The Great Dictator (1940)

The Great Dictator (1940) straddles absurdity and warning.  The monologue Chaplin delivers at the end is shockingly timely today, and yet it was meant for a previous generation who fought fascism with humor, and then drama, and then, when that wasn’t enough, with armies.

Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” persona had been officially retired in his previous film, Modern Times (1936), which we covered here.  Yet the hapless misfit, here known only as a Jewish Barber, retains the Tramp’s innocence, athletic clumsiness, and knack for getting in and out of trouble.  But here he also has a doppelganger, in the form of a dictator who sends his goon squads to threaten Jews, as he plans for war on a neighboring country.  Despite the childishly pompous dictator’s fiendish actions, he is himself a buffoon, a joke, and something to be laughed at for his ineptitude. We do not really fear him…but we do have a sense of fear over his cult following, who carry out his every whim.

It was a daring film, not only to mock a figure who was clearly meant to represent Hitler during a time when we were not yet at war, but to draw attention to the fact that the Jews were so named as his scapegoats and his first victims.  Other films of the late 1930s and early 1940s, even those that boldly decried fascism at home and abroad, shied away from explicitly pointing out that Jews were being treated badly.  It was a courageous and utterly decent move by Chaplin, but he wrote in his 1964 My Autobiography (NY: Simon & Schuster, p. 392), Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator, I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.  For all its boldness in showing ruffian soldiers painting “JEW” on a shop window, the movie has more than its share of silliness.

Some scenes, such as the dueling barber chairs between the dictator and his adversary dictator played by Jack Oakie, clearly meant to be Mussolini, seem right out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon.  Mel Brooks-style Springtime for Hitler-type gags that mock the arrogance of the fascists, and the dictator's frantic speech delivered to his adoring throngs in a kind of pidgin-German reminds one of the fast and furious faux German speech of Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows. They were the imitators; Chaplin was the original.

There are two serious characters, though, on either side.  Henry Daniell plays an advisor to Adenoid Hynkel, the dictator.  Daniell is sinister, quiet and utterly serious.  He seems far more dangerous than the dictator, if only because he is more intelligent, more self-disciplined, and sociopathic. Compared to him, the dictator seems like a clown.

The other serious character is played by Maurice Moscovitch as Mr. Jaeckel, an elderly leader in the Jewish ghetto who helps the Jewish Barber and his community in any way he can.  We see his concern and his resolve, but he is actually helpless against the onslaught of oppression.

Billy Gilbert has a comic role as a bumbling staff member of the dictator, and we note the silly names further poke fun at the bad guys.  Gilbert is “Herring,” possibly a shortening of Hermann Göring, and the evil Henry Daniell plays “Garbitsch,” (garbage).

Two people who have the biggest impact on the Jewish Barber are Reginald Gardiner, who plays an officer in World War I who was saved by the barber and later repays the debt by saving him from the dictator; and Paulette Goddard as Hannah, a waif of the ghetto.  

Miss Goddard was married to Chaplin at the time, and serves as his innocent love interest.  Though this movie does not really have the Chaplin trademark pathos of many of his comedies, what there is can be discerned through the scrappy Paulette Goddard, orphaned and supporting herself doing housework and laundry, and facing the bullying soldiers.

The movie begins in the later days of World War I where Chaplin as the Jewish Barber is part of a German (or Tomanian, as the country is called Tomania) artillery.  Though the setting with its trenches and bombed-out landscape of leafless trees is bleak, there is a jolt of silliness in how he maneuvers the Big Bertha howitzer, and how he loses a live hand grenade up his sleeve.  

He comes upon Reginald Gardiner, a downed flyer who is desperately trying to escape in his plane from the advancing enemy, and Chaplin helps him, with more gags about flying upside-down.  Though the plane crashes, they survive and we have the end of the war in blaring headlines, movie fashion.

The Jewish Barber spends many years in the hospital due to his injuries from the crash, and has amnesia.  He does not realize a decade has passed when he leaves the hospital; he thinks it has been only a matter of weeks, and like Rip Van Winkle, he returns to find his village utterly changed.  His barber shop is now part of the ghetto, and “JEW” is written across the shutters.

But he seems oblivious to the change at first, or at least does not realize the significance of what is happening around him.  Soon, he ends up the prey of a troop of soldiers, who put a noose around his neck and try to hang him from a lamp post.  Suddenly, Reginald Gardiner intervenes, remembers his old friend, and saves his life.  Since he is an officer, he gives orders to the soldiers to leave Chaplin and the Jews alone.

Meanwhile, the dictator is still spewing his ridiculous orders, and it seems silly when he and Henry Daniell, wanting to preserve Aryan purity, which means getting rid of dark-haired and dark-eyed people as much as Jews, remark, “We’ll get rid of the Jews first, then concentrate on the brunettes!”

Planning world domination, we then have the memorable scene of the dictator considering a large globe in his office, which is actually a balloon, and he tosses it, dances a dreamlike ballet with it.  But at last, it pops in his arms.

Back to the Jewish Barber, who no less silly, shaves a man to the frenetic strains of Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5. 

The dictator wants a loan from a banker named Epstein, whom we do not see, but is denied, and therefore he will send his troops to march on a country named Osterlich (Austria).  First, he meets with his counterpart dictator, Napaloni, played by Jack Oakie, and they try to top each other in self-importance. 

