I've made it up to the final year of my research for an essay about the film years 1906-1914. One hundred fifty-one films strong with, I don't know, thirty more to go. I think.
Among those who emerged during this period was Charlie Chaplin. Working at first as a supporting player at Mack Sennett's comedy factory, Chaplin quickly became a star. While many of his early efforts are simple variations on Sennett's "everybody-hit-somebody, everybody-fall-down" brand of comedy, Chaplin had an innate sense of rhythm and comic timing that turned these random free-for-alls into a sort of dance—a Waltz of the Violently Clumsy, if you will.
Here's one of his early directorial efforts, The Rounders, co-starring Roscoe Arbuckle, Phyllis Allen and Minta Durfee.
Released more than three years after the premiere of The Jazz Singer ushered in the sound era, Charles Chaplin's City Lights represented both the peak of the actor-director's brilliant career and a definite exclamation point marking the end of the silent era. A sublime romantic comedy, City Lights was arguably the greatest silent movie ever made, a huge worldwide hit and, along with Buster Keaton's The General, the movie I would recommend to anyone who has never seen a silent movie and is wondering what all the fuss was about. It's also my choice for the best picture of 1930-31.
(Because this essay is likely to run four thousand words or more, Katie-Bar-The-Door suggested I post it in pieces. Part Two will follow as soon as it's ready.)
Introduction: A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man Born in London in 1889 to a pair of music hall performers, Chaplin's parents separated when he was an infant and, after his mother was institutionalized, Chaplin and his brother Sydney, like characters in a Dickens novel, were packed off first to a workhouse and then an orphanage. Amazingly, the experience did not leave Chaplin angry or bitter, but it did leave him with an abiding sympathy for the downtrodden, a sympathy that became a hallmark of his movies and was one of the keys to his astounding world-wide popularity between 1914 and 1931—that, and his sublime technique as a comedian, mime, actor, writer, director, producer, you name it.
Chaplin first performed on stage at the age of five, singing the popular tune "Jack Jones" to calm a hall full of drunken customers who had just booed his mother off stage. In 1910, he toured the U.S. with Fred Karno and his "army," a troupe of comedians that included not only Chaplin and his brother Sydney but also Stan Laurel and which (according to the infallible Wikipedia) invented the pie-in-the-face gag.
Legendary comedy director Mack Sennett, he of the Keystone Kops and many others, spotted Chaplin while he was performing with Karno and signed him to a movie contract. While working for Sennett, Chaplin developed the character of the Tramp, not only the single most recognizable figure of the silent film era but perhaps of all movie history. Rising from obscurity to stardom in less than a year, Chaplin departed for Essanay Studios in 1915 where he directed fourteen shorts, then for Mutual a year later where, working with complete artistic freedom, he made twelve of the greatest comedy shorts of the silent era, including One A.M., The Cure and The Immigrant.
Chaplin later called the Mutual period the happiest time of his life and his success there led to a million dollar contract with First National, where he had not only artistic control of filming and editing but also for the first time control over the pace at which his films would be released, freeing him to work on more expansive projects such as Shoulder Arms, The Pilgrim and, most importantly, The Kid, which I would call one of the four best movies Chaplin ever made (along with The Gold Rush, City Lights and Modern Times).
In 1919, Chaplin teamed with three of the biggest names in Hollywood, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith, to form United Artists, an independent film distribution company designed to put more money in the pockets of the people audiences were paying to see and giving those stars more artistic freedom in the process. Chaplin directed three movies for United Artists—A Woman of Paris, a drama starring longtime co-star Edna Purviance; The Gold Rush, one of the greatest comedies of the silent or any other era; and The Circus, in the words of Daniel Eagan a "delightful, unassuming film" which won an honorary award for Chaplin at the first Oscar ceremony—before turning to his next and perhaps greatest project, City Lights.
Forecasting With His Heart When Chaplin began work on his next film project, the sound era was already a year old. Chaplin publicly stated that the new medium—for sound was not just a new technology but a new medium—was nothing more than a passing fancy and would be forgotten within three years. As Danny Peary put it in the book that inspired this blog in the first place, Alternate Oscars, Chaplin was "forecasting with his heart," never a good idea when money is on the line. In fact, as we now know, by the end of 1928 sound had but drowned out silent movies and by the time of City Lights' release in 1931, only a handful of directors—Chaplin, F.W. Murnau, Yasujiro Ozu—were still standing firm against the new medium.
