The Comedy of Charlie Chaplin: Artistry in Motion

484 Pages·2009·43.22 MB·English

by  Dan Kamin

The Comedy of Charlie Chaplin
Artistry in Motion
Dan Kamin
THE SCARECROW PRESS, INC.
Lanham, Maryland • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
SCARECROW PRESS, INC.
Published in the United States of America by Scarecrow Press, Inc.
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Copyright © 2008 by Dan Kamin First paperback edition 2011
All images from Chaplin films made from 1918 onwards, copyright © Roy Export Company Establishment.
Charles Chaplin and the Little Tramp are trademarks and/or service marks of Bubbles, Inc., S.A. and/or Roy
Export Company Establishment, used with permission.
Quotations from My Autobiography and My Life in Pictures, copyright © Pac Holding SA. All rights
reserved. Used with permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available The hardback edition of this book was
catalogued by the Library of Congress as follows: Kamin, Dan, 1946– The comedy of Charlie Chaplin :
artistry in motion / Dan Kamin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Chaplin, Charlie, 1889–1977—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
PN2287.C5K35 2008
791.4302’8092—dc22 2008018036
ISBN: 978-0-8108-7780-1 (paper : alk paper) ISBN: 978-0-8108-7781-8 (electronic) ™ The paper used
in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information
Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
For the women in my life,
Carol and Hester.
Without you,
even Charlie Chaplin couldn’t cheer me up.
Contents
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
A Note to the Reader
Introduction: The Surprising Art of Charlie Chaplin
Part One
Chapter 1: On the Boards
Chapter 2: Fooling for the Flickers
Chapter 3: Shoot the Mime
Chapter 4: Drunk Again
Part Two
Chapter 5: Gagman
Chapter 6: Cast of Characters
Chapter 7: Shall We Dance?
Part Three
Chapter 8: Facing Sound
Chapter 9: Swan Song with Music: City Lights
Chapter 10: The Machine Age: Modern Times
Chapter 11: Split Personality: The Great Dictator
Chapter 12: Return Engagement
Chapter 13: Monster Movie: Monsieur Verdoux
Chapter 14: Full Circle: Limelight
Chapter 15: The Banished Monarch
Postscript: Teaching Charlie Chaplin How to Walk
Select Annotated Bibliography
About the Author
Foreword
People who know of my passion for all things Chaplin occasionally ask me why
I’ve never written a book about him. The truth is that I only write books I’d like
to read, which presupposes that nobody else has stepped up and done a proper
job. But in the vast literature devoted to Charlie Chaplin, there are several books
that present a three-dimensional portrait of the man and his art that answer the
bulk of the questions I’ve had. I’m thinking of such books as David Robinson’s
massive and surely definitive authorized biography, along with such smaller,
shining gems as Theodore Huff’s Charlie Chaplin, Lillian Ross’s Moments with
Chaplin, and even A. J. Marriot’s surly but invaluable Chaplin Stage by Stage.
And there is Dan Kamin’s The Comedy of Charlie Chaplin: Artistry in Motion,
an expanded and rethought version of Kamin’s Charlie Chaplin’s One-Man
Show, in which the author had the brilliant idea of examining Chaplin through
the only communicative tool an actor in silent movies had: movement, command
of his body. Of course, thirty seconds of Chaplin shows up the vast majority of
silent comedians as comparatively unimaginative processors of gags. Most
comedians rise or fall on the quality of their jokes, but great comedians have a
special relationship to their material—their specific attitude makes each joke feel
customized . . . or should. “Your money or your life,” said to Jack Benny causes
a roar; addressed to anybody else, it’s meaningless.
Chaplin’s gags have resonance not because they’re always brilliant—although I
treasure the sequence with the wood stuck in the grate that he deleted from City
Lights, and the feeding machine sequence from Modern Times—but because of
his attitude toward them, the dance he does around them, or the preparation that
precedes them. The dance of the bread rolls in The Gold Rush is exquisitely
done, but what makes the scene hover in your mind for decades is the sequence’s
emotional impact, which is only possible because of the time Chaplin has
devoted to preparation—the tramp’s isolation in Alaska; the party to which
nobody comes; the moment in the spotlight that exists only in his dream.
There were comedians who used more of film’s vast potential than Chaplin
(yes, Keaton), and there were comedians who got more laughs (Laurel and
Hardy, but they got more laughs than anybody), but I’ve yet to see an actor of
greater virtuosity than Chaplin, or, for that matter, a filmmaker whose technique
was more effectively calculated to present his ideas. The particular glory of an
