~ Biography Of Charlie Chaplin ~

[MysteRy]

Chaplin while Filming
Filming the Kid

Many of Chaplin’s admirers regard The Kid as his most perfect and most personal film. Yet it seems to have been born out of a state of acute emotional turmoil in his private life.

In October 1918 Chaplin had compromised himself into a hasty marriage with a 17-year-old actress, Mildred Harris. The couple had little in common, and Chaplin’s personal boredom and frustration resulted in an acute creative block.

He later wrote : ‘I was at my wits’ end for an idea’. Mildred became pregnant and gave birth to a malformed boy, who died after only three days. Chaplin evidently suffered acute trauma from this loss. But the responses of the creative mind are unpredictable. Only ten days after his own child was buried, Chaplin was auditioning babies at his studio. Suddenly the creative block seemed overcome. He was absorbed and excited by a new plan for a story in which the Little Tramp would become surrogate father to an abandoned child. The film would be called The Waif.

By chance, he visited a music hall where a virtuoso dancer was performing. At the close of his act, the dancer brought on his four-year-old son - a beautiful, sparkling little boy called Jackie Coogan. Chaplin had found his co-star. Jackie was a born mimic, and could perfectly imitate any action or expression Chaplin showed him. This made him the perfect collaborator. Chaplin was the supreme and sole creator of his films. His colleagues all agreed that if he could have done so, he would have played every part in every film himself. Failing this, he looked for actors and actresses who could and would faithfully and unquestioningly copy precisely what he showed them. In Jackie Coogan he found his ideal actor.

His inspiration seemed never to slacken during the shooting, which extended over most of nine months. The only interruption was when Chaplin took a couple of weeks off to knock out a cheerfully uncomplicated comedy, A Day’s Pleasure, to calm his distributors, who were desperate at the slow delivery of new pictures. Chaplin never seemed more dogged in his characteristic quest for perfection than in making The Kid He patiently shot scenes again and again until he was fully satisfied. In the end he had filmed more than fifty times the length of film that appeared in the finished picture. Such a shooting ratio - it was precisely 53 to 1 - was far higher than for any other film he ever made.

The Kid is perhaps Chaplin’s most potent marriage of comedy and high emotion. The story relates how an unmarried mother abandons a baby, which is found and unwillingly adopted by the Tramp. As the child matures to five or six years old, the two form a profitable business partnership: the boy goes round breaking windows, and his friend follows, earning an honest living by mending them again. The Tramp ferociously opposes the efforts of social workers to take the boy into public care, and finally he is reunited with his mother, now a successful opera singer.

The emotional element of the film reaches a peak of poignancy in the scenes where the social workers try to take the boy away to an orphanage. The anguish and ferocity of the Tramp’s fight to keep him are unquestionably inspired by memories of Chaplin’s own childhood heartbreak at being taken from his mother at seven years old and placed in a home for destitute children.

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By the time shooting had ended, Chaplin’s now irretrievably estranged wife Mildred had begun a suit for divorce. Terrified that her lawyers would try to seize The Kid, Chaplin and his most faithful associates fled California. The film was edited in secret in a hotel in Salt Lake City and an anonymous studio in New York. There were further financial problems with the distributors but when The Kid was finally released in February 1921, it was an instant triumph everywhere it was shown, perhaps the greatest triumph of Chaplin’s career.

Jackie Coogan, at 7, became a world celebrity, honoured by princes, presidents and the Pope himself when he embarked on a European tour. He enjoyed a brief film career as a child actor, but, as Hollywood wits declared, «senility hit him at 13 years old». As a young adult he found himself penniless: his mother and step-father had mismanaged his childhood earnings, and what little money was left was eaten up in legal battles.

The one good outcome was that Jackie’s much publicised problems led to the introduction of a law to give financial protection to child performers: into this day it is known as «The Coogan Act». In later life, Jackie, once the most beautiful child in the world, achieved very different new fame as the nastiest of old men, Uncle Fester in TV series The Addams Family.

All this though was still hidden in the far-off future in 1921, when The Kid gave Chaplin the only true co-star of his career, and brought both Chaplin and the child to an unparalleled peak of world fame and affection.

[MysteRy]

Chaplin while Filming
Filming a Woman of Paris

A Woman of Paris was a courageous step in the career of Charles Chaplin. After seventy films in which he himself had appeared in every scene, he now directed a picture in which he merely walked on for a few seconds as an unbilled and unrecognisable extra – a porter at a railroad station. Until this time, every film had been a comedy. A Woman of Paris was a romantic drama.

This was not a sudden impulse. For a long time Chaplin had wanted to try his hand at directing a serious film. In the end, the inspiration for A Woman of Paris came from three women. First was Edna Purviance, who had been his ideal partner in more than 35 films. Now, though, he felt that Edna was growing too mature for comedy, and decided to make a film that would launch her on a new career as a dramatic actress.

At this moment his life was invaded by the second of the women, Peggy Hopkins Joyce. Peggy was not A Woman of Paris but a barber’s daughter from Virginia. She was however very pretty, and had made a profitable career of marrying and divorcing millionaires. No doubt she now intended to add Chaplin to her list of rich conquests. Instead, it was Chaplin who profited from Peggy. He was fascinated by her colourful stories – how she had been the mistress of a rich Parisian publisher, and how a young man had killed himself for love of her. He listened and stored up the stories – and Peggy and her love life were transformed into the character of Marie St Clair, Chaplin’s woman of Paris.

The third inspiration for the film was the glamorous and temperamental Polish-born actress Pola Negri, who had just arrived in Hollywood. Very soon Charlie and Pola embarked on a tempestuous love affair, which was gleefully reported, with all its dramatic ups and downs, by the world’s press. Two things about this affair with Pola were exceptional in Chaplin’s life. The first was that the affair became so public – though ordinarily he was at pains to keep his private life out of the news. The second peculiarity of the affair was that this was the only occasion on which Chaplin permitted himself to mix work and private life. Normally when he was making a film he had time and thought for nothing else, and certainly not for romance.