The barber and Paulette Goddard are thrown together in the ghetto by circumstances and through the matchmaking efforts of Mr. Muscovitch, who advises the barber to open a beauty shop for women and insists he practice on Goddard.  At first, absentmindedly attempting to shave her as he would a male customer, the barber instead washes and coifs her hair, making the Cinderella of the ashes beautiful.

But life gets suddenly grim again when Reginald Gardiner refuses to attack Jews and has lost favor in the high command.  Though he heroically joins their resistance, he cannot protect them anymore.  He and the barber are captured and sent to a concentration camp.

When they make their escape in stolen officers’ clothing, we finally get to the point we knew was coming all along—the Prince and the Pauper switching of the identical barber and the dictator. (Chaplin’s famous character with his dark toothbrush mustache so resembled Hitler that people referring to Hitler on the sly sometimes called him The Little Tramp, to avoid saying his surname.)  The barber and Reginald Gardiner are whisked to an enormous outdoor stadium, Nuremberg-like, to make a speech of conquest. 

The jokes end here, as the barber, looking sickened in his seat, awkwardly steps up to the stage (how ironic that the word “liberty” is solidly in stone there) and the radio microphones, and the vast sea of willing cult members in uniform leaning on his every word.

He gives the famous speech that resonates with us today.  That it does resonate would not make Chaplin proud of his work, but would leave him, as it leaves us, dazed, depressed, and heartsick.  And angry.

The movie concludes with a close-up on Paulette Goddard, who listens to the speech on the radio.  It is a hopeful and inspiring ending.  But it is not true.  It would take several years of war to stop the madness, because when a people wait too long, madness can only be stopped by force.

It is important to face bleak facts and fight evil in any way possible, even to give one’s life to do so, but it is also important to realize that the evildoers are not invincible.  They can be taken down with the rule of law.  Laughing at them also helps. They hate that.

Watch the speech here below.  The entire movie can currently be found on YouTube.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

It is also here in paperback from Ingram.

And here in hardcover from Ingram.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation. 

Buy this or any of my books online here at Bookshop.org.

Modern Times (1936)

Modern Times (1936) says goodbye to The Little Tramp and hello to a brave new world. Charlie Chaplin takes aim at the horrors of industrialism and the tribulations of the Great Depression, and yet he brings along a nostalgic zest for the earlier twentieth century that is not going gently into that good night.  Inevitably, he presents us with a Valentine.

Continuing our look this year at films from the 1930s that make a social commentary on that decade, as I’ve mentioned before, many filmmakers in this era chose to deliberately comment on social conditions in that challenging time and make “modern times” the backdrop of even silly comedies.  You didn’t have to look far to see a message.   We turn now to a giant (a little giant maybe, but still a giant) in the history of film who does just this, and uses it to give his most famous and beloved character not just a curtain call, but a socially relevant one.

Mr. Chaplin came to realize that The Little Tramp’s era of particular innocence was over, and practically speaking, there was no way to continue his adventures not speaking.  Therefore, this is the last “silent film” made featuring our hapless hero.  However, it is also the first film we hear Chaplin’s voice—later in the movie when he sings a silly song.

The film is mostly silent, with some sound effects and very little dialogue—mostly from the boss of the factory who bellows at his employees via a large television-type screen.  This is not your father’s industrial revolution; in fact, the factory where Chaplin works is almost Buck Rogers futuristic, an Art Deco version of a factory.  It is the 1930s, after all.

The movie starts with a stark title screen and a rather film noir-ish musical theme, threatening and foreboding.   We see the image of a flock of sheep, and then the image of men climbing subway steps in a herd, running to the factory, to suggest that they are sheep.  The title card tells us this is “A story of industry, of individual enterprise—humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness.”

Will humanity succeed in finding happiness?  Maybe only at times.

It doesn’t start well for The Little Tramp and quickly goes downhill from there.  We see him tightening nuts on an assembly line, having trouble keeping up.  The bellowing owner from his omniscient screen observes them and wants more speed.  He is played by Al Ernest Garcia.

Charlie takes a smoke break in the washroom, but he gets yelled at by the face on the screen even in there.  Big Brother is even in the bathroom.

Efficiency experts come to the factory to demonstrate a new machine that will make the workers eat lunch faster—and poor Charlie is chosen to demonstrate.  Strapped into a chair, a revolving, demonic lazy Susan is placed before him, and he is force-fed soup, corn on the cob, and gets the traditional slapstick pie in the face from a mechanical arm, while his face is blotted intermittently with a large office blotter.  It’s a funny skit, and levity helps us—if not Charlie—from going crazy at the imprisonment of his workplace. 

When Charlie is on a break or off the line, he continues to twitch with the motion of tightening nuts with two large wrenches.  Poor Charlie goes berserk from the stress, ends up being threaded through the giant cogs of a machine in the iconic scene.  Afterwards, he takes his large wrenches and attempts to tighten anything—including the large dress buttons strategically placed on the breasts of a passing woman.  This is one of those gags that’s more funny if we are led right up to the moment and then is suddenly cut off, because what we imagine could happen is always funnier.

