless. It has been opined [citation needed] that Chaplin wouldn’t create new comedies for his Tramp character unless inspiration hit. One could say, with The Kid building upon assorted shorts, that the Tramp had done all he could in his usual setting of urban poverty. The Gold Rush hails a setting switch.


This wouldn’t come out until 1925, four years after The Kid, with nothing in between to rival it (just a few minor shorts such as The Idle Class, Pay Day and The Pilgrim). By modern terms, four years isn’t that long to wait for a sequel, but compare this to Chaplin’s initial turnaround, between Kid Auto Races at Venice and Mabel’s Strange Predicament: Two days! Two days to four years, a quantitative change which indicates the effect of switching over to feature filmmaking. As vindication of this slow-down, The Gold Rush wrangled up an unfathomable gross of $4,250,000, plus one extra dollar. Four million dollars, in 1926 money (the highest grossing of all silent comedies!) – not only did Chaplin remain a draw in considerable absence, he became a rarity, more valuable in measured doses.

The Gold Rush's genesis lies in sudden inspiration, since Chaplin wasn’t simply developing Tramp vehicles willy-nilly, but waiting for the perfect concept. Chaplin read up on the 1897 Klondike Gold Rush, about the hardships prospectors faced in the icy north. For whatever obscure reason, this historical reality of mass poverty and starvation, this material spoke out to Chaplin and said “I would make for an hilarious comedy.”

It’s true that Chaplin’s comedies derive much of their power from non-comic scenarios. Look to the The Kid’s black comedy of child abandonment, then picture an entire movie based around funny death. Slapping the Tramp into 1897 lets Chaplin mine for comedy just as the Tramp simultaneously mines for gold. Some of The Gold Rush’s funniest moments come early, through the simply contrast of the Tramp ambling awkwardly past icy precipices and unseen brown bears.

Actually, The Gold Rush is no mere pastiche of a more ostensibly serious gold rush movie. It is the era’s premiere, nay possibly only worthwhile look into the setting. The Trail of ’98 and Klondike Annie would only come later, for the spirit of copycatting is as old as time itself. Chaplin, in assembling his picture, did painstaking historical research, creating an accurate look back into the nostalgic “Gay Nineties” (tee hee hee!, I know), which just happens to feature the Tramp. Hell, some of Chaplin’s (the director’s) heaviest lifting occurs in sequences not even having to do with the Tramp! Consider his staged recreation of the Chikoot Trail –


- compared to the real deal –


For a comedy film, this is nearing Cecile B. DeMille levels of spectacle, what with the hundreds of faceless extras, meticulously recreated ginormous sets, and an utter lack of special effects to cheapen the effort – “spectacle” is the most successful form of silent film drama. Since Chaplin, with his storied love of pathos, is increasingly inclined to create serio-comic dramedies, it’s welcome that he embraces this mode of seriousness.

Actually, there is an element of The Gold Rush which recalls some of the less maudlin works of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd – fellow comedians more wholly devoted to comedy-as-thriller, comedy-as-stunt-show. There is a palpable danger in the wintry Klondike, well beyond the mere tragedy of the gutter – Chaplin’s favored setting. The Gold Rush is an adventure film, in its way, repeatedly placing the Tramp in harm’s way, then devising comic solutions to rescue him. This being Chaplin, and not Keaton, there is a noted de-emphasis upon stunt work; danger comes from different areas, of greater interest to Chaplin.


For instance, much of The Gold Rush sees the Tramp ensconced away in a single, one-room cabin during the worst of winter. His solitary mate: Big Jim (Mack Swain, professionally enormous man). Ignoring a brief run-in with a murderous fugitive (Tom Murray), the duo mostly holes up to face hunger and want and loneliness – certainly subject matter dear to Chaplin’s heart. Despite whatever hazards the setting itself might toss out – blizzards, bears, cliffs, ice flows, avalanches – cabin fever is Chaplin’s meat. Chaplin himself (or the Tramp, at least) is also meat, to go by Big Jim’s famished hallucinations of a man-sized chicken.

Keaton, given the same setting, would have no doubt emphasized the storm – Steamboat Bill, Jr. provides a good example of that. He would have also played up the mechanical fact of mining, be it panning for gold, or digging shafts, or chipping away at cliff side. It’s surprising then to note that the Tramp never mines on screen, just as the Dude never bowls. One might consider this an oversight on Chaplin’s part, except he clearly retains an interest in depravation for its own sake – In place of a raucous mining set piece, instead the Tramp boils his boots, and eats the laces like spaghetti. (A classic example of Chaplin humor, more gentle than hilarious.) There is greater humanism in joking about hunger, especially with Chaplin’s street urchin childhood, not his millionaire superstar 1920s fame.

It’s easy enough to question how Chaplin could draw out a feature film (meaning now 96 minutes) with the Tramp merely sequestered in a cabin. He cannot. Before the film is even halfway over, Chaplin relocates the Tramp to a gold rush town, to basically forego prospecting lunacy for the rest of the running time. This is, for me, a mistake, as it removes that danger element which makes The Gold Rush so involving. The Tramp, being a timid soul, instead becomes the Alaskan equivalent of a street bum (Levi Johnston?), attempting to survive via odd jobs and whatnot. Snow shoveling, largely, a chance for momentary physical hijinks. This is much closer to a generic Tramp movie, with the setting barely even mattering. Sigh, at least they’re not going with one of those archaic “Tramp falls for the Girl” stories.


Oh curse it all, they are! Meet Georgia (Georgia Hale – no points for that name), the saloon girl. The Tramp falls instantly in love with her and…well, quite frankly, I can barely even recall much of what occupies the vast majority of The Gold Rush – at least, not in the specifics. An occasionally lopsided tale of frontier romance plays out. The Tramp plays each moment of romantic success by smiling warmly towards the camera, or otherwise telegraphing his joy. I suppose it makes me a heartless curmudgeon that I am mostly apathetic towards this. Chaplin’s appeals to genuine emotion, while no doubt hugely effective, always seem somehow distant in my mind. I am more moved by Buster Keaton’s completely emotionless stone face than all the heart-grabbing, spontaneous joy the Tramp evokes. (Yeah, yeah, my devotion to the other great silent comedian becomes my great undoing in trying to engage this series.)