But the Pola affair was different. It coincided exactly with the production of A Woman of Paris Charlie and Pola met when Chaplin was in the final stages of preparation for the film, and separated for good three days after he had completed shooting. With such perfect timing, it is tempting to speculate whether this was a real love affair; or whether – however unconsciously – Chaplin was seeking in Pola the model he needed for the kind of sophisticated woman of the world who was hard to find in Hollywood.

At first sight the story might seem like conventional melodrama. Look again and you see how Chaplin has overturned all the stereotypes of the time. The heroine is frankly a courtesan. The hero is a mother-dominated weakling. The bad guy, on the contrary, is charming, considerate and amusing. Hollywood at that time revered mothers and fathers, but here the parents are bigoted and selfish and the cause of all the tragedy.

With A Woman of Paris Chaplin inaugurated a whole new style of comedy of manners, and new styles of acting to suit it. Chaplin’s own genius as a comic actor lay in his observation of human behaviour. Now he applied his discoveries to serious drama – exploring ways of revealing the inner workings of his characters’ hearts and minds through their external actions and expressions.

He found ideal interpreters for his ideas in the brilliant Adolphe Menjou and in Edna Purviance, with her long experience of interpreting Chaplin’s ideas. They play their roles with miraculous subtlety, and an understatement that was unprecedented at this time. Chaplin made a profound comment on his discoveries and on the whole art of the best screen acting: “As I have noticed …, men and women try to hide their emotions rather than to try and express them. And that is the method I have pursued … to become as realistic as possible”.

The press was ecstatic. Neither Chaplin nor anyone else had ever received such unanimous praise for a film. But alas the audience did not share the enthusiasm of the critics. Never had a Chaplin film done such bad business. It seemed that people were not prepared to pay their cents to see a film in which their idol did not appear. Few even recognised him in his bit part as the porter – though these few seconds were a high spot wherever the film was shown.

At the very end of his life, Chaplin tried again with the film. At 86 years old, aided by the arranger Eric James, he created and recorded a new musical score. It was to be mark his last days in a film studio and the final work in an astonishing creative life that had spanned eight decades. Perhaps too it was a kind of reconciliation with a film which the public had rejected, though he himself remained intensely and justifiably proud of it.

[MysteRy]

Chaplin while Filming
Filming the Gold Rush

Introduction
Charles Chaplin made The Gold Rush out of the most unlikely sources for comedy. The first idea came to him when he was viewing some stereoscope pictures of the 1896 Klondike gold rush, and was particularly struck by the image of an endless line of prospectors snaking up the Chilkoot Pass, the gateway to the gold fields. At the same time he happened to read a book about the Donner Party Disaster of 1846, when a party of immigrants, snowbound in the Sierra Nevada, were reduced to eating their own moccasins and the corpses of their dead comrades.

Chaplin - proving his belief that tragedy and ridicule are never far apart - set out to transform these tales of privation and horror into a comedy. He decided that his familiar tramp figure should become a gold prospector, joining the mass of brave optimists to face all the hazards of cold, starvation, solitude, and the occasional incursion of a grizzly bear.

The idea took shape much more quickly than was usual for Chaplin: this was the only one of his great silent comedies which he began to shoot with the story fully worked out. Only two months after the premiere of his previous film, A Woman of Paris0 he had already sent a scenario (provisionally titled The Lucky Strike) for copyright, and set his studio to work on building sets. Perhaps his activity was stimulated by the public’s disappointment with “A Woman of Paris” a dramatic film in which Chaplin himself appeared only fleetingly, as an extra.

Complications with Lita Grey
Chaplin generally strove to separate his work from his private life; but in this case the two became inextricably and painfully mixed. Searching for a new leading lady, he rediscovered Lillita MacMurray, whom he had employed, as a pretty 12-year-old, in The Kid Still not yet sixteen, Lillita was put under contract and re-named Lita Grey. Chaplin quickly embarked on a clandestine affair with her; and when the film was six months into shooting, Lita discovered she was pregnant. Chaplin found himself forced into a marriage which brought misery to both partners, though it produced two sons, Charles Jr and Sydney Chaplin.

As a result of these events, the production was shut down for three months. Lita was replaced on the film by an enchanting new leading lady, Georgia Hale. Georgia, then 24, had arrived in Hollywood after winning a beauty contest in Chicago and worked as an extra until Josef von Sternberg cast her In his shoe-string debut film, The Salvation Hunters. Chaplin screened the film in his home, and instantly decided on Georgia, with her distinctive, delicate beauty, as his new leading lady.

The Shooting and Special Effect
With this unforeseen interruption and the distractions of the Chaplins’ domestic tribulations, the production dragged on for almost a year and a half. It was in every respect the most elaborate undertaking of Chaplin¹s career. For two weeks the unit shot on location at Truckee in the snow country of the Sierra Nevada. Here Chaplin faithfully recreated the historic image of the prospectors struggling up the Chilkoot Pass. Six hundred extras, many drawn from the vagrants and derelicts of Sacramento, were brought by train, to clamber up the 2300-feet pass dug through the mountain snow.

For the main shooting the unit returned to the Hollywood studio, where a remarkably convincing miniature mountain range was created out of timber (a quarter of a million feet, it was reported), chicken wire, burlap, plaster, salt and flour. The spectacle of this Alaskan snowscape improbably glistening under the baking Californian summer sun drew crowds of sightseers.