Playfully and maniacally out of control, Charlie is chased by his co-workers, taken to a hospital, and later, cured of a nervous breakdown, and must start his life over.

He is constantly starting over from square one in this movie, and that, too, is a comment on the modern condition.  We must be prepared to start over.  Always.

In another funny mistake, he falls into a manhole and comes up with a red warning flag, such that construction workers would take on a job, and when he emerges from the manhole with the flag, just at that moment, a protest march by a communist workers’ group is going by and he gets swept up with them.  He is rounded up and taken to the police station. 

Meanwhile, Paulette Goddard plays a poor girl living in a shack by the waterfront with her widowed father and two kid sisters. She is The Gamin. Dad is out of work, heavily burdened by the Depression, and Paulette, with a scrappy survivor’s instinct, steals bananas to feed the family.  Reportedly, one of her little sisters was played by Gloria DeHaven at 10 or 11 years old in her first role.

Charlie is sent to prison, and when cocaine is smuggled to another prisoner via a salt shaker, referred to on our helpful title card as “nose powder,” Charlie inadvertently douses his food with it.  His wide-eyed reaction tells us he is high.  One wonders how that got by the Production Code.  Helpless to control himself, he accidentally foils a plot by revolting prisoners to overtake the guards, and he is rewarded with release.  He doesn’t really want to leave, though.  He is cozy in his cell, with no responsibilities and three squares a day.  It’s a good setup for a guy like Charlie, who loses every job he gets.  When he is freed, he is told, “Now make good.”

The Gamin, meanwhile, gets into trouble when her poor father is shot to death.  The authorities step in and take the two younger girls, but Paulette escapes.  She finally crosses paths with Charlie when he gets fired from a shipbuilding company on the waterfront where she lives, and he accidentally launches a half-built ship. She has stolen bread and runs smack into him.  Gentleman that he is, and out of work besides, he allows himself to be arrested and carted off to the hoosegow once again.  He offers his seat to Paulette in the police van and helps her to escape.  Even eating a big meal in a restaurant without the money to pay for it won’t keep him in jail for long, but when he meets Paulette, Charlie decides it’s better to stay out of jail, and he vows he will get a home for them both, “even if I have to work for it.”

They are two lost souls battling the storms of life, but The Little Tramp is a man-child, and their relationship is as playful as brother and sister.

He takes a job as a night watchman in a department store.  Again, as we’ve seen in this previous post on Employees' Entrance (1933), the multi-story downtown department store has a special place in the Great Depression.  It is the cathedral of commerce, with the promise of good times coming again, despite most people not having enough money to do more than window-shop.

Charlie provides a place for Paulette to sleep on home furnishings floor, and while she luxuriates in a comfortable floor model bed, he runs into a former co-worker from the factory that has now been shut down.  He is Big Bill, played by Stanley “Tiny” Sandford, and he is going to rob the store.  One of his accomplices explains, “We ain’t burglars—we’re hungry.”  

It ends, of course, with Charlie taken off to jail again, but before that we have that stunning scene where he tries out roller skates and nearly plumets to his death on a floor where renovation construction is not finished and he comes very close to falling several stories while cutting a caper with fancy skating moves.  Classic film fans may know this is just a very clever matte shot, and Chaplin was not in danger doing the stunt, but it looks terrific.

When Charlie is released from jail this time, Paulette faithfully waits for him, and provides a tumbledown shack for their home, and she has returned to stealing food. 

The factory where he worked at the beginning of the movie is reopening and he hopes to get a real home for them.  He is assigned as an assistant to a mechanic, played by Chester Conklin.  This time, Chester gets caught in the cogs and Charlie’s not much help.  Paulette, Charlie, and Chester would all reunite in The Great Dictator (1940).

Believe it or not, he has another stay in jail, while Paulette gets a job as a dancer in a café, and she gets him a job as a singing waiter there when he’s out of the lockup.  Here’s where we get to finally hear Charlie Chaplin’s voice.  He cannot remember the words to the song he’s supposed to sing, so he makes up gibberish and we see him dashing about the dancefloor, twisting himself into a frenetic ballet, and singing a song Chaplin wrote called, “Je cherche après titine,” which is a mixture of French and Italian that he roguishly performs as a supposedly risqué song. Have a look here.

But wouldn’t you know, life comes down hard again, and the authorities who have been looking for Paulette all this time have returned.  She and Charlie escape, but scrappy Paulette has finally run out of courage.  They stand on the dusty open road that stretches out miles ahead of them.  Is it promising, or is it bleak?  Perhaps it’s just a matter of viewpoint.

“What’s the use of trying?” she says in tears.

He answers, “Buck up—never say die.  We’ll get along!”  It is the theme of the Great Depression for those who survived it.  I can remember many years ago watching a documentary series on the Great Depression with my father, who was a teenager during those years, and who joined the Civilian Conservation Corps to help send money back to support his widowed mother and kid sisters.  At the time, it was an adventure.  Bad times were shrugged off because if they weren’t, you were done for just by giving up.  But as an old man, looking back, with perhaps less courage than he had when he was a teen, and having acquired a great deal more knowledge about life in the meantime, he muttered, stony-faced at the TV:  “My God, it’s a wonder we ever survived it.”