Chaplin's choice to film another silent picture was not born so much of arrogance or nostalgia as of anxiety. He was convinced, rightly I think, that the Little Tramp couldn't survive the transition to sound. Once the Tramp began to speak, he would no longer be an Italian or a New Yorker or a Jew or whoever else was sitting in the theater, but would become what in fact he was, a somewhat fussy Londoner with a polished stage actor's accent. Not to mention that Chaplin was largely a pantomimist, his character existing on some impossible ethereal plane. To have the Tramp speak would be to ground him too firmly in the real world, a place he could never actually exist. So Chaplin set out to make his next feature a celluloid monument to the art of pantomime, the future be damned. If he was going out, he was going out on his own terms.
Chaplin decided the new movie would center on the theme of "blindness," initially toying with the idea of a blind clown before settling on the idea of a blind flower girl. The last scene, which I will discuss below after a "Spoiler" warning, came first in Chaplin's conception, one of the greatest final scenes in movie history. The problem though was not the ending but how to arrive there. The journey would take him over three years.
The first task was to cast the flower girl. As he often did, Chaplin cast his lead actress on impulse, choosing Virginia Cherrill on a whim after spotting her at a boxing match. Although Cherrill protested she was not an actress—aside from City Lights, she's best remembered now as Cary Grant's first wife—an amateur was exactly what Chaplin wanted, preferring to mold his co-star's performance without her having to unlearn someone else's methods.
Indeed, Chaplin preferred to mold everyone's performance in his movies, right down to the expressions of the extras in the background, acting out everyone's part and then shooting the scene over and over until everyone had copied him to his satisfaction.
Nor did Chaplin work from a script, preferring instead to draft the story on the set, using film the way another artist might use a scratchpad, to doodle ideas, taking dozens, sometimes hundreds of takes of a scene as he worked out the precise action. Whether measured by today's standards or those of the time, Chaplin's work methods were borderline insane, taking months and even years to complete a movie and spending what for the time was an enormous amount of money. These methods might have made sense when, for example, he was spending First National's money to produce The Kid and was all but certain of a blockbuster hit; when he was shooting City Lights, he was spending his own money—some $2 million—with no guarantee the finished product would ever find an audience. It was a tremendous risk.
The first meeting between Chaplin's Tramp and Cherrill's flower girl was the key to the movie. Crossing the street, the Tramp cuts through a parked limousine where the Girl sits on a park wall. She hears the slamming of the door as Chaplin gets out and mistaking him for the limousine's owner, asks him to buy a flower. If anything, the Tramp is annoyed but he can't resist her smile and gives her his last dime, not realizing until he knocks the flower from her hand that she is blind. When the real millionaire climbs into the limo, the girl mistakes the slamming door for her customer's exit and in order to preserve the illusion—for the girl's sake, rather than his own—the Tramp sneaks away to watch her from a distance. He's hopelessly smitten and the unfolding love story provides the narrative backbone upon which Chaplin would hang some of the best comedy bits of his career.
It's a sweet, simple scene and in the finished film, takes up just under three minutes of screen time. In reality, the sequence took 342 takes spread out over two years as Chaplin struggled to find the right device by which the blind flower girl would mistake the Tramp for a millionaire.
Using outtakes from Chaplin's own archive in their documentary Unknown Chaplin, Kevin Brownlow and David Gill show the director trying first one trick, then another—perhaps something with a watch chain, maybe a second flower, maybe more comedy, perhaps more feeling—Chaplin becoming visibly frustrated as he fails to work out a satisfactory solution. Chaplin kept the crew and cast hanging around the studio for months on end, Cherrill saying later she sat in her dressing room alone reading day after day, as he waited for inspiration to strike.
Cherrill had never made a movie before and made no effort to hide her boredom with the process—for example, leaving the set one day to have her hair done. Her indifference dismayed Chaplin and he eventually fired her, replacing her with Georgia Hale, his co-star from The Gold Rush. Eventually, however, Chaplin reluctantly rehired Cherrill. Not only had he shot too much footage with her to start over, he also realized that Hale (or any other actress he could have cast) was too professional and couldn't help but give the role of the flower girl a third dimension, making her a fully-fleshed human being when what the part called for was a fantasy figure.