In addition, the studio technicians devised exquisite models to produce the special effects which Chaplin demanded, like the miners’ hut which is blown by the tempest to teeter on the edge of a precipice, for one of the cinema’s most sustained sequences of comic suspense. Often it is impossible to detect the shift from model to full-size set.

The Film
The Gold Rush abounds with now-classic comedy scenes. The historic horrors of the starving 19th century pioneers inspired the sequence in which Charlie and his partner Big Jim (Mack Swain) are snowbound and ravenous. Charlie cooks and eats his boot, with all the airs of a gourmet. In the eyes of the delirious Big Jim, he is transformed into a chicken - a triumph both for the cameramen who had to effect the elaborate trick work entirely in the camera; and for Chaplin who magically becomes a bird. For one shot another actor took a turn in the chicken costume, but it was unusable: no-one else had Chaplin’s gift for metamorphosis.

The lone prospector’s dream of hosting a New Year dinner for the beautiful dance-hall girl provides the opportunity for another famous Chaplin set-piece the dance of the rolls. The gag had been done before, by Chaplin’s one-time co-star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle in The Rough House (1917) ; but Chaplin gives unique personality to the dancing legs created out of forks and rolls. When the film was first shown audiences were so thrilled by the scene that some theatres were obliged to stop the film, roll it back and perform an encore.

The Gold Rush was the first of his silent films which Chaplin revived, with the addition of sound, for new audiences. For the 1942 reissue he composed an orchestral score, and replaced the inter-titles with a commentary which he spoke himself. Among the scenes he trimmed from the film was the lingering final embrace with Georgia, with whom he had maintained a long and often romantic friendship. Perhaps some private and personal feelings caused him to replace the kiss with a more chaste shot of the couple walking off, simply holding hands.

Today, The Gold Rush appears as one of Chaplin¹s most perfectly accomplished films. Though he himself was inclined to be changeable in his affections for his own work, to the end of his life he would frequently declare that of all his films, this was the one by which he would most wish to be remembered.

[MysteRy]

Chaplin while Filming
Filming the Circus

The Circus won Charles Chaplin his first Academy Award - it was still not yet called the 'Oscar' - he was given it at the first presentations ceremony, in 1929. The special award was for 'Versatility and genius in writing, acting, directing and producing'.

The film certainly merited the honor. It contains some of his best comic inventions, subtly balanced with sentiment that is kept tightly in control. Yet paradoxically, though, this is the only film from his mature feature productions which Chaplin does not once mention in his extensive autobiography. As late as 1964, it seemed, this was a film he preferred to forget.

The reason was not the film itself, but the deeply fraught circumstances surrounding its making. Chaplin was in the throes of the break-up of his marriage with Lita Grey; and production of The Circus coincided with one of the most unseemly and sensational divorces of twenties Hollywood, as Lita's lawyers sought every means to ruin Chaplin's career by smearing his reputation. At the height of the legal battle, production of The Circus was brought to a total halt for eight months, when the lawyers sought to seize the studio assets. Chaplin was forced to smuggle such of the film as was already shot to safe hiding.

As if his domestic troubles were not enough, the film seemed fated to catastrophe of every kind. Even before shooting began, the huge circus tent which provides the principal setting for the film was destroyed by gales. After four weeks of filming, Chaplin discovered that bad laboratory work had made everything already shot unusable. In the ninth month of shooting, a fire raged through the studio, destroying sets and props.

Later, when the unit returned to work after the enforced lay-off, they found that Hollywood's mushroom real-estate development had in the meantime transformed the scenery beyond recognition. The troubles persisted to the very end. For the final scene, of The Circus moving out of town, the wagons were towed to location. When the unit returned for the second day's shooting the whole circus train had vanished. It had been stolen by some high-spirited students who planned to use it for a marathon bonfire. This time, luckily, Chaplin was just in time to prevent the catastrophe. Somehow, from all the chaos, Chaplin conjured a film of deft comedy and admirable structure.

The story had all grown out of a single idea: Chaplin imagined a scene of comic thrills, such as his contemporary Harold Lloyd had made his speciality. The scene he envisaged was the climactic sequence in which, having taken the place of the tight-rope walker, and suspended high over The Circus ring, he is attacked by malicious escaped monkeys. They rip off his trousers to reveal that he has forgotten to put on his tights. With this nightmare moment as its climax, he built up the whole that leads up to it, and the finale to conclude.

The Little Tramp is engaged as a clown by a travelling circus. He falls in love with the ill-treated daughter of The Circus proprietor, but meets an insuperable rival in the handsome new tight-rope walker. It is while attempting to compete with this challenger that he has his confrontation with the malevolent monkeys.

The heroine was played by Merna Kennedy, a beautiful 18-year-old dancer making her film debut; and the Tramp's rival in love by Harry Crocker, a handsome young socialite. Chaplin and Crocker spent weeks mastering the skills of rope-walking. Chaplin ran other risks besides the tight-rope. For the scenes with the lions he made some 200 takes, in many of which he was actually inside the lion's cage. His looks of fear are not all merely acting.

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Alongside the thrills the film contains some of his most accomplished gags, notable among them the early scenes in the fairground hall of mirrors, and outside the fun-house where he and a hostile ruffian are forced to pose as automata. The film was so rich in comedy that Chaplin was obliged and able completely to remove an entire, wonderfully developed episode - really a little film in itself - which involved his confusions with a pair of identical twin prize-fighters. This virtuoso sequence, with its brilliant double exposure effects to enable the same actor, Doc Stone, to play both twins, is a tribute to the technical ingenuity of Chaplin's collaborators.


In the late 1960s, after the years spent trying to forget it, Chaplin returned to The Circus to re-release it with a new musical score of his own composition. He even composed a theme song, 'Swing Little Girl', to be sung over the titles. A professional vocalist was engaged, but the musical director, Eric James, recognised that Chaplin himself sang the song much better. So he was persuaded, at the age of 79, to record the song. It seemed to symbolize his reconciliation to the film which cost him so much stress.