In the background, while Charlie is comforting Paulette, we hear the music he wrote, which would later gain lyrics and the title “Smile.”  The first to record it supposedly was Nat King Cole, many years later.  You can listen to it here.

There was no single anthem of that generation, but this quiet, hopeful song may have been one of them.

It was a perfect way, as Charlie and Paulette gather their things and walk down the road together to meet head-on whatever happens next, for The Little Tramp to leave us.  I like to think he’s still down the road somewhere, shrugging off mishaps.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

It is also here in paperback from Ingram.

And here in hardcover from Ingram.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation. 

 

 

 

 

 

Working in the Movies

It may have started the day Charlie Chaplin noticed a HELP WANTED placard in the window of a shop or a restaurant. I don’t recall the name of the film, for this scenario was repeated by him and others. He takes the sign and carries it in to the proprietor. Being a silent film, he points to the sign he holds, and then points to himself, placing his index finger imploringly against his chest, tapping his sternum a couple times. The gruff proprietor looks him up and down, and hires him.

There is no mention of requiring a resume or CV. There is no scheduling of first, let alone second interviews, and no references. No human resources director asks him, “If you were an ingredient in a salad, what would you be?” Or asks him any other question as inane as it is insulting, meant to delve into his psychology and ability to become a Team Member. It is a different world of being hired for a job. But then, when the unlucky Chaplin or Keaton, or Lloyd is discharged from employment, it’s often with a boot to the backside, so firing was a different game then, too.

In the early years of motion pictures, quite a lot of films used the workplace as the scene, and even the device which drove the plot of the story. The store, the factory assembly line, the office, the construction jobsite. This was the hard reality playground in the otherwise fanciful world of movie make-believe. Perhaps it was the Great Depression, when one-quarter of this country’s population was out of work in the worst years that changed the focus of the setting and story line of popular films. The little world, this all-consuming focus of the common worker faded like the disintegrating nitrate film on which it was recorded.

The big stars of the 1930s did not seem to play the guy who swept the floor. Character actors now took over the mundane jobs in the background, getting another keg of beer from the cellar while the star sang on stage. The star did not deliver ice anymore. The star was a roving reporter, or a private detective, or soldier of fortune. The star was an heiress or a princess, or the owner of the factory. Once in a while we might see Jean Arthur and co-workers in “The Devil and Miss Jones” (1941) but mostly the idealized proletariat we saw emblazoned in the WPA-sponsored post office murals was not what greeted us in the movie theater. Escape was the order of the day, escape from our troubles of not having a job, or else, the trouble and bother of having one to earn one’s living at all.

A generation later after The Little Tramp’s job hunt, we have the charming film “In the Good Old Summertime” (1949) with Buster Keaton, who used to play the worker as hero, now relegated to a minor role of just worker in a little shop selling musical instruments, a remake of “The Shop Around the Corner” (1940). Of course, the film’s stars, Van Johnson and Judy Garland are also salespeople in the store, but soon the focus shifts from the day-to-day mundane matter of being salespeople and turns into a love story. The film is a musical and a romantic comedy about finding one’s true love. Always a comforting message, but we know how it’s going to turn out. They will find true love. That’s what we paid for.

But possibly more fascinating, more gripping is what will happen to them if they lose their jobs? What if Spring Byington does not marry shop owner S.Z. Sakall? She is approaching her retirement years; will she be able to afford to retire on her salary? Retirement in those days for spinster shop ladies usually meant poverty.

Will Van Johnson ever be able to marry if he does not get a promotion and more money? People used to consider finances first and then commitment. Will he be a bachelor all his life if he cannot get ahead in the workplace?

When harried Judy Garland complains to Johnson, “When I came here I was a very enthusiastic girl. Now look at me!” we can commiserate because how many of us have felt frazzled by our jobs?

When boss Sakall makes them work overtime and take inventory, we see their frustration at having their personal plans for the evening thwarted, their lives thrown off kilter by the need to please their employer. All this stuff of the workplace is fraught with dramatic tension. While it is not as lovely as the quest for true love, it is what most of us can identify with because work takes up most of our lives.

We spend a lot of time at work. Yet even on television, where for decades the workplace was the setting for dramas and sitcoms, quite of lot of the storylines and action does not center on work. Rather, it focuses on the private lives of the characters and their personal relationships. We don’t really see much work being done. Ninety years ago all it took was a HELP WANTED sign to set the ball rolling for the plot to thicken, and the fun to begin, and the springboard for dreams to come true. Have a look at this clip from “Modern Times” below, and Happy Labor Day.

Movie Luggage

These days we have soft luggage made of lightweight material, with shoulder straps, a million zippered pockets, and quite often on wheels. We still struggle with our bags through airports (where our luggage is sometimes reduced to a clear plastic ziplock bag), struggle with jamming overstuffed suitcases in the ever-smaller trunks of cars, and drag on gummy wheels “pilot’s cases” on sprints through subways and train platforms.

George Bailey wanted a “great big” suitcase in “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) to take with him on the wonderful adventures he was never to have. It was a hard boxy second-hand thing with no retractable handle and certainly no wheels. One wonders how far he could have gotten anyway.