That Chaplin concluded this reveals (to my mind, at least) that the audience is seeing the flower girl not as she is but as the Tramp sees her. Both characters are blinded in their own way, she by a physical impairment, he by sentimentality, and both proceed to act based on assumptions that have no basis in reality. This is what I meant in my essay on Chaplin the actor when I said that there's a difference between Chaplin the artist being sentimental and Chaplin the actor playing the Tramp as a sentimentalist. The Tramp may be blind to reality but Chaplin always saw the world as it was.
[To read "Best Picture Of 1930-31: City Lights (prod. Charles Chaplin), Part Two: A Comedy Romance In Pantomime," click here.]
As with the best director award, the contest for best actor of 1930-31 is a virtual tie, so much so I drafted the spine of three different essays as I tried the award on first Edward G. Robinson then James Cagney before settling finally on Charles Chaplin.
In so choosing, I have the benefit of 20-20 foresight—I know both Cagney and Robinson have Katie Awards in their future—but even without that foreknowledge, I have to say, if I had been a voter in 1931 faced with these choices, I would have no doubt looked at both Cagney and Robinson as promising, if exciting, newcomers while regarding Chaplin as an overdue legend who had turned in the best work of his career. Either way, I think Chaplin is the right choice for best actor of the year.
The chief complaint about Chaplin is that he was sentimental—excessively or affectedly appealing to emotions, in his case, pathos and romance. He wore his heart on his sleeve and manipulated the emotions of his audience as well; he is decidedly un-modern in that regard. We prefer our comedy served cynical these days, and when we look back at the great comics of the Silent Era, it's Buster Keaton most now prefer.
It doesn't help Chaplin's cause to mention that what he did—the silent Tramp—is strictly a product of its time and cannot be equated with anything we'd see in a 21st century movie. Cagney, Robinson and Keaton could step right off a 1931 screen into a 2009 movie and without altering their styles or personas become stars today, while Chaplin would have to mine unexplored talents to make the transition.
I've written at length about Chaplin before (and no doubt will again) so I won't bludgeon you with all of it again. But I will say I think when we measure Chaplin strictly in terms of how he fits in or fails to fit in with our current tastes, we're shortchanging Chaplin the actor. That a guy who didn't speak and used title card sparingly could make us feel as well as laugh is a real testament to his talent as an actor. When the fictional Norma Desmond claimed, "We didn't need dialogue—we had faces," it was more a rationalization than a statement of fact, but in Chaplin's case, it was literally true. Charlie Chaplin was to Charles Chaplin (take a look at City Lights' credits to see the distinction) what John Wayne was to John Ford or Robert DeNiro was to Martin Scorsese—an actor who could interpret and perfectly execute the vision of his director as together they made some of the greatest movies in Hollywood history.
City Lights begins as a showcase for Chaplin's talents as a slapstick comedian, reminding you that in terms of grace and timing he was rivaled only by Keaton and Curly Howard. As the picture opens, the homeless Tramp (Chaplin) awakes in the lap of the ironically-named statue "Peace and Prosperity" and proceeds to make a mockery of the dedication ceremony, first dangling on a sword stuck up a hole in his britches, then thumbing his nose at the gathered dignitaries (and clearly at the age of sound movies as well). It was the sort of effortless slapstick he had perfected early in his career, first under the direction of Mack Sennett, then on his own at the Essanay and Mutual studios, as graceful as a ballet dance, as precise as a Swiss clock.
Indeed, to a degree City Lights is a series of sequences —a suicidal million- aire, a dinner at a swanky nightclub, a prize fight between the 5'5" Chaplin and his heavyweight opponent—that would have worked just as well as two-reel shorts.
Chaplin also reminds you in that first reel that the Tramp is not all the sweetness I think we tend to remember him for. He can also be pompous, such as when he admires a bronze nude (or pretends not to), angry (at a pair of newspaper boys who tease him) and cowardly (when the laborer he is taking to task turns out to be well over six feet). His shortcomings work as comedy though as Chaplin juxtaposes the Tramp's carefully-preserved dignity with his straitened circumstances.
