Director Peter Bogdanovich once repeated a story about the legendary Charlie Chaplin that’s revealing of the man.
Told that, as a director, his camera angles were not very interesting, Chaplin replied, “They don’t have to be interesting. I am interesting.”
That may sound grandiose, but in Chaplin’s case it’s an understatement. Bogdanovich says that from 1917 to about the mid-1930s Chaplin was the most famous, popular, deeply beloved human being on Earth. Nearly 25 years after his death and 94 years after he created his trademark character the Tramp, the guy with the little moustache, bowler hat, baggy pants, waddle walk and cane is still widely recognized.
For a younger generation that mostly steers clear of black-and-white and silent films, now’s a prime opportunity to learn why Charlie Chaplin was so popular for so long, and why he holds such an important place in movie history.
Over the next five weeks, Film Streams will host a 10-film retrospective of Chaplin’s work, including family-friendly classics such as “The Circus” (Friday through Nov. 18), “City Lights” (Nov. 19-25), “The Gold Rush” and “Modern Times” (both Nov. 26-Dec. 2).
Also on the agenda: “The Great Dictator” (Nov. 12-18), Chaplin’s first talkie, which spoofed Hitler; “Limelight” (Nov. 19-25), in which he plays an aging vaudeville clown; a couple of early two-reelers in a double feature, “The Kid” and “The Idle Class” (Dec. 3-5); and a couple of critically panned features from late in his career, “A King in New York,” which addresses McCarthyism, and “Monsieur Verdoux,” which was a personal favorite of Chaplin’s (both Dec. 10-16).
Chaplin lost his way in his later years as his movies got more political and he tried to appeal to the intellectuals of that time.
But in his heyday, Chaplin and his Tramp were in tune with his blue-collar, hard-scrabble audience of immigrant roots. His film language is universal, his comedy timeless. He can still reduce an audience to tears of laughter, or of sadness.
Charles Spencer Chaplin was born April 16, 1889, in London. His father abandoned the family and died of alcoholism. His mother, Hannah, who performed under the stage name of Lily Harley, went mad. Chaplin’s childhood was traumatized by poverty, illness and death. He went from a fine home with a maid to an orphanage, then to surviving as a street performer.
Maybe that’s why he could silently commune with the troubled masses through years of war, inflation and depression. The Tramp seemed a shabby, fallen aristocrat just trying to get by.
Chaplin arrived in America barely 10 years after the start of the movie industry, when most films being made were shorts to be viewed in Nickelodeons. Most of those customers were not from the educated classes. Feature-length films were just dawning, and it was mere accident that Chaplin the vaudevillian ended up in them at just the moment when they, and he, could boost each other in popularity.
His rise was meteoric, from $150 a week working for Mack Sennett in 1914 to Essanay in 1915 for $1,250 a week, to Mutual in 1916 for a guaranteed $670,000 a year, to a million-plus contract with First National in 1918. Then he co-founded United Artists. Such huge popularity guaranteed him absolute artistic control. He directed nearly everything he did from 1914 on.
He perfectly blended physical comedy, sentimentality, cruelty, mimicry, romance and satire into what was only much later appreciated as high art. The inventive, inspired sight gags were seamlessly woven into the fabric of story and character.
He made it look easy. In reality, he rehearsed tirelessly and did multiple takes.
He may have peaked in absolute popularity around the time of “The Gold Rush” in 1925. After that, sensational gossip about his multiple divorces, his sexual fixation on very young girls and his rumored Communist sympathies began to seep into the public consciousness. And his movies were fewer and further between.
He was slow to change, and the arrival of talkies set him back. “The Circus” may have been underrated in 1928 simply because it was competing with Al Jolson in “The Jazz Singer.” Sound was all the rage.
And his silent competition, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, were heralded for their more humanistic, less mechanical approach to comedy — even if they were inspired into being in the first place by Chaplin.
Part of Chaplin’s brilliance was in recognizing the power of getting his audience to identify with him, then zeroing in on how to do that with a cleverness and precision rarely seen since.
The Tramp is the self-pitying, oppressed little man in all of us.
Copyright ©2012 Omaha World-Herald®. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, displayed or redistributed for any purpose without permission from the Omaha World-Herald.