[MysteRy]

Chaplin while Filming
Filming City Lights

City Lights proved to be the hardest and longest undertaking of Chaplin’s career. By the time it was completed he had spent two years and eight months on the work, with almost 190 days of actual shooting.
The marvel is that the finished film betrays nothing of this effort and anxiety. As the critic Alistair Cooke wrote, the film, despite all the struggles, “flows as easily as water over pebbles”.

As usual with Chaplin’s projects, the story went through many changes. From the start he decided it would be about blindness. His first idea was that he himself should play a clown who loses his sight but tries to conceal his handicap from his little daughter.

From this he moved to the idea of a blind girl, who builds up a romanticised image of the little man who falls in love with her and makes great sacrifices to find money for her cure.

Once this was decided, he had – unusually – a clear idea of how the film would end – the moment when the blind girl, her sight restored, finally sees the sad reality of her benefactor. Even before he shot it, he had a sense that if it succeeded this would be one of his finest scenes.

He was right. The critic James Agee said that it was :

“the greatest piece of acting and the highest moment in movies”.

Near the end of his life, Chaplin still marvelled at the magic of the scene:

I’ve had that once or twice, he said, …in “City Lights” just the last scene … I’m not acting …. Almost apologetic, standing outside myself and looking … It’s a beautiful scene, beautiful, and because it isn’t over-acted."

He spent many laborious weeks on the deceptively simple scene where the Tramp and the flower girl first meet, setting up the premise of the story. Here, in two or three minutes, through action alone, he establishes the meeting of the two people; the Tramp’s recognition that she is blind, and his instant fascination and pity and the girl’s misconception that this poor creature is a rich man. At the end of the sequence, having built up the sentiment to a high pitch, he brilliantly dashes it with a touch of broad comedy.

“It is completely dancing, said Chaplin. It took a long time. We took this day after day”.

To play the blind girl he chose a 20-year-old Chicago socialite and recent divorcée, Virginia Cherrill. Inexperience was never a disadvantage in Chaplin’s eyes – he just wanted actors who would obediently follow his instruction. He was impressed by her ability to give the impression of blindness. To achieve it he advised her, in his own words :

“to look inwardly and not to see me.”

Their collaboration was not easy. Virginia was the only actress with whom Chaplin failed to establish personal sympathy. More than 50 years later, Miss Cherrill declared:

“Charlie never liked me and I never liked Charlie.”

For his part, he felt she lacked the necessary dedication to the job – “she was an amateur”, he said scornfully. On one occasion he even tried to replace her with Georgia Hale, who had been his leading lady in The Gold Rush Yet despite – or perhaps because of – the struggles, the performance he finally won from her is as near as may be perfect.

However severe Chaplin was with others, he was always even harder on himself. In this case he had the strength of will to cut out a scene which he know was brilliant, but which simply did not fit into the finished film. It is a polished set of variations built about the simplest idea. The Tramp simply spies a piece of wood stuck in a grating, and idly tries to free it. No more – yet the Tramp’s concentration, and the curiosity he arouses in passers-by was transformed into a sequence of high comedy.

Even before he began City Lights the sound film was firmly established. This new revolution was a bigger challenge to Chaplin than to other silent stars. His Tramp character was universal. His mime was understood in every part of the world. But if the Tramp now began to speak in English, that world-wide audience would instantly shrink. Moreover there was the problem of how he should talk. Everyone, across the world, had formed his or her own fantasy of the Tramp’s voice. How could he now impose a single, monolingual voice?

Chaplin boldly solved the problem by ignoring speech, and making City Lights in the way he had always worked before, as a silent film. His only concessions were to add a synchronised musical score; and to introduce one or two sound effects – like the disconcerting chirruping of a whistle he has swallowed – which showed that he could use sound as creatively as images for comedy purposes.
Already with his silent features he had paid great attention to the music played by live orchestra for the first runs of his feature films. Now he astounded the press and the public by composing the entire score for City Lights

The premieres were among the most brilliant the cinema had ever seen. In Los Angeles, Chaplin’s guest was Albert Einstein; while in London Bernard Shaw sat beside him. City Lights was a critical triumph. All Chaplin’s struggles and anxieties, it seemed, were compensated by the film which still appears as the zenith of his achievement and reputation.

[MysteRy]

FILMS

Chaplin while Filming
Filming Modern Times

Modern Times marked the last screen appearance of the Little Tramp - the character which had brought Charles Chaplin world fame, and who still remains the most universally recognised fictional image of a human being in the history of art.

The world from which the Tramp took his farewell was very different from that into which he had been born, two decades earlier, before the First World War. Then he had shared and symbolised the hardships of all the underprivileged of a world only just emerging from the 19th century. Modern Times found him facing very different predicaments in the aftermath of America¹s Great Depression, when mass unemployment coincided with the massive rise of industrial automation.

Chaplin was acutely preoccupied with the social and economic problems of this new age. In 1931 and 1932 he had left Hollywood behind, to embark on an 18-month world tour. In Europe, he had been disturbed to see the rise of nationalism and the social effects of the Depression, of unemployment and of automation. He read books on economic theory; and devised his own Economic Solution, an intelligent exercise in utopian idealism, based on a more equitable distribution not just of wealth but of work. In 1931 he told a newspaper interviewer :

bq. “Unemployment is the vital question … Machinery should benefit mankind. It should not spell tragedy and throw it out of work.”