Rosemary Clooney and Vera Ellen hustle to catch a train in “White Christmas” (1954) and lament they must leave behind their trunks. Their trunks? Their trunks with no wheels? Can you imagine traveling these days with a trunk? John Candy, maybe, in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.” Nobody else would dare.

Actually, Laurel and Hardy tried to take off with a neighbor lady in a trunk, twice -- once in “Unaccustomed As We Are,” (1929) and once in its remake of “Block-Heads” (1938), but didn’t get very far either time. Too unwieldy.

One of the iconic images of “The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946) was Dana Andrews’ hauling around an overstuffed army suitcase through the entire movie. It is with him at the beginning when he arrives home from the war, and at the end when he bitterly decides to leave his hometown. It is one of the few times I can remember where a suitcase actually looked heavy. He clearly struggles with it, leaning to keep his balance as it bangs against his hip. Usually the luggage carried in old movies looks light as a feather. The characters carry their worldly belongings and never seem out of breath.

That is, of course, because the suitcases are actually empty. The prop guy made sure Dana Andrews’ bag was stuffed to the gills. Even Gladys George won’t let him leave without an additional sweater.

Charlie Chaplin sometimes carried everything in a bandana tied to the end of his cane. Holds about as much as a clear plastic ziplock bag, so you can see how far we haven’t come.

Slapstick to Screwball

Silent film director D. W. Griffith enthusiastically announced of this new art form, “We’ve gone beyond Babel, beyond words. We’ve found a Universal language.”

Some ten years later, Buster Keaton took a pratfall as his car was demolished by an oncoming train.

Griffith is quoted in the autobiography of one of his most famous stars, Lillian Gish, who affirms that he believed “we were taking the first tiny steps in a new glorious medium that had been predicted in The Bible and called the Universal Language. That when it could be brought to its full power, it would bring about the millennium.”

And so it came to pass that Harold Lloyd hid from bullies by crawling up inside laundry hanging from a clothesline.

Charlie Chaplin cooked and ate a boot.

And anybody in the scene took a pie in the face.

The glorious medium that Mr. Griffith had believed was predicted in the Bible and would bring about the millennium reflected almost obsessively on the common lives of common people, but with a little bit of exaggeration. Mr. Griffith specialized in drama, not comedies, and so perhaps his view of the purpose of film was a bit more serious than Mack Sennett’s. Griffith’s hope that silent films would bring about the brotherhood of man fell short of ending warfare for all time. But he was right about the universality of silent film. He was also right about predicting the success of Mack Sennett. Sennett was his protégée.

The universality of silent films was lost when sound pictures came on the scene. Even dubbing into different languages does not have the same effect of universality of meaning. Not everything translates well. Even the titles of films are changed to mean something different.

But pantomime goes beyond mere words, and in comedy films, mere pantomime found embellishment in slapstick. Slapstick evolved into the purest form of film comedy, a gag requiring only a little setup, or sometimes none at all. Afterward, nothing needed to be explained.

There had been physical comedy since the Renaissance, and some early 20th century vaudevillian stage slapstick launched the careers of some famous film comedians, but the slapstick was not so intricate, so carefully plotted, and so technically sophisticated as it became on film. With special effects, physical comedy reached its zenith on film. One could not be witty or acerbic in a silent film. Comedy could be represented successfully only in its broadest terms, and so the Keystone Kops formed a bumbling brigade that raced through the city streets, tumbling off the running boards of the “paddy wagon.”

In yet another ten years, Laurel and Hardy were taking a piano up a flight up stairs, dropping it and being run over by it as they ushered slapstick into sound film. However, sound allowed slapstick to meld into screwball. The dinosaur skeleton model may have tumbled into a heap in “Bringing Up Baby,” (1938) but the film is as much noted for its banter between Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant as for the tear in the back of her dress at the party.

Carole Lombard’s comic prattle in “My Man Godfrey” (1935) begins to overshadow her talents at physical comedy, and all the pratfalls taken in “Sullivan’s Travels” (1941) take a back seat to Preston Sturges’ witty script. Witty could be just as silly as slipping on a banana peel, but it required more understanding. Never again would comedy be so simple, and so universally understood.

If Mr. Griffith was right about silent films being the Universal Language, then pantomime was its grammar. Slapstick was its exclamation point.

This entry is also part of the Film of the Year Slapstick Blog-A-Thon. Please visit this site and the other blogs taking part for more on slapstick comedy.

Movie Myopia

This is a bit of an odd topic, but yesterday’s post on Chaplin’s “City Lights” calls to mind another interesting circumstance of that film. Virginia Cherrill, who plays the blind girl opposite Chaplin, was nearsighted in real life. This is exactly why she got the job.

Author Jeffrey Vance in his “Chaplin - Genius of the Cinema” (Harry N. Abrams, Inc.), recounts the situation and Chaplin’s difficulties on this film. Miss Cherrill had never acted before. It seems Mr. Chaplin had seen her at a public event and was struck by her beauty. He wanted her to test for his upcoming film. One of her qualities that endeared him and that first attracted him was her expression of some sort of wistful searching in her eyes.

Miss Cherrill was nearsighted, and in an interview in later years confessed that she did not like to wear her glasses in public. This was the era of Dorothy Parker’s “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.”