But Chaplin also puts on display his gift for pathos and romance when in the second reel he introduces a girl—there's always a girl—in this case the blind flower seller (Virginia Cherrill) who mistakes the Tramp for a millionaire. The Tramp's hopefully hopeless longing links all the episodes together as he tries both to maintain the facade and pay for the operation that will restore the girl's sight.
It's this inevitable development in a Chaplin plot—the introduction of a damsel in need—that I suspect most often leads Chaplin's critics to call him sentimental, and I will concede that in a film such as The Kid (a film that I love by the way), Chaplin the filmmaker is sentimental, equating Edna Purviance's unwed mother with the Madonna, for example. But here in City Lights, I would argue while the Tramp is motivated by sentimentality, Chaplin sees clearly—even in the famous ending which I won't reveal here—a distinction that may not mean much to some, but which is important to me, anyway.
Chaplin the director is aiming for the truth even if the Tramp, like the blind flower girl, can't quite see it clearly. And it's Chaplin the actor who makes this dual vision work.
Postscript: If it makes you feel any better, while Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney turned in exciting, groundbreaking performances in 1930 and 1931, respectively, both had far better work in them, and when twenty years from now all the Katie Awards have been handed out and are gathering dust on the mythical mantlepieces of history's greatest actors, you'll know Cagney and Robinson won for the best work of their careers, not merely the first great performance they gave. In any event, in a couple of days I'll post my notes on Cagney and Robinson as the essay "A Gangland Double Feature."
Credit Where Credit Is Due: The wallpaper at the top of the article is by Sylvie whose work can be downloaded here. The artwork titled "Chaplin vs. Keaton" is by Damian Blake. You can check him out here.
Funny you mention Carole Lombard in this entry -- because she's in "My Best Girl." She plays a "flirty blonde salesgirl" who's spurned by Buddy Rogers.
At the time this was made, Lombard was age 18, coming off the 1926 automobile accident that caused some minor facial injury and derailed her budding career as a Fox starlet. This was made either before she signed with Mack Sennett or very early in her tenure there; not many people (even most Lombard biographers) are aware of this because she was unbilled.
I did not know that, but I'm glad now I do. See, this is why I write this blog, to find out what I don't know. I've reposted one of the stills she mentions here. Head on over to her site to see the rest.
I'll be writing about Carole Lombard quite a bit in the future. Here's a photo to whet your appetite:
In honor of her birthday on Monday (November 9, 2009), Turner Classic Movies is showing Marie Dressler movies from 6 in the morning until 8 at night. They include her Oscar-winning turn in Min and Bill, her Oscar-nominated performance in Emma and Tillie's Punctured Romance from way back in 1914. Directed by comedy legend Mack Sennett, Tillie's Punctured Romance marks a couple of significant firsts—it was the first feature-length comedy ever produced and after years on the Broadway stage, was Marie Dressler's first Hollywood movie.
It may also have been the first performance by a very young Milton Berle in the role of a newsboy who gets slapped. Anyway, he said it was, but no one remembered him—he was only six years old—and no studio records exist to confirm his claim.
Tillie also marked a significant last: other than cameos, it was the last time Charles Chaplin appeared in a movie he didn't direct.
You might also check out The Patsy to see Marion Davies in her prime. Remem- bered now as William Randolph Hearst's mistress, skewered unmercifully in Citizen Kane as the no-talent "singer" Susan Alexander, Davies was actually a deft comic actress (I really recommend you track down Show People as well).
There are a lot of other name acts here as well—Mabel Normand, Bessie Love, Charles King, Jack Benny (in his first movie), Rudy Vallee, William Haines, Leila Hyams, Polly Moran, Wallace Beery, Jean Hersholt, Myrna Loy, Marjorie Rambeau.
Why, there's even Lillian Gish in a comedy.
Nothing but the best for Marie Dressler who was the biggest star in Hollywood during the Early Sound Era. Check it out.