So be it. It still behooves me to at least point out the classic moments. Chief is Thanksgiving dinner, where the Tramp (now inundated with food) performs a little soft shoe routine involving a couple of dancing bread rolls. Just as Duck Soup’s immortal mirror routine didn’t originate with the Marx Brothers, so can Chaplin’s famous loaf dance be traced back further, to The Rough House with Fatty Arbuckle and – oh no, here it comes! – Buster Keaton. Okay, okay, calm down, Chaplin is good, he elevates a forgotten gag to the level of revered pantomime, I am a Grinch.

This whole middle section is, in retrospect, greatly irksome, when the same exact tomfoolery wouldn’t be out of place in a more typical Tramp short. Why? That Klondike setting. There’s so much potential, with the whole great outdoors, and thousands of men all desperately facing the elements to discover minimal financial reward. Why why why take that promise, deliver a few good starvation gags, then revert into the same standard love story as always?! What’d odd is The Gold Rush feels, somehow, less coherently singular than the lesser The Kid – which made its pseudo-fatherhood story the crux. The Gold Rush has moments of greatness, almost all pertaining directly to the fact of, well, a gold rush. The cabin scenes beforehand – totally wonderful. Thankfully, there’s a bit more where that came from.


Pausing for a moment…Chaplin films, more so than other silent comedies, dwell upon their happy endings, to a fault. Whether the Tramp gets the Girl or not, attains wealth or not, there is a carefully controlled emotion (i.e. pathos) to go out on. (Meanwhile, Keaton would sometimes end his onscreen romances with tombstones, to avoid all treacle.) Given a gold rush, the natural conclusion is to see the Tramp attain riches…and Georgia on his side, for good measure. And it just so happens that Big Jim had discovered a mighty gold claim before ever even meeting the Tramp. Only now he’s come down with the amnesia, as obedient to plot as ever, and the cowardly Tramp is called upon to return to the feared Arctic and find Jim’s lode.

So the two head back to the cabin, and it’s astounding to see the Tramp actually, in some vague way, earning his triumph for once. Compare it to A Dog’s Life, where he simple finds stolen riches, the end. Here, the Klondike demands some degree of effort, and even if we never see the Tramp directly seeking gold (despite that being his reason for being in Alaska to begin with!). At least he does something to earn his top hat and monocle at the end.

But first, this happens…


That occurred during an overnight snowstorm, with Jim and the Tramp (sounds like a morning drive-time DJ combo) asleep unaware in their beloved death cabin. And thanks to immortal drunkenness, when the cabin tilts, it’s written off as a hangover. So start many, many minutes of sublime comic suspense, a literal cliffhanger of balancing this precarious building. Now this is the sort of physical adventure I’d hoped for throughout, even if it retains that Chaplinesque air of pantomime, never inching into Keatonian daredevilry. That means when the Tramp wanders out into the drop-off – which is inevitable, given the scenario – his dangling is shown not through insane stunt work, but with a stop motion, miniature Tramp. The effect is rather noticeable today, but it doesn’t harm the sequence – the thrill comes from how things are choreographed, not just executed. And with this climax, The Gold Rush completely redeems itself.


I’ll largely pass over the epilogue in silence, where the Tramp, Robber Baron, has his final romantic reconciliation with Georgia. As an ending, it means to emphasize the value of love over money, and I’m not touching that one.

Postscript: In 1942, Chaplin re-released The Gold Rush as a talkie (…sort of). It features a musical track, with Chaplin himself narrating the film as a substitute for the usual title cards. There are some further changes, to projection speed and the romantic subplot. As tinkering goes, it’s not nearly as infuriating as George Lucas’ Special Editions, but it seems fed by the same sort of myopia. The additional aural elements overemphasize the maudlin pathos of the endeavor, which is appropriate enough in the Georgia sequences, but not really needed with Big Jim. With silence, one is freer to read a preferred mood (the great joy, and great challenge, of silent cinema, which demands much more of the audience). I personally prefer the silent version (which is, oddly enough, completely silent, thanks to the 1942 version’s impact – I just put on some Ennio Morricone instead). Though for the average viewer, the sound version is certainly more accessible. I’d almost call it a perfect gateway to silent films.

The Tramp, No. 4 - The Circus (1928)

The Circus was Charlie Chaplin’s release for the back half of the ‘20s. Happily toiling for his very own United Artists, features starring the Tramp were now all Chaplin was putting out, and he hadn’t done anything since 1925’s The Gold Rush. This is not even remotely problematic, for though The Circus underperformed relative to The Gold Rush (finishing 7th for the decade financially, as opposed to 5th), its more modest scope and ambitions fit that.

The Circus is the result of a long-term thought, dating back a decade: What if the Tramp went to a circus? This is a simple idea, deceptively so, more in line with the mentality which produced the shorts of the ‘10s – change up the location, and in each film explore the new comic possibilities it presents. The Circus feels, with no insult intended, like an old Chaplin short stretched out to three times its length. There are barely any plot complications one couldn’t find in some of Chaplin’s superior shorts – in fact, both The Tramp and The Vagabond provide the dramatic backbone which The Circus then elaborates upon.

Here is the plot, in total: The Tramp (Chaplin, duh) goes to the circus. He gains employment, falls in love with a nameless Girl (Merna Kennedy), and ultimately leaves dejected upon learning her heart belongs to a more traditionally manly suitor (here, Harry Crocker). For reference, it’s pretty close to the plot of Big Top Pee-Wee as well.


The meat of this story is obviously the romance, same as it is not only in the majority of Chaplin’s filmography, but in that of practically every silent era comedian. A love interest makes for a great MacGuffin for all the ridiculous stunt sequences filmmakers cooked up in the ‘20s. And with the circus setting, nicely hermetic and self-contained, a love story does not distract from the setting’s promise in the way it does in The Gold Rush. Any zaniness the Tramp gets up to under the big top can be traced back to his desires to impress the Girl – that is, when he’s not engaging in tomfoolery in order to eat, because hunger remains the driving force in the Tramp’s universe, which really makes one worry about living conditions in the 1920s. (Gags such as stealing away the apple from a William Tell performance would, in today’s climate, be obesity jokes. Here, it’s a joke on paucity, not abundance – an interesting distinction.)