Chaplin felt convinced that her expression, simply borne of nearsightedness, would perfectly convey not only the gentle spirit of the Blind Girl, but illustrate her physical blindness as well. He wanted to show her as blind without exaggerating her appearance, or, as Chaplin noted in his autobiography, “without being offensive.”

It is remarkable that a man of such perfectionist tendencies would literally pick from nowhere a woman with no acting experience for such an important role in his film. As it is, Mr. Chaplin became dissatisfied with her acting abilities. This film, in the scene where they first meet and she says, “Flower, sir?” hoping he will buy one from her, holds the Guinness Book of World Records for most takes for a single scene in any film. They shot 342 takes. Mr. Chaplin was not happy with her. He particularly did not like the way she handed the flower to him. Maybe she couldn’t see him.

This circumstance of nearsightedness inducing a dreamy expression could perhaps also extend to the wonderful actress Teresa Wright, whose searching glance over the faces of her fellow actors in some of her most tender scenes, something of a trademark with her, is possibly due to her being nearsighted in real life. Off the set, she wore glasses.

Contact lenses were new in the 1930s, and the only use they had in Hollywood at that time was probably by Lon Chaney, Sr., who used them to show disfigurement and blindness in his characters. They were not used to see better. In fact, they ruined his vision.

The most celebrated movie myopic is likely Mr. Magoo, whose world was nevertheless colorful for being vague. Much the same way Virginia Cherrill’s nearsightedness made her seem fey, wistful, and blind, it was all a blurry illusion.

City Lights (1931)

“City Lights” (1931) is one of the most fascinating films of Charlie Chaplin’s career and of that era of filmmaking, on the awkward cusp between silent and sound. The Little Tramp evolves to a multi-dimensional character, no longer just the vaudevillian scamp, but an Everyman. It is also one of the last times we see him, because sound, as Chaplin himself feared, would be the end of this perhaps most recognizable icon of the young movie industry.

His silence, not the films being silent, but the character’s silence made him easily to identify with by people of different cultures all over the world. Speech would make him less universal, and Mr. Chaplin knew that.

Chaplin made a slight concession to the new sound film industry by adding a musical score he had composed for this film, and a few sound effects, but he drew the line at the spoken word. There was none of that to intrude on The Little Tramp’s world.

It is the story of how he befriends a blind flower girl. He also helps out a drunken millionaire about to commit suicide. “Be brave! Face Life!” Played by Harry Meyers, the character, An Eccentric Millionaire, is pals with The Little Tramp only during bouts of drunkenness. Sober, he doesn’t even recognize him. Chaplin exhibits his usual athletic grace while slipping on the waxy floor of a nightclub, and when he swallows a whistle, the blowing of the whistle is one of the few sound effects we hear.

When the millionaire takes off for Europe, The Little Tramp has no extra handouts to help him care for the lovely street flower seller, played by Virginia Cherrill. At their first meeting, she mistakes his character for a wealthy man, and he tries to uphold that image for her, lying to her and passing on what money he can to her. When she is sick, he gets jobs to help out her and her elderly grandmother, including a famous scene as a boxer when he takes on the champ for a share of the purse.

There are some cute bits in the film, such as when he furtively whispers to someone in the fighter’s dressing room and we are meant to assume he is asking for the men’s room, when he really only wanted was to get a drink of water from the water cooler. He sizes up his formidable opponent, and fearful he will be killed in the ring, he coyly tries to befriend the stern prizefighter, who sizes Charlie up and immediately retires behind a curtain away from Charlie’s prying eyes, to change for the fight.

An African-American fighter also makes ready to take on his next fight, and refreshingly there are no stereotype caricatures of the day for this actor. He is just another fighter waiting for his turn in the ring. Like many athletes, he has a good luck ritual before the contest, and allows The Little Tramp to use his lucky rabbit’s foot and horseshoe to get luck for his own upcoming fight. Charlie feels reassured after using the good luck charms, until the boxer returns unconscious, carried from the ring. Then Charlie’s heart sinks. Inevitably, he will also be carried off after losing his own boxing match.

Eventually, The Little Tramp unwittingly becomes accused of robbing the millionaire, but runs away and gives the money he has received to the blind girl, so that she may have an operation to restore her sight. He knows he will go to prison, but makes the sacrifice for her sake.

In the final scene, one of the most powerful Chaplin ever filmed, we see that his famous character is no longer just the smart aleck, lucky fellow who always lands on his feet. Here, he is just released from prison, downtrodden and his carefree attitude seems lost forever. He looks beaten and bitter. There is a chance meeting with the blind girl, now with her vision restored and the owner of her own flower shop. She takes pity on The Little Tramp, whom she does not know, and tries to give him a coin. When she touches him, she realizes it is her old friend, and the bemused pity she felt a moment before for an odd-looking stranger becomes a heartbreaking mixture of sorrow and gratitude to her friend.

Their roles are reversed; he is no longer the benefactor and she the object of pity. It is now the opposite, and both feel a sense of wonder and humility. His joy at discovering she can see makes his prison time worthwhile. His frozen expression of delight is priceless.

We get no wedding bells type of happily ever after from this movie, only that pure moment when two human beings cross paths, each of them reaching a personal, and yet shared, destiny.