In Modern Times he set out to transform his observations and anxieties into comedy. The little Tramp - described in the film credits as “a Factory Worker”- is now one of the millions coping with the problems of the 1930s, which are not so very different from anxieties of the 21st century - poverty, unemployment, strikes and strike breakers, political intolerance, economic inequalities, the tyranny of the machine, narcotics. The film’s portentous opening title - “The story of industry, of individual enterprise - humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness” - is followed by a symbolic juxtaposition of shots of sheep being herded and of workers streaming out of a factory. Chaplin’s character is first seen as a worker being driven crazy by his monotonous, inhuman work on a conveyor belt and being used as a guinea pig to test a machine to feed workers as they work.

Paulette Godard
Exceptionally, the Tramp has a companion in his battle with this new world. On his return to America after a world tour in 1931, Chaplin had met the actress Paulette Goddard, who was to remain, for several years, an ideal partner in his private life. Her personality inspired the character of the “Gamine” in Modern Times - a young girl whose father has been killed in a labour demonstration, and who joins forces with Chaplin. The couple are neither rebels nor victims, but, wrote Chaplin, ”The only two live spirits in a world of automatons. We are children with no sense of responsibility, whereas the rest of humanity is weighed down with duty. We are spiritually free”. In a sense, then, they are anarchists.

Chaplin at first planned a sadly sentimental ending for the film. While the Tramp was in hospital, recovering from nervous break-down, the Gamine was to become a Nun and so be parted from him for ever. This ending was filmed, but was finally abandoned in favour of a more cheerful finale. “We¹ll get along”, says a title; and the couple, arm in arm, set bravely off down a country lane, towards the horizon

By the time Modern Times was released, talking pictures had been established for almost a decade. Till now, Chaplin had resisted dialogue, knowing that his comedy and its universal understanding depended on silent pantomime. This time though he weakened to the extent of preparing dialogue, and even doing some trial recordings. Finally he thought better of it, and as in City Lights uses only music and sound effects. Human voices are only heard filtered through technological devices - the boss who addresses his workers from a television screen; the salesman who is only a voice on the phonograph.

Just at one moment, though, Chaplin’s own voice is heard directly. Hired as a waiter, the Little Worker is required to stand in for the romantic café tenor. He writes the words on his shirt cuffs, but these fly off with a too-dramatic flourish; and he is obliged to improvise the song in a wonderful, mock-Italian gibberish. Chaplin’s voice had already been heard on radio and in at least one newsreel, but this was the first and only time that the world heard speech from the Little Tramp.

Apart from this indecision over sound and the changed ending, the shooting seems to have been fairly untroubled and, by Chaplin¹s standards, comparatively fast. It may have helped that the essential structure is neatly devised in four “acts” each one more or less equivalent to one of his old two-reel comedies. As the contemporary American critic Otis Ferguson wrote, they might have been individually titled The Shop, The Jailbird, The Watchman and The Singing Waiter.

As he had done for City Lights Chaplin composed his own musical score, giving his arrangers and conductors a harder time than usual, with the result that the distinguished Hollywood musician Alfred Newman walked off the film.

The film became the victim of a strange charge of plagiarism. The Franco-German firm of Tobis claimed that Chaplin had stolen ideas and scenes from another classic film about the 20th century industrial world, A Nous la Liberté, directed by René Clair. The case was weak, and Clair, a great admirer of Chaplin, was deeply embarrassed by it. Yet Tobis persisted, and even renewed its claims in May 1947, after the Second World War. This time the Chaplin Studio finally agreed to a modest payment, just to get rid of the nuisance. Chaplin and his lawyers remained convinced that the determination of the German-dominated company was revenge for the anti-Nazi sentiment of The Great Dictator

Happily for posterity, Tobis failed in their original demand to have Chaplin¹s film permanently suppressed. Instead, Modern Times survives as a commentary on human survival in the industrial, economic and social circumstances of the 20th century society. It remains as relevant, in human terms, for the 21st century.

The Challenge of Sound
The arrival of sound films was a bigger challenge for Chaplin than for any other actor or director. He had won world fame with the universal language of pantomime. If the Little Tramp now began to speak in English he would become incomprehensible to a large part of his international audience. In 1931 he predicted that talking pictures would not last six months, and told an interviewer that ’Dialogue may or may not have a place in comedy … dialogue does not have a place in the sort of comedies I make . .. For myself I know that I cannot use dialogue.’ When the interviewer asked him if he had tried using speech in his films, he retorted “I never tried jumping off the monument in Trafalgar Square, but I have a definite idea that it would be unhealthful… For years I have specialized in one type of comedy - strictly pantomime. I have measured it, gauged it, studied. I have been able to establish exact principles to govern its reactions on audiences. It has a certain pace and tempo. Dialogue, to my way of thinking, always slows action, because action must wait upon words.”

By the time he came to prepare Modern Times however, it seemed that he had steeled himself to use speech. In the Chaplin archives there is a dialogue script for all scenes in Modern Times up to and including the department store sequence. The dialogue which Chaplin planned for his own character is staccato, quippy, touched with nonsense. He began to rehearse the dialogue for the scenes in the jail and warden’s office; but after only a day or so seems to have been deeply dissatisfied with the results. No more dialogue scenes were to be shot for Modern Times

Chaplin did proceed with sound effects, however, and took a personal interest in the technique of their creation. For a scene involving rumbling stomachs, he created the noises himself by blowing bubbles into a pail of water. The fact that Chaplin was sufficiently keen to create the effects himself in this way suggests the extent to which he was intrigued by sound problems at this time. A memorandum about possible musical effects notes: ’Natural sounds part of composition, i.e. Auto horns, sirens, and cowbells worked into the music.’ The sound effects, as the Dardennes brothers point out in the accompanying commentary, became an element of the musical score.