The broad strokes of The Circus are absolutely nothing unique in the Tramp’s playbook, and for that reason it gains the same advantages as the shorts. One advantage is that the story is preset, formulaic in the way which benefits comedy, because it creates anticipation, can then subvert it, all in an intimately familiar framework. Like a short, The Circus excels around that basic story, because the cloying love scenes between the Tramp and the Girl are nothing new whatsoever, and I’ve said my peace on this side of Chaplin’s game. So it’s a good thing that the circus is a rich setting, wholly capable of sustaining a short film’s formula for feature length, with a varied series of individual comic sequences:

- First, a cop chases the Tramp through the fairgrounds, which is another way of saying “Silent Comedy 101.” This particular cop chase stands out through the clever use of a Mirror Maze, long before The Lady from Shanghai or Enter the Dragon did so more seriously. Moving outside, Chaplin also gets the opportunity to fashion an animatronics-inspired pantomime routine, all the better to fit in with the Noah’s Ark robots on display actively violating God’s laws and the Uncanny Valley.

- The chase continues into the big top, along the way passing over Gravitrons and other such spinning amusements. Unintentionally taking the circus’ center ring, the Tramp upstages the traditional (and purposefully unfunny) clowns – surely a bit of self-congratulatory meta commentary on Chaplin’s part, and indeed the start of a thread. The gist of it is that the audience (the circus’ audience that is; people at home may be of more wildly divergent opinions) find the Tramp hee-la-ri-ous, and thus our hero is employed.


A few more random scenarios:

- The Tramp performs as the magician – and screws it up royally. An attempt to pull a rabbit from his top hat (which he traded his traditional derby out for) results in the mass escape of bunnies, piglets and doves. Furthermore, the Tramp exposes the trick’s entire secret – the Alliance isn’t going to be too pleased with this.


- The Tramp is locked in the cage with a sleeping lion. He tries to escape without waking the great beast, resulting in a silent symphony of noises nearly made, then avoided – slamming doors, falling pots, barking dogs, even a tiger at one stage just in case lions aren’t your particular big cat of choice. (This moment has its ancestor in “Don Quixote,” which is an automatic way to curry my favor. Mmm, curry…)

- Climactically, the Tramp performs on the high wire trapeze – to impress the Girl, natch. Anticipating future developments in Hong Kong cinema, the Tramp hooks himself up with a safety wire, to prevent falling…and Chaplin is among the few situational comedians who can actually make the inclusion of a safety device the cause of greater danger. (There isn’t, overall, the same sort of devotion to danger here as in The Gold Rush, but those unexpected moments are most impressive indeed – Hell, I’d wager Chaplin’s tightrope performance is even the closest he’s come to approximating the more death-defying stunts of Keaton or Lloyd.) And all this is before the scene inundates with monkeys, because like with “Don Quixote,” monkeys automatically make anything better.


So it goes for The Circus’ major set pieces, individual encapsulations of joy which best represent their movie.

Then there’s the question of Chaplin’s meta commentary – and relax, there’s nothing particularly up-its-own-butt with medium awareness here (we leave that to Keaton’s utterly indispensible masterpiece Sherlock, Jr.). Recall the ringmaster (Al Ernest Garcia) hired the Tramp because he was funny. Naturally, the Tramp is made a clown, though he’s never put into the traditional clown makeup, possibly because everyone realizes that the Tramp’s classic appearance is in fact Chaplin’s makeup. Or something – it made more sense in my brain. The only issue is that the Tramp, as a clown trying to be funny, isn’t. Not that the other clowns are funny either (creepy, yes, but you already knew that), but a self-aware Tramp cannot reach even their level of schmaltzy, trite slapstick. To give Chaplin the credit, he (and not his Tramp) remains funny – a guy trying to be funny and failing, portrayed by a guy trying to be funny and succeeding, it’s all pretty good.


…The Tramp cannot be intentionally funny – His whole persona was built upon a poor man with awkward physical delusions of class, hence his cane and derby and ill-fitting pants. (A question arises: How do we get our mirth from the Tramp? Do we laugh with or at him? For all his human desires, he feels wholly unreal, down to the almost ceremonial body language which no longer carries anything identifiably “funny” about it.) To rectify this problem, the ringmaster realizes that the Tramp is funny in non-comic performances – leading chiefly to his magic act (the trapeze scenario is more something of the Tramp’s own devising). There is a potential farce to be had in this notion, to continually reinvent a performer’s act without his own knowing – a farce Chaplin is rather disinterested in, as it butts heads with the growing romantic subplot (which I won’t examine). But it boils down to this: The Tramp brings the circus untold success.


The Circus was originally intended for a 1927 release – a mere two years after The Gold Rush. This was on the dawn of the sound era, and legend has it that some of Chaplin’s more moving trapeze scenes were filmed immediately following the release of The Jazz Singer (the first big deal sound picture). It then becomes easy to read the circus as a microcosm of Chaplin’s greater Hollywood career – Its initial rabble of grotesque, undisciplined clowns clearly a parallel for Keystone Studios. And when the classic ending from The Tramp replays –the Tramp walks alone down a deserted road – it comes when he and the circus part ways, the fallout of his doomed romance. Could it be Chaplin was declaring his hostility towards sound cinema, a movement he proved obstinately opposed to?

Well, there’s a great deal of personal darkness informing The Circus, for as disposable and light as it is (certainly after all the abject starvation of The Gold Rush or the emotional apocalypse of The Kid). That its release was delayed for a year speaks volumes – of Chaplin’s struggles with the IRS, who were on a training run for Capone, demanding back taxes from fat cat celebrities.

Chaplin wound up owing the Federal Government…uh…I actually don’t know, so let’s just say a million dollars. (That’s a rounded estimation, but the most common number cited in any Chaplin biography.) Around the same time, he owed something similar to Lisa Grey, his second wife he was in the middle of divorcing. For you see, Grey was at one time a sixteen-year-old, which is what attracted Chaplin to her, but now she was a doddering old hen at nineteen! Chaplin the humorist was truly his era’s Woody Allen, for he persisted in his public demand for nubile young flesh, reportedly whoring himself around with underage girls repea– What am I, the “TMZ” for 1927?! (For what it’s worth, Nabokov’s “Lolita” was inspired by all this mess. What a legacy!)


Okay, the main point is Chaplin’s life was incredibly crappy while The Circus was being made, well in contrast with his Tramp character – and that’s to say nothing of the film studio burning down, or Chaplin’s mother dying. In light of my repeatedly-stated preference for Buster Keaton (Keaton’s The General is perhaps my favorite film of all time), it’s easy to think harshly of the Chaplin in this era. Basically, he seems desperate for attention. There’s mugging going on, with little grins and sideways glances at the camera. For over the past decade, he’d been the unquestioned comic star of the universe, who could do no (artistic) wrong, and it’s likely brilliance doesn’t best thrive while being actively hailed. I fear I’m largely repeating an old Roger Ebert argument here, and obviously stating it worse.