Here's the schedule from TCM's website (as always times are Eastern Standard Time):
6:00am [Silent] Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914) In this silent film, a con man dupes a wealthy country girl into marriage. Cast: Marie Dressler, Charles Chaplin, Mabel Normand, Charles Bennett Dir: Mack Sennett BW-72 mins
7:15am [Silent] Patsy, The (1928) In this silent film, a romantic young woman falls for her sister's fiancé, then discovers her sister is cheating on him. Cast: Marion Davies, Orville Caldwell, Marie Dressler, Dell Henderson Dir: King Vidor BW-77 mins
8:45am [Musical] Chasing Rainbows (1929) Musical performers fall in love while rehearsing for the big show. Cast: Bessie Love, Charles King, Jack Benny, George K. Arthur Dir: Charles F. Reisner BW-86 mins
10:15am [Romance] Divine Lady, The (1929) Lady Hamilton's love affair with Admiral Nelson rocks the British Empire. Cast: Corinne Griffith, Victor Varconi, H. B. Warner, Ian Keith Dir: Frank Lloyd BW-99 mins
12:00pm [Musical] Vagabond Lover, The (1929) A small-town boy finds fame and romance when he joins a dance band. Cast: Rudy Vallee, Sally Blane, Marie Dressler, Charles Sellon Dir: Marshall Neilan BW-65 mins
1:15pm [Romance] Girl Said No, The (1930) A college sports star surprises everyone with his money-making schemes. Cast: William Haines, Leila Hyams, Polly Moran, Marie Dressler Dir: Sam Wood BW-92 mins
3:00pm [Drama] Min And Bill (1930) Two crusty waterfront characters try to protect their daughter from a terrible secret. Cast: Marie Dressler, Wallace Beery, Dorothy Jordan, Marjorie Rambeau Dir: George Hill BW-66 mins
4:15pm [Comedy] One Romantic Night (1930) A princess engaged to a prince falls for her brother's tutor. Cast: Lillian Gish, Rod La Rocque, Conrad Nagel, Marie Dressler Dir: Paul L. Stein BW-72 mins
5:30pm [Drama] Politics (1931) Two women take on small-town racketeers. Cast: Marie Dressler, Polly Moran, Rosco Ates, Karen Morley Dir: Charles F. Riesner BW-73 mins
6:45pm [Drama] Emma (1932) A housekeeper faces unexpected snobbery when she marries her boss. Cast: Marie Dressler, Richard Cromwell, Jean Hersholt, Myrna Loy Dir: Clarence Brown BW-72 mins
Faithful reader lupner has made a special request for a word about silent film star Marie Prevost. So here's the word:
Canadian-born Marie Prevost got her start with legendary comedy film producer Mack Sennett in 1915. In 1921, she came to the attention of a young producer at Universal by the name of Irving Thalberg, who decided she had the makings of a star. Known primarily as a light comic actress, she probably did her best work in a trio of Ernst Lubitsch vehicles, The Marriage Circle, Three Women and Kiss Me Again.
Although she continued to appear in movies throughout the 1930s, Prevost's career took a sudden nosedive with the advent of sound and she began slipping down the billing until she was reduced to playing uncredited bit parts.
A heavy drinker since the silent days, Prevost was found dead in January 1937 of malnutrition and acute alcoholism. She was thirty-eight.
The body wasn't found immediately and the coroner discovered her pet dachshund had fed on her corpse, a fact I mention only because in 1978, Nick Lowe memorialized her in the song "Marie Provost" [sic]. "She was a winner," he sang, "That became a doggie's dinner."
Yes, well said.
More trivia: In 1919, Prevost married socialite Sonny Gerke whose family was so disapproving of the acting profession, the two kept their marriage a secret until 1923 when Gerke finally had to reveal the union in order to file for divorce.
She had a face like a bulldog, if someone had been cruel enough to stamp on that bulldog with the heel of his boot—lantern jaw, bulbous nose, heavy bags under deep-set eyes. Her pear-shaped body sagged, her voice growled and the characters she played often wore their clothes as if a field of potatoes had crawled into a burlap sack and been too tired to crawl out again. But she was a gifted actress—Buster Keaton often called her "the greatest character comedienne I ever saw"—and for a brief time, from 1931 until her death in 1934, Marie Dressler was the most popular actress in America.
It was Dressler's supporting performance in this adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's stage play that, at the unlikely age of 62, set her on the path to stardom.
Anna Christie is the story of an immigrant's daughter, Anna (played by Greta Garbo), who returns to her father for the first time in fifteen years. Each has idealized memories of and hopes for the other only to discover that time hasn't been kind to either of them. It's best known now as Greta Garbo's sound debut—"Give me a whiskey, ginger ale on the side. And don't be stingy, baby"—but it also launched Marie Dressler's comeback and made her the biggest box office draw of the Early Sound Era.