The Premieres
Modern Times was launched more quietly than previous Chaplin films. The film opened in New York on 5 February 1936, and in London on 11 February. Chaplin and his co-star Paulette Goddard attended a third and the most glamorous “premiére” in Hollywood on 12 February. The venue was Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, which had opened in 1927 as “a shrine to art … the crowning achievement of a brilliant career … the realization of the vision of a simple soul, a master showman … Sid Grauman”. The guests were handed programmes designed in lush and glamorous Art Deco style, printed in black and red on gold paper.

In the past Grauman had devised elaborate live stage shows for Chaplin premieres, but this time the entertainment was entirely on screen, with a newsreel, a travelogue, a Technicolor interest film, and the latest issue of the current documentary series The March of Time - though, emphasising its topicality, this was announced as “Subject to weather conditions for Air Express”.

The most notable item in the supporting programme was a new Silly Symphony from the Walt Disney Studios, Mickey’s Orphan Concert. The inclusion of this cartoon exemplified an intense mutual admiration between Chaplin and Disney, who both recognised similarities in the other’s work. Disney bought advertising space in the programme, “In appreciation of the pantomimist supreme whose inimitable artistry and craftsmanship are timeless”. It was signed, “Mickey Mouse and Walt Disney”.

[MysteRy]

FILMS

Chaplin while Filming
Filming The Great Dictator

In the autumn of 1938, when the Munich Agreement was being signed in Europe, Charles Chapin was putting the finishing touches to the first draft of a script written in the greatest secrecy. Rumour had it that the creator of the Tramp had decided to make his first talking film. Moreover, it was said that he would be playing the part of a character inspired by Adolf Hitler.

Finally, after the long and painstaking process of revising and then directing, Chaplin presented The Great Dictator in New York on October 15th 1940. The historical circumstances in which he had found himself during those two years were quite extraordinary. His native country, England, had declared war at the beginning of September 1939, but the United States, where he had been living as a permanent resident – but British citizen – since 1913, had resolved to keep out of the conflict that was to bathe the Old Continent in blood.

By waging war against Hitler via the silver screen, Chaplin was making a personal commitment and, albeit with more gravitas, repeating the experience of Shoulder Arms. Even before shooting began, The Great Dictator had enraged German and British diplomats posted in the United States and brought Chaplin to the forefront of celebrities harassed by the House of Un-American Activities.

This struggle in favour of a democratic idea of peace is in itself reason enough for the historian’s interest. Chaplin, however, added to the credits of the Great Dictator the following warning; “Any resemblance between Hynkel the Dictator and the Jewish barber is purely coincidental.” This was a playful way of hinting that what was really at stake was not so much Chaplin’s double role but the tension between him and his twin, the Tramp. Up to now the Little Tramp had conveyed an experience of the world through the language of pantomime, and because he embodied no national identity and spoke no mother tongue, he had touched the hearts of spectators everywhere. His immense success rested on popular acclaim but also on the recognition of intellectuals, especially in France in the 1920s, where many artists and authors praised his genius.

Getting Charlie to speak also meant putting to death this character that had made his creator famous and taking the risk of exposing himself without a mask. Does the declamatory speech at the end of the Great Dictator betray Chaplin’s inability to sustain the aesthetic and comic register all the way through to the end of the film? Chaplin was well aware of these issues, which is why he wrote the words “First picture in which the story is bigger than the Little Tramp.”

Chaplin’s real history was not just the one he was facing up to, but also the one he was recounting by combining the characters of the Tramp and the Jewish barber in the image of the “pariah”.

[MysteRy]

FILMS

Chaplin while Filming
Filming Limelight

Charles Chaplin made Limelight at the most troubled period of his adult career. In the late 1940s, America¹s Cold War paranoia reached its peak, and Chaplin, as a foreigner with liberal and humanist sympathies, was a prime target for political witch-hunters. It did not help that he had recently been cited in an unseemly paternity suit. Pilloried as he was by the right-wing press and reactionary institutions like the American Legion, it seemed that America had turned against the man it had once idolised.

In this atmosphere, his 1947 film, Monsieur Verdoux with its sardonic view of war, was attacked as being anti-American. Not surprisingly, then, in choosing his next subject he deliberately sought escape from disagreeable contemporary reality. He found it in bitter-sweet nostalgia for the world of his youth – the world of the London music halls at the opening of the 20th century, where he had first discovered his genius as an entertainer.

His story concerns a once-famous comedian who has lost the ability to command his audience. Chaplin said that he based the character on real-life stage personalities whom he had seen lose their gifts and their public – the American black-face comedian Frank Tinney (1878-1940) and the Spanish clown Marceline (1873-1927) with whom he had himself worked as a boy. Clearly he was also thinking of his own present bitter experience of a faithless public.

Chaplin spent more than two years writing Limelight His method was remarkable, and unique in his work. As a preliminary, he wrote the story in the form of a full-length novel – some 100,000 words long and entitled “Footlights”. The novel – never published or apparently even intended for publication – relates the story as it appears in the finished film, but in addition includes two separate biographies of Calvero and Terry, detailing their lives before the action of the film proper begins.

What makes these biographies so remarkable is that we can trace in them a great deal of extended autobiography, as Chaplin quite openly introduces episodes from his own life and those of his parents. Just like Chaplin¹s own father, Calvero is devastated when he discovers his wife¹s infidelity and drifts into alcoholism. In the novel, Calvero even dies in the same hospital – St Thomas’ on the banks of the Thames – where Charles Chaplin Senior died in 1901 at the age of only 37.

The character of Terry, the young dancer, was equally clearly based on Chaplin’s mother, Hannah, though with reminiscences too of Chaplin’s first and never forgotten love, Hetty Kelly.

Claire Bloom, who plays Terry, remembered that in rehearsing her, Chaplin was always recalling gestures of his mother or Hetty, and the clothes they wore. With this strong underlay of nostalgia, Chaplin was at pains to evoke as accurately as possible the London he remembered from half a century before. In this he was helped by the great Russian-born designer, Eugene Lourié, who remodelled a set on the Paramount lot to look like a Victorian London street. A permanent setting of a theatre at RKO-Pathe was decorated to look like the Empire Theatre, London’s grandest music hall.