What I’m saying is that there’s a disconnect between the Tramp and Chaplin, one living hand-to-mouth, the other making movies only when it damn well suits him. Chaplin still expects our opinion of the Tramp to be our opinion of him, the hard-working underdog with millions of dollars and multiple barely legal love slaves. Thus, to regain our trust, the Tramp ends The Circus as aimless as he began, sans success or love or even an apple. (Oh, and he steals from a small child, which I trust was “relatable” to the average American in 1928.)

What little effect assorted scandals had upon Chaplin’s art or public reputation, all things considered! Many of his greatest masterpieces are yet to come, as proof that certain child-impregnating artists (see also Roman Polanski) can somehow remain forever divorced (as it were) from their scandalous real lives. The fictional Tramp, if separated from Chaplin, still has value.

The Tramp, No. 5 - City Lights (1931)

“A comedy romance in pantomime.”

City Lights: The world’s second greatest movie, so says the British Film Institute circa 1952 (second to Bicycle Thieves, which is more foreign and therefore better). Orson Welles’ favorite movie. Nearly so for Kubrick. More recently, AFI’s top romantic comedy, thirty-eighth best comedy, but somehow better than that overall at eleventh. IMDb’s highest-ranked silent film.

City Lights is very well Charlie Chaplin’s ultimate creation, even if he would personally point to something else (The Gold Rush) as his masterpiece – owing no doubt to the happier circumstances of its creation. City Lights is the essential Chaplin, the essential Little Tramp, because it unites all of Chaplin’s chief concerns into a single whole – his pathos, slapstick, pantomime, obsession with class as seen by a dignified vagabond. If the earlier, 1910s Tramp shorts created a formula (Tramp seeks Girl, usually fails), and longer features then explored that fundamental relationship through other entities such as a dog (A Dog’s Life) or a child (The Kid), then City Lights comes full circle, and wholly examines the Tramp and the Girl relationship at feature length, with the maturity of time. Unlike The Gold Rush (where the Girl’s presence is barely tolerable, for me) and The Circus (where she is a painless, necessary evil), in City Lights she is fundamental, essential for Chaplin to cement his combination of comedy and drama.


It is highly worth noting that City Lights is a silent movie, as have been all of Chaplin’s films so far. But it’s 1931 now, four years following The Jazz Singer, and the film industry has switched over to talkies with a dedication that should make today’s lunatic 3-D zealots blush. From 1929 onwards, one could nearly count on but two hands the silent movies released with that intent – it was no time to be a luddite, or nostalgic for an outdated format. Chaplin is a large part of this minor holdout, as he had the cachet to be free even from overarching entertainment meta-narratives – Buñuel, Murnau and Ozu are among the few other late-adopters.

The decision to retain silence is central to City Lights, which wouldn’t hold nearly its potency were it a product of but a few years earlier. Chaplin’s Tramp was, in Chaplin’s mind, purely a silent pantomime character, a wholly exaggerated, unreal figure whose very essence would be lost with speech – and keep in mind talkies of 1931 were largely word-obsessed harangues, never-ending diatribes delivered rapidly and unintelligibly before a static, disinterested camera. Truly a lot of cinema’s beauty was lost with the technological transition to chattiness, chiefly its air of spectacle, now that movies were limited to a soundstage. The very fundamental nature of filmmaking changed, to the extent where breathless exposition became a crutch, and it’s still difficult to find a movie which truly makes the utmost of its visual nature.

For Chaplin, his perfectionist approach to filming wouldn’t work with sound, which necessitates a script preplanned to the nth degree prior to shooting – totally at odds with Chaplin’s love (shared by most other silent film practitioners) for relative improvisation. A Chaplin joint would be sketched out in only the broadest terms prior to shooting, then largely made up on the spot – valuable for a clown like Chaplin, where the “voodoo of location” informs the performance greatly. In cinematic comedy, only recently is some degree of improvisation creeping back, but in a Judd Apatow form which isn’t really comparable. Hence, Chaplin-wise, sequences often follow with a sort of semi-logic, resulting in simple (but not simplistic) plots which are perfectly happy to give way to isolated comic set pieces. Hence the four-year gap between Chaplin films, and their astoundingly consistent quality.


City Lights is not, however, a pure silent film – not technically. It employs a synchronized soundtrack. Chaplin’s orchestrated music is married forever to the visuals onscreen – which is pretty similar to silent-era musical accompaniment, which Chaplin dictated for live performers, but couldn’t control as readily. (See the 1942 reissue of The Gold Rush for a similar approach.) On top of that, Chaplin incorporates “sound effects” into City Lights, and numerous gag routines simply would not work in pure silence: The Tramp, at a hoi polloi shindig of well-heeled snobs, swallows a whistle. He hiccups, it rings, and as a capper, the Tramp becomes Pied Piper to a motley crew of itinerant hound dogs. (A boxing bell serves a similar purpose later on.) Even as recently as 1927, such a scene wouldn’t even be legible. This is an example of Chaplin taking advantage of new technology as he saw fit – approximating something closer to live stage vaudeville – without being beholden to it. (This approach predicts the silent film homages of Jacques Tati.) It’s worth noting that the “sound effects” are really just pieces of music, like the noises reverse-engineered into Fantasia. Most of what appears visually makes no diagetic sound.

Nearly all of City Lights’ dialogue is conveyed the old-fashioned way: through title cards. The sole counterexample occurs at the very start, where a public speech is rendered aurally in “Peanuts”-style “wah-wah-wah-wah-wah” verbal nonsense – a succinct little parody of sound cinema, one I am wholly sympathetic to.

It’s a testament to Chaplin’s popularity and his control over the medium that City Lights was wholly embraced in the midst of a technological revolution. It stands as a treatise of what silence can do that chatter chatter chatter cannot, and thus becomes almost a textbook example of Chaplin. The setting, as per the title, is the city, notably the same basic gutter the Tramp often finds himself in when a more specific locale is unavailable. Such is possibly needed, to best comment upon the old Tramp archetype. There is one notable change, however: It’s now the Great Depression, with social and technological evolution wildly altering the Tramp’s familiar world. His own destitution now reads more clearly, as poverty was a greater daily fact than during the heady days of the ‘20s (at least, it seems more historically appropriate now in 2011).


