On Chaplin - a love declaration
Firstly, a poetry-related link. Seamus Heaney on his collaboration with Ted Hughes, and on collecting poems, here.
Secondly, as mentioned some entries earlier, I love silent movies. I love one actor/director/producer in particular. So watch me going on at length about him.
I saw my first Chaplin films the way probably everyone of my generation and the one preceding us sees them - on TV, at the wrong speed, with "funny" music and commentary added. Snippets at that, of the early serials he made for Mutual. As a child, I equated this with Tom and Jerry cartoons. Some small guy with a bowler hat and a cane and several fat guys getting kicked in the behind. Or something like that. It didn't seem particularly memorable.
As an adult, I moved to Munich and went to the university. Which brought along a lot of changes in my life, and a minor one was this: I could see silent movies on the big screen, since there are always some cinemas here in Munich going for some historic programs. Also, I could attend classes about silent films. And along the way, I discovered the oeuvre of one Charles Spencer Chaplin for myself. It was The Kid that did it, watched as a part of getting introduced to the silent comedians. It also happens to be Chaplin's first feature-length movie, and I can recommend it to anyone as an introduction.
The story is basic Chaplin in its mixture of Victorian melodrama and comedy: Girl gets illegitimate child and has to expose same, baby ends up with Tramp, Tramp raises baby, happy life of Tramp and Kid is interrupted by cruel social service taking Kid into orphanage, Tramp liberates Kid and goes on the run with same, Mother (rescued back then from suicide attempt and trying to find baby ever since because she got to be a successful and rich artist) returns to the plot as dea ex machina and reunites Tramp and Kid, rescuing both from evil police. Sounds dreadful, doesn't it? But that's where the artistry of Chaplin comes in. When the little Tramp (Chaplin in his scenarios and later in his memoirs always calls his movie persona "The little Tramp" or "the little fellow", never "me"; as opposed to many other actors and a good portion of the audience, he never confused his character with himself) comes across the baby (which since the mother exposed it already wrecked the plans of two thiefs in a hilarious sequence), he doesn't react like any other movie hero would. On the contrary, the first thing he tries is to get rid of it. Who'd want a squalling baby? Not the Tramp. His attempts to dump the twerp on pretty much everyone before falling in love with the big eyes aren't just funny, they keep this picture's balance of sentiment and comedy perfect.And then there's the child. Jackie Coogan has been called the greatest of child actors and Chaplin's one true co-star because of this one part, and you can see why. No matter whether it's a funny scene like the Kid and the Tramp going to earn money via child smashing windows and tramp turning up to repair them, or sad ones like their heart-rendering separation, he's just perfect and makes the dozens and dozens of children showing up in later films look artificial and annoying in comparison. And another thing: I defy you not to feel the urge to bawl your eyes out when our two heroes are separated by the forces of the law and the camera shows us both in close-up. Chaplin has such incredibly expressive eyes, and so does little Jackie Coogan.
Talking about The Kid invites two remarks about Chaplin the person as well as Chaplin the actor/director/producer/composer/all round genius. They show two aspects of his personality. Firstly, regarding the autobiographical element which one can spot in The Kid without too much effort: Charles Chaplin had the Victorian childhood from hell, which makes Oliver Twist's look comfortable in comparison. Mad mother, alcoholic absent father, any number of workhouses and orphanages, first stage appearance as a child was also his mother's last and he famously and innocently mimicked her breaking voice and got laughter and coins for it. (There you have the mixture of pathos and comedy born.) When admiring critics later wrote how he showed the nobility of poverty in his movies, he reacted with genuine anger. There was, he wrote in his autobiography, nothing whatsoever noble about being poor. It was horrible, it was awful. Just as there was nothing whatsoever romantic about watching your mother go insane and being put in orphanages with and without your brother at irregular intervals. And yet, of course, you can say that poverty, poverty close to starvation, is made fun of in Chaplin's movies; women with illegitimate children and suicidal desperation are saved and end up wealthy and happy; and love leads to reunions.
The other remark would be to note that in the dream sequence of The Kid, we see the little Tramp dreaming of being in heaven and flirting with a cute angel. (Which leads to getting kicked out of heaven.) Said angel was played by a girl named Lita Grey, only thirteen at the time. Two years or so later, she became Chaplin's mistress. She also got pregnant, he married her, and they had a marriage even more miserable than Chaplin's first. His penchant for young girls would later give ammunition for the campaign to get him out of the country. I remember a lot of newspapers bringing it up as late as the Woody Allen/Mia Farrow break-up, drawing parallels.