For the climactic scene Chaplin planned a ballet, in which Claire Bloom – not a dancer herself – was doubled by Melissa Hayden, a star of the New York City Ballet. Since the coming of sound films, Chaplin had always composed his own music scores, with the assistance of arrangers. Exceptionally, the music for the ballet – 25 minutes, though it was reduced in the final film – had to be composed in advance. Chaplin was relieved when Melissa Hayden and her partner and fellow star André Eglevsky assured him that the music was suitable for choreography. The “Limelight theme” was to remain one of Chaplin’s best-loved compositions; and in 1972, twenty years after the film’s first release, he and his musical collaborators Ray Rasch and Larry Russell were awarded a belated Oscar for “Best Original Dramatic Score”.

The beautiful, 20-year-old English stage actress Claire Bloom was chosen to play Terry after much soul-searching; and Chaplin’s son Sydney was given the secondary male role. Perhaps it was a comfort in these difficult days – and an element of the nostalgia – to have his family around him: four other children and his half-brother Wheeler Dryden also played in the film, and even his young wife Oona doubled for Claire Bloom in two brief shots. Though Chaplin’s public life was beset by problems, the shooting of Limelight at least was trouble-free and completed in 55 shooting days an exceptional standard of economy for Chaplin’s feature productions. The premiere was, appropriately, held in London on 16 October 1952.

In Chaplin¹s absence, open official hostility in America escalated to a point where he decided not to return to “that unhappy country”. Thereafter he made his permanent residence in Europe. At that moment Chaplin believed that Limelight would be his last film. It was not: but if it had proved so, this exercise in nostalgia and family autobiography would have been a fitting conclusion to his career.

[MysteRy]

FILMS

Chaplin while Filming
Filming Monsieur Verdoux

Charles Chaplin, without modesty, described Monsieur Verdoux as “the cleverest and most brilliant film of my career”.

He was from time to time to qualify this opinion; but Verdoux was certainly the blackest of his comedies – the story of a serial killer who ends up beheaded on the guillotine. As he had always said, comedy is never very far from tragedy and horror. “Under the proper circumstances,” he wrote, “murder can be comic”

The idea was originally suggested by Orson Welles, as a project for a dramatised documentary on the career of the legendary French murder Henri Désiré Landru – who was executed in 1922, having murdered at least ten women, two dogs and one boy. Chaplin was so intrigued by the idea that he paid Welles $5000 for it, with the agreement that the film would carry the credit “Based on an idea by Orson Welles”. In later years Welles claimed that he had himself written a script for the film, but this is unlikely – certainly the written agreement between Chaplin and Welles makes no mention of it.

The agreement was signed in 1941, but Chaplin took four more years to complete the script. In the meantime the irritating distractions of a much-publicised and ugly paternity suit had been compensated by his brilliantly successful marriage to Oona O’Neill.

Chaplin said that the character of Verdoux was also in part inspired by Thomas Wainwright, a 19th century English forger, murderer and intellectual. However Monsieur Henri Verdoux has still a great deal in common with Monsieur Henri Landru. Both are furniture dealers by profession, and both maintain a respectable bourgeois family life whilst marrying and murdering rich widows for their money. Like Landru, also, Verdoux is finally caught when the family of one of his victims grows curious about her disappearance.

Chaplin uses the story to make a satirical comparison between private and public murder. Verdoux declares at his trial, “As for being a mass murderer, does not the world encourage it? Is it not building weapons of destruction for the sole purpose of mass killing?” and tells a reporter who comes in interview him in the death cell, “One murder makes a villain …. Millions a hero. Numbers sanctify, my good friend.”

Sentiments like these were deeply suspect in 1940s America, which had already begun to slide into the paranoia and witch-hunting of the Cold War years. The Breen Office – the American cinema’s self-censorship organisation – initially disapproved the script in its entirety, claiming that it “impugns the present-day social structure” – even though the story was set in France between the two World Wars. In the end they were satisfied with only a few cuts, though the prudery of those times demanded the removal of all scenes that suggested that a husband and wife might share the same bed or that a girl was a prostitute.

Apart from censorship problems, the shooting was faster and more trouble-free than any full-length film Chaplin had ever made. The soaring costs of production and the post-war rationing of film stock meant that Chaplin could no longer afford the luxury of improvisation and on-set experiment that previously characterised his working method.

Economy now dictated that everything must be carefully planned in advance. Chaplin worked with a completely finished script, a precise shooting schedule, and meticulous plan drawings for every scene.

To ensure authenticity in the French settings, he engaged as his assistant the French director Robert Florey, an old friend and admirer. Authenticity also extended to Monsieur Verdoux s moustache – the first time that Chaplin had grown a real moustache for a screen role. The shooting was completed in less than three months.

The film was released in New York in April 1947, at a time when the political paranoia was climbing to its first peak, with Chaplin, vaguely but virulently suspected of radical sympathies, as one of its most prominent victims.

He was shocked by the generally unenthusiastic response at the premiere, and much more by a press conference at which hostile journalists declined to discuss the film but insisted on asking him questions about his political sympathies, patriotism, tax affairs and refusal to adopt American citizenship.

Subsequently the same right-wing zealots who had organised this harassment organised hostile pickets at cinemas showing the film, even forcing United Artists temporarily to withdraw it from circulation. This was the start of Chaplin’s last and unhappiest period in the United States, which he was definitively to leave in 1952.