Chaplin dwells upon class more strongly than usual, countering the Tramp (with his false airs towards sophistication) with a Millionaire (Harry Myers) whose recent financial failures push him in the opposite direction, towards the Tramp’s sphere. If I am still a little opposed to Chaplin’s unconditional hagiography of bums (seeing as he is a multi-millionaire), at least the historical context makes it more acceptable. But the Tramp is really a tool for framing more naturalistic characters, so it helps when all the characters exist in the same economic universe as he.


Romance is central to City Lights, and here it goes: Tonight’s Girl (Virginia Cherrill, only barely capable by Chaplin’s exacting, holier-than-thou standards, leading to occasional unsuccessful recasting and reshoots)…er, tonight’s Girl is a blind flower saleswoman. She is impoverished, at the same station as the Tramp, but beautiful, and therefore out of his league – or at least the Tramp leaps silently to this conclusion. He begins to court her, but with the lightly comic conceit that he must convince her all the while that he is wealthy.

Aiding the Tramp unintentionally in this rouse is the drunken, suicidal Millionaire, who, once the Tramp saves his inebriated life, enjoys a close friendship with him – but only when the Millionaire is wasted. Once sobriety rises its ugly, hangover-ridden head, the plutocrat cannot recognize the Tramp. Still, the Tramp has occasional access to items of wealth, allowing for a more maudlin variation on Tony Curtis’ yacht seduction in Some Like it Hot.


Notice immediately how neither the Girl nor the Millionaire is able to visually recognize the Tramp – which is important, because in silent cinema (unlike talkies), appearance is all there is. Especially with the Girl, Chaplin stages scenes according to the senses, with the only sense we can experience being the one sense the Girl is not afforded. Through her blindness, the Girl becomes a means to discuss (silent) cinema as a total, using a wholly cinematic (i.e. non-conversational) means to do so.


City Lights isn’t huge on plot – it mostly ping pongs the Tramp between the Girl and the Millionaire, with the Millionaire’s occasional inability to recognize the Tramp getting in his way of fooling the Girl into misidentifying him – whoo, my head hurts! Within this framework, as in most Chaplin efforts, there is plenty of room for gag sequences which would play perfectly well on their own as shorts. Mainly, the Tramp takes on an assortment of odd jobs, all done for the Girl’s benefit, and not out of need due to his own poverty – the Tramp’s personal destitution, though rather inescapable because of his archetypal nature, is little more than an ornamental detail.

The Tramp’s jobs range according to Chaplin’s random whims, owing to the broad, generic possibilities of the city setting. Notably, he becomes a pooper scooper and an amateur boxer. The former affords the single most tasteful elephant feces joke cinema has to offer. Tom Green, Chaplin ain’t. The latter creates a boxing sequence which stands as one of Chaplin’s single most celebrated routines, worthy of solo examination…

The Tramp attempts to fix a fight against another boxer, and split the winnings (instead of his skull). Circumstances conspire, as is their wont, so the Tramp instead faces a genuine threat in the ring (it’s Champ vs. Tramp), with only his (the Tramp’s) own arhythmic semi-comic gyrations to protect him. But the Tramp survives for quite a long while, simply by keeping the referee between himself and the boxer. There is some very careful choreography between the three men, and therefore the scene mostly plays out in a single wide shot, to highlight that fact. It seems most of Chaplin’s feature films showcase one show-stopping sequence such as this – The Kid’s vision of Heaven, The Gold Rush’s teetering cabin, The Circus’ trapeze act. Most of the time, this penultimate sequence promises guaranteed enjoyment, even if the overall film doesn’t perfectly work.


It is my curmudgeonly flaw that much of City Lights irks me ever so slightly, in the way all of Chaplin’s oeuvre does. The Girl needs money for that most melodramatic of reasons – she’s sick. The Kid, in its dramatic moments, similarly tugged at the heartstrings in a way which just feels cheap and unearned. Naturally, Chaplin’s narrative assumes the Girl and her family will not be able to pay the doctor’s bill (to say nothing of the late-due rent, just to add to the sorrow orgy). Therefore it’s up to the Tramp to raise the cash, for completely selfless reasons…which is totally selfish of Chaplin. We cheer on the Tramp, and by proxy Chaplin, for this fictional act of charity…or we’re meant to. Along with the occasional camera glances Chaplin insists upon, it’s a little too self-conscious, especially when the Tramp is more an incredibly complex system of tics rather than a genuine human being (which is simultaneously the Tramp’s greatest asset, but the reason I cannot side with him nearly as strongly as the everymen of Keaton or Lloyd).

Later on, the Tramp’s amateur philanthropy is motivated by a quest to purchase $1,000 eyeball surgery. This is more sensible, less melodramatic, and it works with that whole cinematic metaphor, so it’s good.

Meanwhile, the Tramp can never raise cash. Every job instead leads to comic failure. It is an old comedy standby that the hero can never catch a break, that a sitcom protagonist is always denied riches in favor of the status quo. That’s totally appropriate for the loosey-goosey serialization of the Tramp’s anti-continuous franchise. But he’s not doing this for himself, but for the Girl. The universe conspiring to deny her a surgery is only funny if it’s a greater hardship for the Tramp – and it isn’t. His philanthropy (already questionable) gets in the way of laughs, while aiming for emotion. I am a hard nut, and a movie which abandons laffs for seriousness is, to me, fundamentally flawed. It’s insincere.

The greatest issue, though, is the simple, eternal fact of the Chaplin universe: the poor cannot succeed on their own. I don’t wish to open some debate, but it’s a strange, anti-Horatio Alger sort of argument for a humanist, populist filmmaker like Chaplin to put forth. When the Tramp does amass cash, it’s simply as a random, unearned gift from the drunken Millionaire – it’s always, always, ALWAYS a deus ex machina with Chaplin! This is actually a greater fairytale than a story about “pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.” Wealth may only be obtained by random dumb luck. What the hell sort of a message is that?!


Besides, the Millionaire sobers up almost instantly after paying the Tramp (following a rather left-field burglar sequence), and thus thinks the Tramp is stealing. Thus the Tramp flees from the cops – that old standby. In some fundamental sense, the Tramp always steals, and though this is different, it feels equally problematic.

All that aside, the moment comes for the Girl’s sight surgery. The ending to City Lights is famously regarded as one of the most brilliant, moving moments in film. I have never been able to watch this scene without the baggage of that claim weighing down upon me. I’ve never felt the raw emotive power others describe – intellectually I kinda get it, so let’s just leave it in those terms…

Chaplin’s films are often defined by their endings, be they happy or sad. What City Lights does well, without revealing too much detail (because you really ought to see it for yourself, in spite of my personal apathy), is that it creates an open-ended resolution. What occurs has the potential for bliss or tragedy. The conclusion also ties up all of City Lights’ silent film metaphorics, in a way that is a great big question mark about the future of cinema. Given Chaplin’s own ambivalence towards talk, that feels like the best way to leave things off.