Here is that final scene.

Haunted Spooks (1920)

“Haunted Spooks” is a two-reeler where Harold Lloyd, dumped by his wealthy girlfriend for another man, marries a complete stranger instead and spends the wedding night in a haunted house. As with most silent comedies, the plot is thin but never-ending, at least until the film runs out.

Harold Lloyd has a remarkable modern quality to him, as noted before (see June 21st and June 27th entries), perhaps it is as much to do with his simple costume of a regular suit and nerdy glasses, and his manner of occasionally looking directly into the camera, as if to gauge our reaction to what he is doing. When Chaplin or Keaton look in the direction of the camera, it is to gaze beyond it, as if it is not there. Lloyd knows we are there every step with him, and he seems to want to know what we think.

The action takes place in the South, as the caption tells us, “Go down the Mississippi River several miles and turn to the right.” The 1920s college boy wit continues with the explanation that “A southern gentleman has died for the first time,” and his heir, The Girl, must live with her husband in the family mansion for a year, or the whole inheritance will fall to The Uncle.

However, The Girl, played by Mildred Davis, is not married. She tells the lawyer, “But I have no husband -- nothing but a Ford and a phonograph.” With such dialogue, we get the feeling the roaring, carefree 1920s has begun with this film.

Her ambitious lawyer tells her he will round up a husband, and finds Lloyd failing at a series of unsuccessful suicide attempts after losing out his best girl to another. He does not look terribly despondent, however, just frustrated that nothing works, not jumping off a bridge into ankle-deep water, nor standing in front of an oncoming trolley which switches tracks right before it hits him, nor throwing himself, backside first, into the oncoming car driven by the lawyer. This is quite a funny sequence with the lawyer’s car moving backward and forward and side to side, desperately trying to miss Lloyd, who perseveres and stubbornly sticks his bum out in front of the bumper wherever he can find it.

Lloyd agrees to marry The Girl in a hasty ceremony, after which a comic automobile ride in the Girl’s previously mentioned Ford out to the mansion gives us a sensation of being in a fast-moving Ford ourselves, as we trail the happy couple behind a road hog.

Meanwhile, at the mansion the Uncle, wanting to plant a trap and warn off the couple so he can inherit the mansion himself, tells tales of ghosts haunting the mansion on this night of nights to the assembled servants. All played by African-American actors and not white actors in blackface as was common before the 1920s, the staff are so upset by the ghost stories that they practically trample the happy couple on arrival in their haste to get away. Remaining is the dignified but anxious butler, who explains to Lloyd about the ghosts and the staff problem, and a young boy, played by Ernest Morrison. Young Morrison appeared in many silent films as a child and is probably the first black child star. Very popular, he worked for Hal Roach, and later appeared as one of the Dead End Kids in his teens.

Here, he is comic relief, when his unfortunate hiding place from the ghosts, a flour bin, covers him all in white powder and makes him appear ghost-like. He spends much of the film freaking out, and unavoidably freaking out others. This is the film of the famous shot of Lloyd with his hair standing on end in fright, as if from static electricity.

The mansion itself is an interesting set, very heavily ornamented, richly furnished, decorated with different wallpapers and wainscoting as to appear quite realistic and not like a slapped-together set.

Eventually the butler discovers the Uncle’s ruse and ghostly tricks, and he muscles him out. The other servants return, and Lloyd and The Girl proceed with their wedding night. As they enter their room, night clothes over their arms, she coyly asks him, “Say, what’s our name?”

Before all this chaos, there had not been time for a proper introduction.

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An Eastern Westerner (1920)

Harold Lloyd in “An Eastern Westerner” (1920) plays a rich milquetoast (do the younger folk of today even know that word?) who is sent by his father, after carousing all night in a dance hall where “Shimmie Dancing Prohibited” to an uncle’s ranch Out West as a punishment.

The plot is thin, the gags are constant, and hapless Harold Lloyd finds himself saving a damsel in distress and her father from the town bully. Like silent screen clown counterparts Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Lloyd does this through pluck, conscience, acrobatics, ingenuity, and a lot of dumb luck.

Unlike Chaplin and Keaton, Mr. Lloyd has a strange kind of modernity to him. Where Chaplin played the classic Little Tramp, a fellow who could have stepped out of the pages of Dickens to visit the 1920s, and Keaton, who played a wider range of roles in different historical time periods nevertheless still carried turn-of-the-20th century American Everyman about him, Lloyd was different. Harold Lloyd rode on the crest of the wave of public interest that had to do with the frivolous young college set, and he looked hopelessly collegiate.

Perhaps it is his round glasses which makes him seem like a modern day nerd, without any other affectation to his screen character (Chaplin’s costume or Keaton’s flat hat). Lloyd would make a credible computer geek today.

His antics to save The Girl, played by Mildred Davis, and her sausage curls from Tiger Lip Tompkins (Noah Young), the bully and his rather KKK-styled hooded gang called “The Masked Angels,” who we are told are “men who have broken eight commandments and twisted the other two,” Lloyd’s fighting is never direct but a kind of guerrilla tactic involving all the props one can find in an alley. There is an especially neat stunt when he hides in a wooden barrel, which is set to rolling and quickly smashes against a porch with the staves coming apart and the Lloyd entangled in the hoops.