Returning to Chaplin's screen work again, The Gold Rush was his own favourite among his films. It's also about the happiest, though not without darker shades. The wonderful bread roll sequence, with the Tramp dreaming he entertains Georgia and the other girls, is a dream, after all, and it ends up with him waking up cold and alone, which never fails to bring a gulp to my throat. Personally, I wouldn't put The Gold Rush on the top of Chaplin's oeuvre - my own favourite is City Lights - but it's certainly the one most often plundered for excerpts - the scene with the house going over the edge, the scene where the Tramp's comrade dreams of eating him because they're so close to starvation, and chases him around like a chicken, and the dance of the bread rolls, which by the way showcases something else recurrent in Chaplin's movies - dance, music, ballet. Nobody but Chaplin (pre-Muhammad Ali, at least) could have thought of turning a boxing match into a hilarious dance a deux, as he does in City Lights; and then of course there is the famous dance with the globe in The Great Dictator, which is funny and creepy at the same time, because while Chaplin is mocking Hitler here with an acid edge, he also lends him his own physical grace.
City Lights was a last gesture of defiance towards sound, or perhaps an attempt at reconciliation. It took two years to produce and premiered in January 1931, at a time where the "talkies" had more than one the battle - they were the only game left in town. Chaplin was the only one who could still afford making a silent movie. While he appreciated the possibilities of a recorded soundtrack, he hated the idea of the Tramp talking. In his mind, a language and a voice would reduce the cosmopolitan idea of the Tramp (and loose him a part of his world-wide audience). He also wasn't that impressed with dialogue as a means of expression anyway. Bear in mind this was the man who had managed to film a scene in one of his very early serials in which the Tramp was impersonating a preacher, a very verbal profession, one would think; the scene was supposed to show the Tramp preaching to an audience about the reading of the bible. And it did so in complete pantomime, with the Tramp mimicking David and Goliath. If you ever come across the documentary Unknown Chaplin, they include this little gem there. Anyway, back to 1931 and City Lights. Again, Victorian melodrama and comedy. The Tramp comes across a blind flower girl who mistakes him for a millionaire. He decides to help her and does so, partly through a series of accidental fortunes (he meets a real millionaire who is a great chum when drunk and an utter bastard when sober), partly through hard work. (This, incidentally, is where the boxing sequence comes in.) And he succeeds, ultimately paying for the operation which enables the girl to see again. The finale, when the girl comes across the Tramp, finds him just funny and pitiable and hands him a flower, with the touch of his hand recognising suddenly that this is her benefactor, so far from the romantic figure she imagined, is probably the most famous in any Chaplin movie, and you really can't imagine an equivalent in sound, because it's all in the expression of those two faces. There are so many interpretations possible of that last look on Chaplin's face - happiness, embarrassment, shame, or is it selfless joy? The realisation that this is goodbye for them, or the hope for a shared future? In any case, it's magic and more powerful than any other scene between a male and a female character in a silent film I can think of.
Chaplin and politics: he was a committed leftist in the way Dickens was, with a deep anger and indignation at the wrongness in the world but only vague ideas of what to do about them. The satire of industrial exploitation in Modern Times is sharp and biting, but really, what's the alternative? To paraphrase some of Orwell's remarks about Dickens, about the only thing Chaplin comes up with is sudden wealth via patronage as a solution. But as opposed to Dickens, Chaplin doesn't really believe in a happily ever after anymore; even the Gold Rush, in its original form, can't resist a dig about the happy end - "Oh, you've spoiled the picture" says a photographer via an insert card when suddenly wealthy Tramp and girl kiss. And while we hope that Tramp, Kid and Mother make it, we're not actually shown they do. City Lights leave everything open, and it gets darker from there.