Dressler plays an aging, alcoholic "tramp" named Marthy who's shacking up with the father who suddenly finds her presence embarrassing when he gets news that the daughter he long ago sent to Minnesota to live with relatives is coming to visit.
By chance, the two women meet over a drink and it doesn't take Marthy long to size up Anna as a younger version of herself. They meet again later, in a scene screenwriter Frances Marion invented especially for Dressler, after Anna has met yet another man who has an idealized view of her and Marthy reminds her that life is too short to spend it apologizing for who you are and pretending to be something else, a brief but important scene that illuminates Anna's subsequent actions.
In their scenes together, Dressler eats the more-celebrated Garbo alive. To be sure Dressler possessed a theatrical talent that straddled the divide between the silent and modern eras, but I distinguish in my mind between an actor who chews scenery (Garbo, still relying on exaggerated, silent film techniques) and a character who chews scenery (Dressler's self-described "wharf rat" who hides her pain beneath a swaggering pose of indifference).
Garbo eventually shed the exaggerated techniques that had served her well during the silent era and mastered the subtleties of the new sound medium. But not before Dressler had bested her in their one head-to-head outing.
Long before Anna Christie, Dressler had starred in the Mack Sennett comedy classic Tillie's Punctured Romance, which also featured Charlie Chaplin in one of his earliest roles. By the end of World War I, though, Dressler had pretty much disappeared from the movies. Reduced to working as a maid, Dressler later admitted she found the fall from stardom so devastating, she had seriously considered suicide.
But back when she was still a star, Dressler had befriended a young, struggling writer from San Francisco named Frances Marion, and when their roles were reversed and Marion was the top writer in Hollywood and Dressler was out of pictures altogether, Marion remembered her old friend and began including parts for her in various comedies. Later, when Marion was adapting Eugene O'Neill's play as the vehicle for Greta Garbo's sound debut, she expanded the part of Marthy specifically with Dressler in mind.
It was a pivotal opportunity for Dressler and proved to be her comeback role.
She starred in a dozen movies over the next three years, including Min and Bill (another Frances Marion screenplay) which won Dressler an Oscar, Emma which secured her a second Oscar nomination, Tugboat Annie with Wallace Beery, and possibly her best role, that of aging stage actress Carlotta Vance in the classic dramedy, Dinner at Eight. Even people who don't know Dressler's name remember the last scene she does with up-and-coming Jean Harlow.
"I was reading a book the other day," says Harlow as the unforgettable social-climbing vamp, Kitty Packard.
"Reading a book?" says Dressler's Vance after the greatest double take in movie history.
"Yes. It's all about civilization or something. A nutty kind of a book. Do you know that the guy says that machinery is going to take the place of every profession?"
Dressler looks Harlow up and down and then says, "Oh, my dear, that's something you need never worry about."
A year later, Dressler was dead of cancer. She was 66.
Note: There were a lot of good choices for supporting actress this year, far too many to write about at any length. In addition to nominees Nina Mae McKinney and Seena Owen (both of whom I will write about in later postings), and, of course, winner Marie Dressler, I also considered the underappreciated Margaret Dumont for her role as Groucho's comic foil in the Marx Brothers' debut film, The Cocoanuts; personal favorite Anita Page as a naive virgin who falls for smoothie Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., in Our Modern Maidens; Lilyan Tashman as a criminal mastermind in Bulldog Drummond; Leila Hyams as the sister of a prison inmate in The Big House; and Alice Roberts as possibly the movie's first onscreen lesbian in Pandora's Box.
Any one of them might be your choice for best supporting actress of the year. You won't get any kick from me.
Charles Chaplin or Buster Keaton, who was greater, is one of those perennial questions—like "Republican or Democrat" "Elvis or the Beatles"—that transcends its original context and ends up saying more about the people doing the debating than about the subject at hand. As with any debate of this type, there is no right or wrong answer, only a matter of taste.
My tastes, which are broad enough to include both performers, ultimately lean toward Chaplin.
At his peak, Chaplin was the most popular movie performer in the world and yet his reputation rests on a relatively small body of work. After beginning his career with a flood of forgettable short features (mostly directed by Mack Sennett), Chaplin worked meticulously and produced few films. Over a span of ten years beginning in 1921, he directed only three shorts (including The Idle Class and Pay Day) and five features, one of which—the drama A Woman Of Paris—included only a cameo on his part.