The Tramp, No. 1 - A Dog's Life (1918)

In 1918, Charlie Chaplin was contracted by First National, a newly amalgamated film studio banking on their monopoly of theater chains throughout the U.S. Yeah, the movie industry was this way until antitrust actions decades down the road. Chaplin’s contract was in excess of one million dollars, the first actor (along with fellow new First National star Mary Pickford) with such clout. And these are 1918 dollars here! That sort of money no longer even exists, or my conversion is slightly off. (First National was eventually engorged by Warner Brothers, for what it’s worth.)

Chaplin already enjoyed great heaping scads of freedom to create his own films as he wished – as producer, director, writer, star, composer (in the silent era, dictating what accompanists played live). Upon reaching First National, add to that release from the tyranny of a schedule. Unlike with Mutual or Essanay, Chaplin no longer had to contractually deliver a certain amount of reels per year. Rather, he could take things slowly, focus upon pure quality in a way few filmmakers have ever enjoyed. So, from a pace of a dozen two-reel comedies a year, Chaplin went to producing only two or three reels total per year. It’s worth noting that this is where his iconic Tramp character became a long-lasting cinematic legend, and not simply a passé superstar.


New among Chaplin’s freedoms was the chance to do films at whatever length he preferred – no more duration limitations, should he wish to move on. And while Chaplin had no doubt perfected the two reeler, there’s only so much it allows. Assuming the Tramp features in every film, the story must concern him homelessly ambling into a new situation, falling for a girl, possibly getting her (the elusive Chaplin happy ending)…plus all the time needed to run through whatever gags the setting suggests. So the Tramp must forever languish in a surface-level depiction of poverty, because this movie needs to make boat jokes, then this one cops jokes, this one department stores, a church, and so forth. But extend the Tramp’s time in any of those same settings, and the facts of his plight itself can be explored.

So it is that Chaplin’s first First National national release, A Dog’s Life, is not a two reeler. Neither is it feature length (in 1918 terms, six reels – one hour, give or take). Chaplin is working his way up to that point, settling in the mean time for three reels – just over half an hour. Certainly not a proper movie, but neither a short – and more common in the silent era, before distribution formats necessitated the standard bladder-dictated running time we love today. Buster Keaton’s arguable masterpiece, Sherlock Jr., is only slightly longer. Some would argue that Chaplin’s next Tramp role, The Kid, is the first in the “series” (as in “feature length Tramp movies”), but I feel A Dog’s Life deserves some recognition.


The scenario of A Dog’s Life is nothing special. In fact, it’s the Tramp template stripped to its bare essence: The Tramp living in the gutter, scrounging for food, falling for the Girl (Edna Purviance, same as usual). Most Tramp shorts, even The Tramp, elaborate upon this. There is the slightest elaboration in A Dog’s Life, as Chaplin shares protagonist duties with Scraps, “a thoroughbred mongrel,” the Little Tramp in dog form.

First off, the Tramp awakes in his familiar filth, stands in the bread line, battles old-timey shopkeeps – you know, just your average American day. Ho hum.

Then, in parallel, Scraps awakes in its scraps, and runs through a dog-centric variation on the same – basically, contending with a bunch of larger asshole dogs.

To ascribe some sort of deeper meaning to Chaplin’s work – which he no doubt intended, though it’s not worth dwelling upon self-seriousness – he portrays the bum’s existence in almost literal “dog eat dog” terms. Audiences of 1918 lapped this stuff up, as it depicts the regular immigrant experience – this is a historical predicament we’ve somewhat moved beyond.


The Tramp ends up rescuing Scraps from a dog pile, perhaps recognizing the artful parallel between them. They’re kindred spirits, at any rate. And all this before the Girl even shows up! It paints the Tramp in a different light, less selfish than before, a benefactor and not simply a scrounge. For the less high-fallutin’ comedic value of it all, Scraps is anthropomorphized up the wazoo! Editing gives him much of the Tramp’s cadence and instant emotability. It’s not unusual for silent comedians to enjoy a dog costar – Keaton had Luke, and while your reaction to Scraps might be “Ahh, I want to pet it,” your reaction to Luke would be “Holy crap, did that dog just climb up a ladder backwards?!”

Such demonstrates their comedic differences, not a necessary exploration when discussing Chaplin films alone, but it helps me define what is unique about Chaplin against other luminaries of silent comedy. It’s more tender, and the laughter isn’t as loud. This is humor, not comedy, to be precise, which uses an amusing approach to enlighten or amuse. I guffaw mightily at many of Chaplin’s contemporaries; with Chaplin, I might just grin softly. This isn’t a fault in Chaplin’s work, but an example of his uniqueness.


Not that there aren’t moments of more extreme comedy to behold. Scraps and the Tramp (!) attend the local vaudevillian music hall – a chance to explore the art form which created Chaplin. The Girl sings a melodramatic song, whose musical quality is retained by Chaplin’s score despite the silent format. It is a ridiculously sad song, at that, with the Tramp and other audience members weeping by the literal bucketfuls. (With three whole reels to play with, this joke has time to creep up on you as well.) It somewhat resembles the projectile puking scene in Stand By Me, only with tears replacing great heaping torrents of human bile. (Wagging the censors, Scraps is covered in moisture, and it’s unclear it this is the dog’s tears, others’, or some different liquid entirely.) It’s patently unrealistic, with no (evident) greater relevance to the pathos of poverty – except as maybe a parody of Chaplin himself.

Following the song, the Tramp pursues the Girl. If you wanted, you could try paralleling this to his relationship with Scraps. Or you could simply enjoy a slapstick dance sequence involving the three of them. Usually, dancing alone would be a signal for supposed “hilarity” in silent comedies – totally performer-dependent, and usually somewhat outdated. Chaplin adds in a dog on a leash. Because that’s not enough, there’s also gum on the floor, to exacerbate things further. Such a scene cannot be written, nor preplanned. It’s all on the strength of Chaplin’s pantomime.