But then you don't have to show an alternative to make a political point. The Great Dictator, Chaplin's first complete talking picture, has the distinction of being one of only two comedies about the Third Reich shot at the time which still work; the other is To be or not to be, and both Ernst Lubitsch, who shot the later, and Chaplin said after the war that had they known the full extent of the horror, they couldn't have done it. Chaplin started working at The Great Dictator when the US was still isolationist and definitely not inclined to involve itself in European affairs; this later led to him being accused of being premature anti-fascist. The eerie fact of him and Hitler being born only a week apart from each other and sharing some obvious physical similarities had been remarked upon before; playing Hitler therefore wasn't an original idea. And the plot - Jewish Barber (who is a variation of Chaplin's Little Tramp persona, but not the Tramp himself) gets confused with Evil Dictator - is standard comedy. And you can be awed and appalled at the naiveté of Chaplin & Co. assuming concentration camps would be like normal prisons. But the brilliance of The Great Dictator is in its merciless mocking of what was back then taken as very impressive indeed by the audience Chaplin was creating this movie for. Even his dislike of speech in film worked wonderfully; screaming nonsense words as Hynkel into the microphone makes the talk sound obscene, as it was intended. And then there's something which I'm amazed got by the censors; when Hynkel/Hitler has worked himself up into a frenzy and gets the screaming "Heils", he afterwards discreetly sheds some cold water into his trousers. The dance with the globe I already talked about; I can't think of another scene which makes me grin and creeps me out in a similar way. The final speech of The Great Dictator, back then called communist by the Right and sentimental by the Left (which again reminds of Orwell observing about Dickens that Lenin was right to call him a sentimental bourgeois, but then that this was making Dickens human in a way Lenin was not), remains controversial with the critics; it's definitely Chaplin breaking out of his movie persona and talking directly to the audience. But it's so sincere and urgent that it's impossible not to be moved, and to wish some people would have listened.
As a director, Chaplin definitely belonged into the perfectionist-and-dictator category, if the reports are anything to go by. And he knew it, which was one of the reasons why Hitler, apart from being hateful and disgusting was an object of appalled fascination for him. After being the universally loved Tramp for decades, it's interesting to observe that his last roles in the movies are all reflections of the darker side of human nature, starting with Hynkel. Then came Chaplin's most notorious flop, Monsieur Verdoux; playing a serial killer who offs his wives and when caught makes a pointed speech on how murdering a few women is a crime but murdering hundreds and thousands, as governments are prone to do, is good politics, couldn't have come at a worse time, if you consider that this was when the anti-Communist hysteria was getting in full swing and, due to a paternity suit and a series of venomous articles, the public was suddenly seeing Chaplin as sexual predator. Today Monsieur Verdoux is immensely watchable even though one feels a bit guilty at laughing about Verdoux' attempts to kill Annabel the walking, talking life force. Verdoux is certainly the anti-Tramp, even more than Hynkel. The idea for this entire project had come from Orson Welles, and depending on whether you read a Welles biography or a Chaplin biography, Chaplin first agreed but then decided he couldn't be directed by someone else and decided to do it on his own (Welles' version) or Welles didn't have anything near a script or the wish to continue but asked for a credit in the picture as in "idea by" anyway (Chaplin's version). In any case, Verdoux showcases Chaplin as an actor and makes one wonder whether he couldn't have tried more roles like this, perhaps not directed by Welles (the clash of mighty egos would have made any Japanese monster movie fight look pale in comparison) but by Billy Wilder or any of the other younger directors. If only.
However, as things turned out, the melodrama of Chaplin's life really could compete with the one in his movies. En route to London where his next movie, Limelight was supposed to premiere, Chaplin got the news that the US attorney had annulled his permission to reenter the United States. It seems so bizarre today: literally banished from a country where he had lived for decades (the official justification was paragraph (c ), clause 134, concerning the refusal of readmittance of foreigners to the US for "moral reasons, and in case of promoting communism". When I researched about the writer Lion Feuchtwanger whom I wrote my thesis about, I came across a letter by Chaplin (they were friends) written shortly afterwards. It was quite bitter and nostalgic at the same time; dreaming of the beauty of California and being angry and hurt at the rejection by America, as he saw it. You very much got the idea of Chaplin and the US as lovers who had separated on a spectacular bad note, each feeling itself betrayed. Billy Wilder, who as opposed to Chaplin had come to America as a refugee of a war-torn Europe, never could understand why Chaplin hadn't become an American citizen decades earlier, or tried to, and thought this was a reason for the American attitude towards him then, combined with the communist suspicions and the Chaplin-the-moral-decadent-issues. As far as I recall, Chaplin was asked once why he didn't apply for American citizenship and said something along the lines of wanting to be a citizen of the world. It certainly wasn't because of British patriotism.
