“Assorted French Tarts”

Still no word from Dr. B. on whether or not my Chaplin topic will fly, so what could I do but take the evening off? It is out of my hands. (=cough=)

Watched six or seven of Chaplin’s KeyStone and Essanay shorts as a warm up. I think that counts as research, don’t you?

A couple things spring to mind. The first is the certainty that anyone who has seen Dough and Dynamite (1914) and still thinks that Charlie was a Communist is out of their gourd.

Second, whatever the Tramp ever was, we can be sure that Chaplin’s assertion that, upon first donning the costume, he was “born fully realized” is pretty damned faulty.

Compare the Tramp from A Fair Exchange (1914) with the one in The Tramp (1915), or even in (parts of) The Champion (1915). The way love replaces lust, adoration replaces raunchiness, innocence replaces drunkenness, and the way that pathos replaces crude and incessant violence. The Tramp traveled light years in development in just that year, alone. I can’t even imagine the Tramp from Modern Times (1936) doing half the stuff the Tramp of 1914 did to people, especially women, in those early films. The Tramp remained puckish for all his days, but he softened some cruel edges as time passed.

The Tramp was an on-going process, and may be one of the most fascinating laboratories of organic character development we’ve ever had the privilege to observe. Even think of how Chaplin later describes the Tramp as growing entity, as when he commented that, until The Great Dictator (1940), he had not realized the Tramp was Jewish, but that the Little Man told him so, firmly, when the chips were down in Europe.

So, then, from rascal to romantic, and thus to idealist, is it still a mystery that the Tramp (though officially put to rest with Modern Times) hung on only long enough to meet sound technology face to face and to pour his heart out to the audience? People say that the ending speech of The Great Dictator was an artistic flaw, but in many ways the Tramp was building towards it for 25 years.

Some wonderful, wonderful shorts, and a magnificent body of work… I could thumb through my sets for days.

However, duty calls, and, as I have the joy (and misfortune) of now claiming my hobby as my work, I’ve got to get serious and put away my unfocused delight that accompanies discovering and re-discovering these films.

But, before utility commands me for the next two weeks, I must ask one thing: What could be more beautiful than The Vagabond (1916) and The Immigrant (1917)? Can anything be finer than A Dog's Life (1918)? Has the human mind and hands surpassed those two films in terms of grace, charm and poetry, ever?

What a world that contains such treasures!