Another fun scene is when Lloyd sits in at a game of cards and a tough hombre rolls his own cigarette with one hand while concentrating on his hand of cards. Lloyd tries to imitate him and comes out with a handful of factory-perfect cigarettes at once. Luck is occasionally with him.

In the silent screen days, at least with the comedies, the gags were the foundation of the plot, which was loosely constructed around the gags. It is as if a modern-day stage magician started to form a story around the tricks he performs for us on stage. The tricks are the purpose of the act; the story is just to string us along until the next trick.

The wild and wooly western town is actually quite realistic-looking, with its uneven streets and alleys and run-down structures. It looks more realistic than the neatly laid out and painted western towns of the B-westerns of a couple of decades later. Perhaps because 1920, when the film was made, was a bit closer to the wild west days than the late 1940s.

The film closes after one more stunt with a train, the damsel saved, and Mr. Lloyd takes a pencil and draws a circle around her ring finger, indicating they are to wed. It is the kind of thing Chaplin would do because the Little Tramp never had any money, but wealthy young college boy Lloyd should have been able to wire home for the dough to purchase a diamond. At the very least, such a gesture illustrates how much the film contemporaries borrowed from each other.

This film is also noted for being shot just after Mr. Lloyd lost part of his right hand in a stunt on a previous film, though his flesh-colored prosthetic glove and his superb athletic ability never reveals to the audience that he is now with a handicap. Like the character he played, he always found a way around a problem and never gave up.

That's all for this week. See you Monday.

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The Kid - 1921

“The Kid” (1921), Charlie Chaplin’s first feature film, ties together episodic bits in the life of an orphaned child and the Little Tramp who raises him. What ties the flow of funny or heartbreaking short scenes together is Chaplin’s wonderful sense of place. The slum these two characters live in is a world unto itself, and they are survivors in this world that is not supposed to be funny, but frequently is.

Their streets are mean and dirty. Their flat is crumbling about them, and their food looks like just so much garbage in a steaming wash tub. There is nothing meager, though, about their sense of purpose in surviving poverty, and their attachment to each other.

Charlie Chaplin’s character, and the world he lives in, is equal parts honor and larceny, but underhandedness only in a sense of survival because that it what it takes to survive. The kid, played by Jackie Coogan, breaks windows with rocks so that Chaplin, a street peddling glazier, may repair them to support them both.

When a bratty kid steals Coogan’s toys, given to him by the kind lady who later turns out to be his natural mother, Coogan thrashes the brat in a fistfight. Chaplin’s pride in his boy soon turns to thoughts of self preservation when the brat’s old brother, a bully played by Charles Reisner, threatens to beat up Chaplin if Coogan wins the fight. Chaplin, in comedic timing worthy of a true champion admonishes Coogan with a quick, “You wicked boy,” and plants his foot on Coogan’s chest to keep him from winning.

Inevitably, the bully wants to fight Chaplin anyway, and the voluminous padding under Reisner’s tight turtleneck making him look a little like the Michelin Man tells us he is a strong and powerful fighter. We need not fear for Chaplin, however, because underhandedness is his code of honor, and he repeatedly clunks the bully with a hidden brick.

We see trickery at work as well in the flophouse (no politically correct homeless shelter in 1921), where Chaplin tries to sneak Coogan in without paying extra for him. Chaplin pays for a cot in a barn of a room lined with other sleeping men and hides Coogan successfully, until Coogan, raised by him to be good as well as sneaky, after a snuggle and a kiss, slips out of bed and onto his knees for a quick bedtime prayer, and they are caught, and he must pay extra. A nice touch is the thin, pitiful jets of gaslight being turned down by the proprietor, and then later frantically turned on again by Chaplain when he realizes his boy is missing.

Edna Purviance plays the woman who abandoned the kid as a baby and who, now a successful performer, pines for her lost son. That they are eventually reunited, all three in Purviance’s mansion is meant to satisfy the audience and resolve Chaplin’s and the kid’s hopeless future, but her mother’s love is not so meaningful to us as the anxious moments earlier in the film when the orphan asylum authorities try to remove the kid from Chaplin’s care. Coogan is removed, kicking and crying and dropped into the truck bed the way a dogcatcher rounds up a stray dog. Young Coogan is handled and manhandled so much in this film, it’s a wonder he lived to grow up.

When Coogan is taken from him, Chaplin struggles bodily with the authorities and when they restrain him, his expression thrown like a dart at the camera is one of animal pain and fear. Chaplin expertly, with one deep look into his stricken face, illustrates our deepest sick fears, our worst nightmares about losing our children, and cuts to the heart.

In a vigorous chase over rooftops, with the asylum vehicle driving the street below to show perspective of height, Chaplin escapes the authorities and leaps to the truck bed, reunited with his boy with a clinch of a hug and a desperate kiss, and charges at the driver in a physical threat to leave them alone. That his lithe, graceful little form, so successfully used to comic effect can be actually threatening as he stamps his feet at the intimidated asylum officer, is somehow touching.

Chaplin was very good at exploiting his abilities, and at exploiting the emotions of the audience, who were always right in his pocket.

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