In the early hours of Christmas day of 1977, the great ballet master of the silent screen passed away in his sleep at the age of 88. His films stand as a testimony to a life lived in fantasy and style, rising above a childhood of hunger, uncertainty and deprivation. Chaplin’s legacy, that of one of the first and finest American auteurs, lives on as one that drew the “flickers” from the realm of crude entertainment and spectacle in the Nickelodeon to that of a magnificent art. Charlie, and his creation,
the Little Tramp, will live forever on film and as part of our collective cultural inheritance.
Chaplin was born in the evening on April 16, 1889. His mother, a frail and dramatic woman, loved her children, but was seldom able to support them, and the family spent stretches of time in the workhouses of Dickensian lore. In 1901, his father Charles Sr. died of alcohol-related liver disease, and in 1903 his mother finally succumbed to mental illness and was committed to the Lambeth infirmary. At 14, Charlie became responsible for himself. It is not surprising that the son of two music hall singers would himself seek employment on the stage. Chaplin eventually settled on the theatre rather than the music halls, and at 14, young Master Chaplin attained some success in the Saintsbury touring company of Sherlock Holmes, in which he worked for three years. At 17, he found himself unemployed and becoming too old to play boy characters. Capitalizing on his natural physical abilities, and accepting the fact that his 5’5” stature was not going to translate into leading-man roles, Chaplin turned to comedy. He soon followed his beloved brother, Sydney, into joining the now-famous Karno Company.
It was with this troupe of comedic actors that Chaplin first set foot in New York. It was in Karno’s American touring production of "The Mumming Birds" in 1913 that the 24-year-old was singled out by representatives of the Keystone Film Company, and received the telegram that would change the world. In January 1914, the boy comedian renowned for his manic stage comedy became a new player in the new film industry, and neither would ever be the same.
Staying with Keystone only one year, Chaplin learned everything he could about direction and film technology and made 35 short films, mostly slapstick and fast-paced farces of little artistic value. Significantly, it was with Keystone that Chaplin appeared as a supporting character, second only to gifted stage star Marie Dressler, in the first recorded feature-length comedy,
Tille’s Punctured Romance (1914). Other than this milestone, the limited studio offered little by way of artistic history.
However, on the 7th of February 1914, an enduring work was released, and the public would begin its oftentimes problematic love affair with Charlie. In the simple and crude little film,
Kid Auto Races at Venice, an alluring figure appeared from the crowd of spectators, wearing baggy pants, a tight frock coat and a frayed derby hat. In his hand, he carried a superfluous bamboo cane in an attempt to affect an air of dignity that would be attacked by everything from cops to conveyor belts over the next 25 years. The Little Tramp sprang to life, bringing Chaplin his most perfect role and his everlasting, iconic image.
In the early years, the Tramp was generally rough and one-dimensional, void of true character. An occasional drunk who could think of little more than finding a pocket to pick and a girl to chase, the early Tramp was not much different from the other tumblers of Keystone fame. It was not until Chaplin signed with Essanay Studios, and gained artistic freedom, that the Tramp began to look and feel like the universal Everyman we know today. In
The Tramp (1915), a short film revolving around the Tramp’s attempts to save a damsel in distress (the indomitable Edna Purviance, whose angelic features made her an ethereal counterpart to the Tramp’s earthiness), we see much of what we would expect from early comedies. There are many skulls cracked with giant cartoonish mallets, to be sure. But there is something else that would become the calling card of Chaplin’s genius: the ability to combine romance, comedy, and pathos in one narrative, and, thus, to make the gags support the plot.
It was the addition of human feeling to the Tramp’s character that created the empathy upon which the stories came to hinge. Most of all, he appealed to women who found their maternal instincts pleasantly aroused by the Tramp, and, subsequently, by Chaplin himself. Thus, the Little Fellow, once considered too small for romantic roles, became one of the very first Hollywood Heart Throbs.
The first Hollywood Star to sign a million-dollar contract, Chaplin got complete artistic freedom when First National agreed to buy his product but leave his production alone in 1917. The 29-year-old millionaire built himself a state-of-the-art studio in 1918 and began to make the films for which he is now most famous. In 1920, Chaplin made his first feature-length Tramp film,
The Kid, and for the next fifteen years he remained a box-office king, with five of the greatest silent comedies ever made, as well as one of the finest dramas (though a box-office flop),
A Woman of Paris (1923), to his credit. All of this despite the many Cassandras, including some of his own advisors, who predicted his doom when sound technology was popularized in 1927.
In 1940, Chaplin’s first full sound picture was the controversial anti-fascist comedy,
The Great Dictator, in which he ended the Tramp’s silence by making his Jewish barber, a victim of racist attacks in the fictional nation Tomania, the Tramp’s twin. The movie was discouraged at first by those who still held out hope for the appeasement of Hitler, a man whom Chaplin loathed, but after the beginning of the Second World War it was the film’s reported Communist and Pacifist sentiments that earned Chaplin further public relations difficulties. By the late 1940s, Chaplin the man had eclipsed his work in the States, and, as he had never applied for American citizenship, the country turned its back on him on September 19, 1952. The government refused Chaplin reentry. Hurt and angry, Chaplin liquidated his American assets and only returned to Hollywood once in the remaining 25 years of his life, to receive his Honorary Oscar in 1971, a gesture that many consider too-little, too-late in exchange for a life that gave the motion picture industry so much.
Chaplin spent the rest of his life in a comfortable, yet bitter, exile in Switzerland where he died in 1977.
Of course, this is a simplified telling of a life spanning nearly nine decades, and one lived by a man as complex and as enigmatic as any yet seen. Occasionally egotistical and cruel, Chaplin was a man of deep emotions and passionate convictions. He was also blessed with more talent than many of us will ever witness in our lifetimes. Today we mark the 28th anniversary of his death. He is sadly missed, even by those of us who never knew him. Yet, at least we have the gift of his films, and, when we hit play we make the man live again through the Tramp, his greatest creation.
Suggested reading:
My Autobiography (C. Chaplin);
My Life in Pictures (C. Chaplin);
Chaplin: His Life and Art (D. Robinson);
Remembering Charlie (J. Epstein).