artist is that they change as you do. The artist may be long dead, the work itself
frozen in amber, but you see more—or, unfortunately, sometimes less—in it as
you age and make return visits.
Dan Kamin’s insights are fascinating and invariably apt: A simple declarative
sentence like “It is interesting to note that as Chaplin’s sex life became the
subject of tabloid headlines, his screen character became less sexually
aggressive,” would be belabored by most writers into a chapter, if not an entire
book, but Kamin tosses it off in a footnote. Kamin has returned to the films
again and again, and this new edition is proof of his even more expansively
detailed view of the man who remains, even today, nearly a hundred years after
he first tentatively walked onto the Keystone lot in Edendale, the cinema’s
premier artist.
Scott Eyman is the author of many books on filmmakers, including Empire of
Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille and Print the Legend: The Life and
Times of John Ford.
Acknowledgments
This book is only the latest of my attempts to get Charlie Chaplin out of my
system. There are a number of people who must share the blame for my failure.
Frank Scheide and Hooman Mehran, coeditors of The Chaplin Revue book
series, have repeatedly ensnared me into participating in their dubious literary
enterprises. I do so only out of pity, since these unfortunates suffer from an even
more virulent form of the disease than I do. Then there are the people I think of
as the Chaplin mafia, including Bonnie McCourt, Lisa Stein, Bruce Lawton,
Alice Artzt, Shunichi Ohkubo, Ono Hiroyuki, David Totheroh, and Louise
Burton, to name a few, all of whom have enabled me through their misguided
acts of kindness.
Speaking of enablers, Kate Guyonvarch of Association Chaplin in Paris has
been all too willing to offer her time and resources, knowing full well what the
result would be. She, Josephine Chaplin, and the association allowed me—
indeed, encouraged me—to print many of the pictures in this book, no doubt
hoping to lure new victims. Cecilia Cenciarelli of Progetto Chaplin has
cheerfully provided materials from the Chaplin Archive, housed at the Cineteca
Bologna—and why not? The very existence of these organizations attests to the
global nature of the crisis.
Two generations of Scarecrow Press editors, including most recently Jessica
McCleary and Stephen Ryan, must share a portion of the blame as well, though
theirs was a hopeless task. Had it been possible to edit Chaplin out of my life,
Carol Fryday would surely have done it by now. That our marriage has survived
not only Chaplin, but her careful editorial scrutiny of this manuscript, is, like a
Chaplin film, a miracle of love and laughter.
A Note to the Reader
This was supposed to be a revised edition of a book called Charlie Chaplin’s
One-Man Show, but it soon became apparent that the book, like almost
everything Charlie Chaplin touches in his films, was turning into something else
in front of my eyes. It was becoming a new book—based on the old one, to be
sure, but so different that it needed a new title.
When I wrote the original in the early 1980s, I was cranking 8mm and 16mm
prints through small film editors and projecting them onto my living room wall,
or taking notes in darkened movie theatres. While there was a certain pioneering
charm about having to study the films this way, it wasn’t easy to do. With
Chaplin’s complete output now available on DVD I’ve been able to examine the
films much more closely. In the process I’ve discovered many gems—gags,
scenes, and sometimes whole films—that I overlooked or gave short shrift the
first time. I’ve also been able to draw on a wealth of new material that has come
out over the past two decades. So many books on Chaplin have been published
that there are now books about the books on Chaplin. Significant primary source
material, such as the Chaplin studio records and many of his outtakes, has also
come to light, so that there is more information available than ever before about
the man and his art.
But the main reason my old book ended up morphing into this new one is that
my ideas have evolved considerably, due in no small part to the doors that
opened to me after that first one came out. I was invited to give many
presentations on Chaplin at film festivals and colleges, and became involved
with a number of intriguing theatrical projects, including plays about Chaplin at
Harvard’s American Repertory Theatre and Canada’s Shaw Festival. Symphony
orchestras began asking me to create live “silent movies” on stage. Hollywood
beckoned as well: I devised the physical comedy sequences for Benny and Joon
with Johnny Depp, and helped to re-create Chaplin’s art for the movie Chaplin.
Obviously, there could be no better way of putting my ideas about Chaplin to the
test than training Robert Downey Jr. for the title role in Chaplin, and I’ve