Not that he was free of nostalgia for his English youth, hard as it had been. Limelight, among other things, is a powerful evocation of the English music hall tradition Chaplin had grown up with and which he never forgot. (In his memoirs, he can still quote some of the songs, for example: You won't catch me on the gee-gee's back again,/ It's not the kind of horse that I can ride on./ The only horse I know that I can ride/ Is the one the missus dries her clothes on!) At the same time, it's a movie full of farewells; Chaplin's character, the aging clown Calvero, has lost his audience, and though he saves the young ballerina played by Claire Bloom from suicide and gives her reason to live again, he knows she'll never love him as a man. He drinks too much, and he's not a funny drunk. He experiences the ultimate comedian's nightmare of trying, and trying in front of a silent, stone-faced audience. Terry the young ballerina can organize one last successful performance for him, and for the cinema audience, it's a special treat because it got to see, for the first and last time, Chaplin and that other giant of the silent screen, Buster Keaton, together. But this last success is bought with his death, and what stays in mind isn't that Calvero finally gets some applause again but the scene in the dressing room with Chaplin and Keaton earlier, Chaplin as Calvero staring in the mirror, in his ravaged, make-up less face. If all clowns are truly tragedians at heart, this moment captures it perfectly. As Simon Callow said, Limelight ought to have been Chaplin's last movie, but life is rarely that neat. Essays can be, though. But it wouldn't be fair to end with the picture of Chaplin-as-Calvero staring in the mirror, haunting as it is. So I'll evoke what is the quintessential finale of those early serials that made Chaplin famous world wide. The Tramp has just found out his adored Edna loves another and walks away from the camera dejectedly. He stumbles. Then he straightens up and kicks the cactus which stood there. Cane in hand, steps being just this side between his odd walk and a defiant little dance, he continues to walk, but now we know he'll be alright. The human spirit is irrepressible. And if all of Chaplin's pictures taken together have one message, it surely is this.
Secondly, as mentioned some entries earlier, I love silent movies. I love one actor/director/producer in particular. So watch me going on at length about him.
I saw my first Chaplin films the way probably everyone of my generation and the one preceding us sees them - on TV, at the wrong speed, with "funny" music and commentary added. Snippets at that, of the early serials he made for Mutual. As a child, I equated this with Tom and Jerry cartoons. Some small guy with a bowler hat and a cane and several fat guys getting kicked in the behind. Or something like that. It didn't seem particularly memorable.
As an adult, I moved to Munich and went to the university. Which brought along a lot of changes in my life, and a minor one was this: I could see silent movies on the big screen, since there are always some cinemas here in Munich going for some historic programs. Also, I could attend classes about silent films. And along the way, I discovered the oeuvre of one Charles Spencer Chaplin for myself. It was The Kid that did it, watched as a part of getting introduced to the silent comedians. It also happens to be Chaplin's first feature-length movie, and I can recommend it to anyone as an introduction.
The story is basic Chaplin in its mixture of Victorian melodrama and comedy: Girl gets illegitimate child and has to expose same, baby ends up with Tramp, Tramp raises baby, happy life of Tramp and Kid is interrupted by cruel social service taking Kid into orphanage, Tramp liberates Kid and goes on the run with same, Mother (rescued back then from suicide attempt and trying to find baby ever since because she got to be a successful and rich artist) returns to the plot as dea ex machina and reunites Tramp and Kid, rescuing both from evil police. Sounds dreadful, doesn't it? But that's where the artistry of Chaplin comes in. When the little Tramp (Chaplin in his scenarios and later in his memoirs always calls his movie persona "The little Tramp" or "the little fellow", never "me"; as opposed to many other actors and a good portion of the audience, he never confused his character with himself) comes across the baby (which since the mother exposed it already wrecked the plans of two thiefs in a hilarious sequence), he doesn't react like any other movie hero would. On the contrary, the first thing he tries is to get rid of it. Who'd want a squalling baby? Not the Tramp. His attempts to dump the twerp on pretty much everyone before falling in love with the big eyes aren't just funny, they keep this picture's balance of sentiment and comedy perfect.And then there's the child. Jackie Coogan has been called the greatest of child actors and Chaplin's one true co-star because of this one part, and you can see why. No matter whether it's a funny scene like the Kid and the Tramp going to earn money via child smashing windows and tramp turning up to repair them, or sad ones like their heart-rendering separation, he's just perfect and makes the dozens and dozens of children showing up in later films look artificial and annoying in comparison. And another thing: I defy you not to feel the urge to bawl your eyes out when our two heroes are separated by the forces of the law and the camera shows us both in close-up. Chaplin has such incredibly expressive eyes, and so does little Jackie Coogan.