But wait, there’s still another reel left! With the relaxed pace already affecting the tone, Chaplin uses his extra ten minutes to do something no Tramp film has really had – he creates a plot. That is, not simply a romantic predicament, but a series of connected events. It’s all in service of an eventual happy ending, in a rather Horatio Alger sort of way. A local criminal, pursued by the police, buries a wad of cash near the Tramp’s favored filth. From the setup, it’s obvious Scraps will dig it up – a little too obvious, by modern standards, perhaps. So find it Scraps does.

That the Tramp’s eventual salvation comes of coincidence and outside events is no mistake. We might prefer a more active protagonist, but this better perpetuates beliefs Chaplin’s impoverished audience might prefer. Chaplin paints the gutter as mostly inescapable, and again someone with more time and concern might care to tie this back to his political beliefs. In the years following, Chaplin’s left-leaning attitudes have become an elephant in the room, something he possessed even this early on, yet always tried to keep out of his films.


To create the impression that the Tramp has actually earned salvation, he runs through a brief conflict with money-hungry crooks. This is partly the chance for a fun isolated comic routine – the Tramp knocks out one goon, then hides behind a curtain as he animates the crook’s body to fool the rest. Then the Tramp is found out, leading to the Chase – a silent comedy standby. Normally, this would have accompanied all the other plot points in a fraction of A Dog’s Life’s running time – and then, we wouldn’t even have the dog subplot, or the extended view of the Tramp’s vagrant existence. Calmly isolating outward climactic conflict like so keeps the rest of the movie on its own enjoyable level. A good thing, because this section might be the film’s weakest.

Then our heroes achieve their bucolic happy ending, as happily wed farmers. We see this at length, to impress upon us just what happiness looks like – no material comfort, but the assurance of a home, hearth and crops. And Scraps has puppies, possibly as a stand-in for the babies most romances would conclude with. There’s a little grist for the “dog and Girl parallel” interpretation, plus a fun joke on the censors and their fear of biology. (The ending of Sherlock Jr. does something similar, but altogether cleverer.)

Interestingly, this happy ending is a guaranteed secure future for the Tramp. And yet he’ll return time and again, always reverted to his initial level of poverty. This doesn’t undermine the joy certain iterations of the Tramp find in the mean time. As a series, the Tramp’s films as discontinuous, wholly separate tales that just happen to feature the same persona. The Tramp is the same character, but with many stories he can tell. In this way he evolves into something of an icon or an archetype for audiences at the time. The Tramp will always be there, struggling against crooked authorities and the whims of fate just as his viewers are. This, paradoxically, allows fans to appreciate the Tramp’s financial windfall at the end of A Dog’s Life, without alienating the Tramp himself.

(As a postscript, 1918 also saw Chaplin create a much shorter Tramp film, The Bond. This is a curiosity, a one-reel effort to sell bonds for World War One, showing the war bond’s interaction with day-to-day life, and oh so many other outdated period details. So much for Chaplin’s films being apolitical, eh?)

The Tramp, No. 2 - The Kid (1921)

The Kid is Charlie Chaplin’s first feature-length film. After nearly a decade of assorted twenty and thirty minute frivolities, it clocks in at a mighty sixty-eight minutes! That double what A Dog’s Life boasted, and it allows Chaplin to hunker down with essentially the same concept – the Tramp and his small charge living in poverty (here Chaplin trades up, from dog to child) – only developed with greater detail than ever. A Dog’s Life was rather the perfect length for a Tramp comedy, really, yet The Kid effectively doubles its time by doing twice the genres: comedy and drama. This is perhaps Chaplin’s hugest contribution to the world of filmed comedy – the dramedy. That’s most appropriate for the man synonymous with pathos, and it’s perhaps only by my own compulsion to read these things primarily as comedies that I don’t often think of Chaplin as a dramatist.


It is inarguably The Kid’s aim to accomplish this unlikely union of the serious and the silly, as that is its admission right there at the top. Silent film titles allow the storyteller to directly address the audience far more effectively than talkies. This is a little too on the nose, but for the first time out it’s necessary to alert audiences what sort of tonal experience they’re in for.

The predicament: A Woman (Edna Purviance) has an unwanted newborn baby boy, and tries to abandon it with a wealthy family, and hope for the best. Through a series of semi-comic blunders, the baby instead winds up in the charge of the Tramp, who at least lives indoors now. Five years pass, the child grows into young Jackie Coogan (also TV’s Uncle Fester!), happily conning window-owners with the Tramp. Then outside forces, from crooks to well-meaning bureaucrats, conspire to separate this unofficial father-son ragtag team.

The move to relative dramatics is essential; at feature length, the style of comedy of even Chaplin’s more dour shorts would seem flippant. Other silent comedians graduating to features would sometimes add on other genres – the 1920s are host to a surprisingly large number of comic action-thrillers, from Safety Last! to The General. Or they would use drama to up the stakes in what would otherwise be featherweight comic shenanigans. Chaplin, rather, seems to embrace drama more wholeheartedly than the others.

The thing is, this is silent era drama, a most melodramatic beast indeed. Drama is tricky, as it’s sort of a-generic – comedy seeks laughs, action thrills, horror frights. Drama simply seeks emotion of some sort, in a more broad sense. Comedy works in silence, because there is a regularized output (jokes) which aren’t hurt by the necessarily stylized acting silence demands. The other genre genres work similarly – witness Nosferatu’s eeriness, or the thrills of an old Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckler. Silent dramas work when trading in spectacle – Intolerance – but they’re the hardest antiquated film form to take seriously today.


The Kid, lacking in spectacle by its domestic setting, opts for the melodramatic histrionics of silent drama, for want of a different tact. This form of drama traffics in being overwrought – Assuming an immediate connection with the characters on screen, the story will start indiscriminately ladling out tragedies and diseases and oh so many other unpleasantries, resulting in tear showers the likes of which A Dog’s Life so effectively mocked. It’s sort of that way with the introductory sequence with the baby-abandoning Woman. An early title asserts “Her only sin was motherhood.” (Funny, spell check wants me to change “sin” to “son.”) Sorry to differ, but her undiscussed sin is abandoning a newborn child in the ghetto. And yet, we’re supposed to immediately feel pity for the Woman. There’s not enough context to really understand her motivation, besides poverty, so one only assumes child abandonment was a regular enough part of the 1921 audience’s existence (Great Depression and all) for them to relate.

Once the youth winds up with the Tramp, the natural emissary of comedy, things improve mightily. The Tramp is a figure of fun – this fact is so ingrained in viewers’ knowledge by now that he needs even no introduction prior to discovering the tot amidst the ash and soot. His first non-cannibalistic impulse is the same as ours would be upon finding an alley baby – he tries to get rid of it. Ye gods, the instinct is spreading!