But among the hostility there were still passionate supporters of Chaplin and Monsieur Verdoux The most important of them all was the legendary critic James Agee of The Nation, who struck back at the reactionary opposition by devoting not one but three successive reviews to Monsieur Verdoux which he unequivocally called “one of the best movies ever made”. As to Cold War America, Agee declared, “I believe that a democracy which cannot contain all its enemies, of whatever kind or virulence, is finished as a democracy”. Chaplin was not, of course, America’s enemy, but, in the character of Monsieur Verdoux he was undoubtedly a critic, in a society in which criticism was deeply unwelcome.

[MysteRy]

FILMS

Chaplin while Filming
Filming A King in New York

With A King in New York Charles Chaplin was the first film-maker to dare to expose, through satire and ridicule, the paranoia and political intolerance which overtook the United States in the Cold War years of the 1940s and 50s.

Chaplin himself had bitter personal experience of the American malaise of that time. The right wing and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had seen him as an ideal target – a foreigner who had never taken American citizenship, and whose work had a natural appeal to the humanists and radical intellectuals, now regarded as enemies of society. By the late 1940s the political and personal attacks on Chaplin became so acute that in 1952 he was happy to be forced into the decision to leave America for ever, and make his home in Europe.

To take up film making again, as an exile, was a challenging undertaking. He was now nearing 70. For almost forty years he had enjoyed the luxury of his own studio and a staff of regular employees, who understood his way of work. Now though he had to work with strangers, in costly and unfriendly rented studios. In the old days he could take all the time he wanted, trying things over and over again until he got them to his satisfaction. Now every minute cost money. Working under such constraints, Chaplin completed shooting A King in New York in what was for him a record time of only twelve weeks. The film shows the strain.

The story is set in New York, but Chaplin was obliged to use London locations, which are often less than convincing. He employed one of the cinema’s great cameramen, Georges Périnal, but was generally in too much of a hurry to allow him enough time to light the set properly, so that the photography has often a shabby look. The script would have benefited from a good editor. In his satirical view of America, Chaplin takes on too many targets – wide screen movies, television commercials, cosmetic surgery, social pretension. Chaplin himself insisted that his intention was not to make a political film. His was still as it had always been, he said, only concerned to make people laugh. Yet at the centre of this imperfect film is a fierce and effective comic essay on political intolerance and its ultimate victims.

Here, the ultimate victim is the small boy Rupert Macabee robbed of his self-respect when the Un-American Activities Committee investigators trick him into “naming names”, betraying the political affiliations of his parents’ friends. It is interesting to compare A King in New York with an earlier film, The Kid in which a small boy is also a central figure, and the ultimate victim of a sick society. In The Kid the injustice of society takes the form of physical deprivation. In A King in New York the child suffers something far worse – his honour, his conscience and his soul are abused.

The role of the small boy was of crucial importance – like Jackie Coogan in The Kid he is virtually Chaplin’s co-star. It was a last-minute decision to choose his own eldest son, Michael, then 10 years old. Michael’s parents thought of disguising his identity under the pseudonym of John Bolton, but the boy himself insisted on keeping his own name. His performance is excellent. He plays Rupert as an odious, precocious brat, but at the same time makes him touching in his vulnerability. In later years, Chaplin and his wife would debate who was the better actor, Michael or Jackie Coogan – with Oona Chaplin always championing her own son.

Apart from all else, it was commercially audacious of Chaplin to make a film which he knew could not be shown in the United States – and indeed it was to be 16 years before A King in New York was screened there. In Europe reaction to the film was generally favourable. Critics were not put off by any technical shortcomings, and the distinguished critic Kenneth Tynan considered it a positive merit that “Nobody has subjected the script to ‘a polishing job’ which is the film industry’s euphemism for the process whereby rough edges are planed away and sharp teeth blunted …. A crude free film is preferable, any day, to a smoothly fettered one”. In A King in New York Chaplin – unlike his contemporaries in Hollywood – was definitely and fearlessly unfettered.

[MysteRy]

FILMS

Feature Films[1921-1940]

The Kid

Year : 1921
Cast : Jackie Coogan, Edna Purviance
Production : 1st national
Description : Chaplin 1st feature film. The little tramp finds an orphan and raises him

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/UBX2Yy2dqg4&amp;wide=1&amp;feature=player_embedded" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/UBX2Yy2dqg4&amp;wide=1&amp;feature=player_embedded</a>

[MysteRy]

FILMS

Feature Films[1921-1940]

Woman Of Paris

Year : 1923
Cast : Edna Purviance, Clarence Geldart, Carl Miller
Production : united artist
Description : Marie St. Clair believes she has been abandoned by her fiance because he fails to meet
                      her at the station. He reappears later in this woman's life while she loves another man.

<a href="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=50322416" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=50322416</a>

[MysteRy]

FILMS

Feature Films[1921-1940]

The Gold Rush

Year :1925
Cast :Mack Swain, Georgia Hale, Henry Bergman, Tom Murray, Malcom Waite
Production :united artist
Description :Seeking for gold in the mountains the little tramp encounters some wilde characters 
                     before falling in love with the beautiful Georgia.

<a href="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7662147" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7662147</a>

[MysteRy]

FILMS

Feature Films[1921-1940]

The Circus

Year : 1928
Cast : Merna Kennedy, Al Ernest Garcia, Henry Bergman, Harry Crocker
Production : united artist
Description : Escaping the police in the middle of a circus the little tramp will soon become the star of
                       the show without knowing it

<a href="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7591111" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7591111</a>

[MysteRy]

FILMS

Feature Films[1921-1940]

City Lights

Year : 1931
Cast : Virginia Cherrill, Harry Myers, Al Ernest Garcia
Production : united artist
Description : Tangled up with a suicidal millionaire and in love with a blind girl the little tramp will find a 
                        way to help her recover her sight

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/b2NTUnujk1I" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/b2NTUnujk1I</a>