Talking about The Kid invites two remarks about Chaplin the person as well as Chaplin the actor/director/producer/composer/all round genius. They show two aspects of his personality. Firstly, regarding the autobiographical element which one can spot in The Kid without too much effort: Charles Chaplin had the Victorian childhood from hell, which makes Oliver Twist's look comfortable in comparison. Mad mother, alcoholic absent father, any number of workhouses and orphanages, first stage appearance as a child was also his mother's last and he famously and innocently mimicked her breaking voice and got laughter and coins for it. (There you have the mixture of pathos and comedy born.) When admiring critics later wrote how he showed the nobility of poverty in his movies, he reacted with genuine anger. There was, he wrote in his autobiography, nothing whatsoever noble about being poor. It was horrible, it was awful. Just as there was nothing whatsoever romantic about watching your mother go insane and being put in orphanages with and without your brother at irregular intervals. And yet, of course, you can say that poverty, poverty close to starvation, is made fun of in Chaplin's movies; women with illegitimate children and suicidal desperation are saved and end up wealthy and happy; and love leads to reunions.
The other remark would be to note that in the dream sequence of The Kid, we see the little Tramp dreaming of being in heaven and flirting with a cute angel. (Which leads to getting kicked out of heaven.) Said angel was played by a girl named Lita Grey, only thirteen at the time. Two years or so later, she became Chaplin's mistress. She also got pregnant, he married her, and they had a marriage even more miserable than Chaplin's first. His penchant for young girls would later give ammunition for the campaign to get him out of the country. I remember a lot of newspapers bringing it up as late as the Woody Allen/Mia Farrow break-up, drawing parallels.
Returning to Chaplin's screen work again, The Gold Rush was his own favourite among his films. It's also about the happiest, though not without darker shades. The wonderful bread roll sequence, with the Tramp dreaming he entertains Georgia and the other girls, is a dream, after all, and it ends up with him waking up cold and alone, which never fails to bring a gulp to my throat. Personally, I wouldn't put The Gold Rush on the top of Chaplin's oeuvre - my own favourite is City Lights - but it's certainly the one most often plundered for excerpts - the scene with the house going over the edge, the scene where the Tramp's comrade dreams of eating him because they're so close to starvation, and chases him around like a chicken, and the dance of the bread rolls, which by the way showcases something else recurrent in Chaplin's movies - dance, music, ballet. Nobody but Chaplin (pre-Muhammad Ali, at least) could have thought of turning a boxing match into a hilarious dance a deux, as he does in City Lights; and then of course there is the famous dance with the globe in The Great Dictator, which is funny and creepy at the same time, because while Chaplin is mocking Hitler here with an acid edge, he also lends him his own physical grace.
City Lights was a last gesture of defiance towards sound, or perhaps an attempt at reconciliation. It took two years to produce and premiered in January 1931, at a time where the "talkies" had more than one the battle - they were the only game left in town. Chaplin was the only one who could still afford making a silent movie. While he appreciated the possibilities of a recorded soundtrack, he hated the idea of the Tramp talking. In his mind, a language and a voice would reduce the cosmopolitan idea of the Tramp (and loose him a part of his world-wide audience). He also wasn't that impressed with dialogue as a means of expression anyway. Bear in mind this was the man who had managed to film a scene in one of his very early serials in which the Tramp was impersonating a preacher, a very verbal profession, one would think; the scene was supposed to show the Tramp preaching to an audience about the reading of the bible. And it did so in complete pantomime, with the Tramp mimicking David and Goliath. If you ever come across the documentary Unknown Chaplin, they include this little gem there. Anyway, back to 1931 and City Lights. Again, Victorian melodrama and comedy. The Tramp comes across a blind flower girl who mistakes him for a millionaire. He decides to help her and does so, partly through a series of accidental fortunes (he meets a real millionaire who is a great chum when drunk and an utter bastard when sober), partly through hard work. (This, incidentally, is where the boxing sequence comes in.) And he succeeds, ultimately paying for the operation which enables the girl to see again. The finale, when the girl comes across the Tramp, finds him just funny and pitiable and hands him a flower, with the touch of his hand recognising suddenly that this is her benefactor, so far from the romantic figure she imagined, is probably the most famous in any Chaplin movie, and you really can't imagine an equivalent in sound, because it's all in the expression of those two faces. There are so many interpretations possible of that last look on Chaplin's face - happiness, embarrassment, shame, or is it selfless joy? The realisation that this is goodbye for them, or the hope for a shared future? In any case, it's magic and more powerful than any other scene between a male and a female character in a silent film I can think of.
