Snapshot: Episode Four: 1910s - Charles Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin is the cinema’s prime mythic figure, an icon of the medium itself.  He was not the most popular of the silent stars: that distinction was held by the now largely forgotten Mary Pickford.  Nor is he considered by contemporary critics to be the greatest of the era’s comedic actor/directors: Buster Keaton has long been thought superior.  Yet his impact upon the movies was almost instant, profoundly universal, and is on-going: his films are still widely screened and enjoyed today ninety four years after his debut.

Born in 1889 in London, the son of a drunken music hall entertainer and his mentally unstable wife, the young Chaplin endured abject poverty, including stints in a Dickensian poor house.  The squalor and the desperation of those years informed his art as much as early exposure to, and experience on, the English stage.  It is one of sad ironies of his career that Chaplin rose to fame playing a comic drunk, a variation no doubt on the ghastly, real life excesses of his father, who drank himself to death at age thirty seven.

Chaplin’s theatrical success as part of Fred Karno’s burlesque troupe led to a tour of the United States and eventual employment by Mack Sennett’s Keystone company in 1914.  Initially resisting a physical, slapstick style much cruder than the stage pantomime he had already perfected, Chaplin effectively transformed Keystone from within after absorbing all that Sennett and his leading lady Mabel Normand could teach him. 

The tramp character which became his alter ego trade mark got its first outing in Chaplin’s second released film, “Kid Auto Races at Venice”.  The premise was a simple one: a tramp interferes with the filming of trolley cart races by mugging for the newsreel camera.  Seen today it is still remarkably fresh and funny, self-reflexive, post-modern even, long before such terms were coined.  Chaplin’s connection with the audience was immediate; a star was born.

Within four months of debuting in front of the camera Chaplin assumed  responsibilities behind it,  writing and directing all his own work.  His Keystone films are wildly inconsistent, a reflection of the speed at which they were made, the fact that he was still learning the filmmaking craft and Sennett’s overall insistence on slapstick.  As the year progressed, however, a greater sense of character and subtly emerged.  His pairings with Fatty Arbuckle in “The Rounders”, and Mack Swain in “The Gentlemen of Nerve” demonstrated that the tramp worked surprising well when supported by a co-conspirator.  Chaplin the director brought out the best in his fellow performers.

For the balance of the decade Chaplin changed production companies on a yearly basis, his art evolving as he assumed more and more control of his own films.  Acquiring a permanent leading lady in Edna Purviance the tramp was regularly a romantic lead, though one that seldom if ever got the girl.  The short films reached their apotheosis in 1917 with four back to back masterpieces, including “Easy Street”, which explicitly drew on childhood memories of crime and poverty and “The Immigrant”, a poignant tale of European refugees whose symbolic use of the Statue of Liberty anticipates the more serious themes of Chaplin’s maturity.

Latterly maligned as a limited director too grounded in theatrical tradition, Chaplin developed a style all of his own.  It was one perfectly attuned to his multi-faceted genius, not afraid of pathos or sentiment, designed to show off unprecedented skills in pantomime.