Actually, this yields a most amusing routine, with the baby acting as an unwanted prop the Tramp fails to squander off on assorted Depression Era urban archetypes. The kick comes from how serious the situation is. Adding a baby gives the Tramp’s antics weight, edging things ever so slightly into dark comedy. Hey, that’s a pretty good example of how the drama improves the comedy, at the least! And there’s always that reassurance that nothing dire will happen to the child, that indeed the Tramp shall concede and unofficially adopt it – now christened John. (That the Tramp never seems to consider an orphanage seems curious – not knowing the social realities of the time – but the fact is we must saddle him with a child for this movie to play out, so on with the show.)


Once John has aged into his five-year-old self, The Kid’s meat is upon us. “Father” and “son” roam the city in a variation on the usual Tramp antics, a sort of unofficial comedy duo – it helps immensely that Coogan was already quite familiar with vaudeville by this stage. Many scenes feel, on the face of it, not unlike what a Tramp short would offer up: taking unfair advantage of homeowners to make a buck, or antagonizing the local derby-clad tough (a disproportioned period type I can only associate with cartoon bulldogs). The comedy is winning enough, I suppose, in that gentle Chaplinesque sort of way – never aggressive, more eager for a smile than a guffaw. Dramatic seriousness has waned notably, doing a disservice to the comedy…for now.


(It somewhat bothers me that the Tramp is so unashamedly crooked or dishonest in his own dealings. Perhaps it’s a condition of his impoverished existence, or a way for audiences to feel that he’s getting one better on the supposed suppressor forces in their lives, but it makes the Tramp – for me – a little less likable. Contrast him to the perfectly middleclass Harold Lloyd, also hugely popular in his day, though Lloyd’s Everymen have the advantage of financial comfort.)


There is some drama left, drama now pertaining to the Tramp himself. Playing his standard comic bits with John builds their relationship subtly, creating much more specific, rich bonds than a full-fledged period drama could. It’s the “honey on the wormwood” to draw audiences in for the inevitable heartstring tugging. Many of the best works of humor – I’m thinking partly of “Don Quixote” – sneak deeper emotions up on you, by investing the lead characters with purely humorous traits at first, until the reader (viewer, whomever) cares for them anyway. I don’t begrudge this approach, it can be remarkably effective. (One reason television comedies, with the advantage of time, can be so effecting.) The Tramp, as a recurring character, accomplishes largely the same response.


There is no doubt that John and the Tramp love each other very much. With enough setup, that allows for some genuine threats to enter their existence, right around the time something like A Dog’s Life would be wrapping up. Interesting, how every time increase inspires in Chaplin an entirely new style of comedy. Mind you, that’s with over half an hour devoted entirely to the Tramp and John. Despite the presence of Purviance, there is no attempt at a romantic subplot, or anything that would distract from the central fatherly relationship.

So a few plot complications later, and the authorities catch wind of the tenuousness of John’s existence. It’s not the poverty that’s an issue (pointed commentary…unintentionally?), but the mere fact that the Tramp seems to simply have the boy, for no justifiably good reason. Their dire threat: To shanghai John off to the orphanage, and find a well-to-do family for him. All well and good, except it undermines the emotional bond John has formed.


John is taken away…and the Tramp gives chase. What follows is another example of comedy working best when there’s some seriousness underlying it: The Tramp, desperate to get his child back, outpaces the orphanage’s paddy wagon across the rooftops, police chasing, until he leaps into the speeding vehicle, fights off the interlopers, and escapes. In a different film it would read as an action sequence, but in context it is tragicomic. And the duo’s reunion, after even so short a separation, is all the more rewarding for the emotions involved.

It’s inevitable that John cannot remain the Tramp’s forever, as their subsequent itinerant existence between flophouses isn’t sustainable. Thanks be again to the gods of coincidental melodramatic plotting, John is destined to be reunited with his original mother – the one so abandonment-happy at the outset. She has, in the meantime, endured a largely unseen drama of her own (one imagines a more generic picture of the era chronicling this), having in five years risen from the gutter and somehow become a singing sensation superstar. It’s oh so convenient, that John is destined to go live in a shiny gilded mansion, that promise of ostentatious riches this era’s films always tempt viewers with. It seems…willfully perverse to excuse initial abandonment with subsequent wealth. Odd too that John won’t be happy without the Tramp unless he’s obscenely rich. This matter of money seems really disingenuous, in the context of things.


The Tramp, meanwhile, doesn’t know what’s happened to John for various ostensibly comic reasons. Then Chaplin allows himself one truly unexpected detour, as the Tramp dreams on a stoop in his loneliness…and pictures his slum as Heaven, everyone in the most by-the-books angel outfits possible – even the Tramp, derby and baggy pants still forever there along with his wings and harp. The image alone must be what sustains comedy in this section – presumably – or otherwise it’s a parody of some long-dead form of entertainment, or something. As a dramatization of the Tramp’s emotional state, it reveals little. I’m not sure what to make of it, except Chaplin needed a definitive climax for his low key, bittersweet dramedy, and happened upon a sub-hallucinatory passion play for whatever reason.

Then, like the ending of Monsters Inc., our hero, denied a lifetime with his child, at least gets one final heartwarming reunion. All is well. It’s a strong way to end the movie, reinforcing the Chaplin/Coogan team up.

Thematically, this was no doubt a hugely personal film for Chaplin, in the wake of his own impoverished London childhood. Such experiences, and Chaplin’s rise to international stardom, perhaps excuse some of the Algerian (that is, Horatio Alger, not Algeria) money-gazing which often resolves his stories. More immediately, Chaplin’s firstborn infant had died just before The Kid was made, and his inner turmoil is certainly present on film. This accounts for the unusually vulnerable state of the Tramp, the matter of a master clown infusing greater humanity into his central creation without ever sacrificing what makes him funny.

The Kid was the result of a two-year downtime for Chaplin, who hadn’t put out a film since 1919. This shows incredible faith on the part of First National Pictures, confident that Chaplin’s cachet would persist into the twenties. They were right – in spades! The Kid was the second highest grosser of 1921 (one can only guess what a high gross looked like in those days), behind only The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Chaplin produced a few more short films for First National – The Idle Class, Pay Day, The Pilgrim – over the next two years. He was growing less prolific, certainly in contrast to the heady ‘10s. But Chaplin’s artistic heyday was just beginning, as even more freedom would soon be his.