Keaton was more prolific. "[I]n an extraordinary period from 1920 to 1929," Roger Ebert has written, "[Keaton] worked without interruption on a series of films that make him, arguably, the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies."
The public, however, found Keaton to be an acquired taste and he was always scrounging for funding. Still, he managed to make some of the best silent comedies of all time, including The General, Sherlock Jr., Our Hospitality and The Navigator.
Both wrote, directed and starred in their own productions. Both did most of their own stunts. And both were, at their best, hilarious. Neither truly hit their stride until they formed their own production companies and took full control of their work, United Artists in Chaplin's case, Buster Keaton Productions in the other.
The argument in favor of Keaton is a good one. He made what many, including myself, consider to be the best movie of the Silent Era, The General. In addition, the understated style of his comedy as his characters single-mindedly pursue their desires is a style at once familiar and easily-accessible to modern audiences. Finally, his movies have none of the unabashed sentimentality of Chaplin's films that some, though not me, find cloying and heavy.
In arguing for Chaplin the actor, I am relying on the handful of shorts and the feature-length films, including The Kid, The Gold Rush and The Circus, over which he exercised complete artistic control.
Watching those movies again, and comparing them with Keaton's, I was struck by the range of the emotions and comic situations in Chaplin, from the gentle humor in the domesticity of The Kid to the surreal slapstick of The Gold Rush to the acrobatic grace and athleticism of The Circus.
While I believe you can argue about who made the better movies, Chaplin, as a comedian and an actor, could simply hit a greater variety of notes with seeming ease than Keaton ever dared try.
I remember one terrific laugh in Chaplin's comedy, The Kid, that comes from a matter-of-fact flick of Chaplin's eyes from a foundling baby to an open sewer hole that certainly suggests one solution to the problem of unplanned parenthood.
And yet later in The Kid there's that unforgettable sequence when Chaplin races across the rooftops to rescue this same child, now a six year old boy he has raised as his own, from the remorseless representatives of the local orphanage. The reunion of Chaplin and the boy is one of the most touching scenes in movie history.
I guess that's what separates Chaplin from Keaton for me: both can make me laugh, but only Chaplin can make me cry.
If that makes me, to quote Louis in Casablanca, "a rank sentimentalist," so be it, I'll cop to the charge.
Audiences the world over related to the character Chaplin played in nearly every movie, the Tramp, the little guy living in squalid poverty, oppressed by the soulless machinery of a hostile society—which is pretty much the human condition in a nutshell for millions of people.
These same audiences longed, I suspect, to achieve the in-it-but-not-of-it insouciance with which the Tramp met his daily suffering. Oh, to relish the taste of the boot you've boiled for your Thanksgiving dinner the way the Tramp did—there's Chaplin's appeal reduced to a single scene.
The other key to Chaplin's allure is that more than any other silent performer, Keaton included, Chaplin truly did not need dialogue to convey action, jokes and especially emotion. As Roger Ebert has pointed out, children get Chaplin; it's only after they grow up that they forget how words serve mostly to confuse and distract.
Chaplin continued to make films sporadically during the sound era. Two of those films, City Lights and Modern Times, are masterpieces, and a third, The Great Dictator, is nearly so.
Chaplin was awarded honorary Oscars for his achievements twice, one at the very first Oscar ceremony in 1929, the second in 1972. He won a single competitive Oscar for his scoring of Limelight.
Nothing I've said here settles the debate—the debate can never be settled. Fortunately, I only have to choose between Chaplin and Keaton for purposes of handing out an award that doesn't even exist. My movie collection includes a healthy sampling of each.
You want my advice? Skip the argument, watch Chaplin and Keaton and become a fan of both.
Note: The boy in the photograph with Chaplin is Jackie Coogan, who not only played the title character in Chaplin's classic, The Kid, but later grew up to play Uncle Fester in one of my favorite television shows, The Addams Family.
Keep that in mind the next time you think, "Gee, what a cute kid ..."
I've made it up to the final year of my research for an essay about the film years 1906-1914. One hundred fifty-one films strong with, I don't know, thirty more to go. I think.