Chaplin and politics: he was a committed leftist in the way Dickens was, with a deep anger and indignation at the wrongness in the world but only vague ideas of what to do about them. The satire of industrial exploitation in Modern Times is sharp and biting, but really, what's the alternative? To paraphrase some of Orwell's remarks about Dickens, about the only thing Chaplin comes up with is sudden wealth via patronage as a solution. But as opposed to Dickens, Chaplin doesn't really believe in a happily ever after anymore; even the Gold Rush, in its original form, can't resist a dig about the happy end - "Oh, you've spoiled the picture" says a photographer via an insert card when suddenly wealthy Tramp and girl kiss. And while we hope that Tramp, Kid and Mother make it, we're not actually shown they do. City Lights leave everything open, and it gets darker from there.
But then you don't have to show an alternative to make a political point. The Great Dictator, Chaplin's first complete talking picture, has the distinction of being one of only two comedies about the Third Reich shot at the time which still work; the other is To be or not to be, and both Ernst Lubitsch, who shot the later, and Chaplin said after the war that had they known the full extent of the horror, they couldn't have done it. Chaplin started working at The Great Dictator when the US was still isolationist and definitely not inclined to involve itself in European affairs; this later led to him being accused of being premature anti-fascist. The eerie fact of him and Hitler being born only a week apart from each other and sharing some obvious physical similarities had been remarked upon before; playing Hitler therefore wasn't an original idea. And the plot - Jewish Barber (who is a variation of Chaplin's Little Tramp persona, but not the Tramp himself) gets confused with Evil Dictator - is standard comedy. And you can be awed and appalled at the naiveté of Chaplin & Co. assuming concentration camps would be like normal prisons. But the brilliance of The Great Dictator is in its merciless mocking of what was back then taken as very impressive indeed by the audience Chaplin was creating this movie for. Even his dislike of speech in film worked wonderfully; screaming nonsense words as Hynkel into the microphone makes the talk sound obscene, as it was intended. And then there's something which I'm amazed got by the censors; when Hynkel/Hitler has worked himself up into a frenzy and gets the screaming "Heils", he afterwards discreetly sheds some cold water into his trousers. The dance with the globe I already talked about; I can't think of another scene which makes me grin and creeps me out in a similar way. The final speech of The Great Dictator, back then called communist by the Right and sentimental by the Left (which again reminds of Orwell observing about Dickens that Lenin was right to call him a sentimental bourgeois, but then that this was making Dickens human in a way Lenin was not), remains controversial with the critics; it's definitely Chaplin breaking out of his movie persona and talking directly to the audience. But it's so sincere and urgent that it's impossible not to be moved, and to wish some people would have listened.
As a director, Chaplin definitely belonged into the perfectionist-and-dictator category, if the reports are anything to go by. And he knew it, which was one of the reasons why Hitler, apart from being hateful and disgusting was an object of appalled fascination for him. After being the universally loved Tramp for decades, it's interesting to observe that his last roles in the movies are all reflections of the darker side of human nature, starting with Hynkel. Then came Chaplin's most notorious flop, Monsieur Verdoux; playing a serial killer who offs his wives and when caught makes a pointed speech on how murdering a few women is a crime but murdering hundreds and thousands, as governments are prone to do, is good politics, couldn't have come at a worse time, if you consider that this was when the anti-Communist hysteria was getting in full swing and, due to a paternity suit and a series of venomous articles, the public was suddenly seeing Chaplin as sexual predator. Today Monsieur Verdoux is immensely watchable even though one feels a bit guilty at laughing about Verdoux' attempts to kill Annabel the walking, talking life force. Verdoux is certainly the anti-Tramp, even more than Hynkel. The idea for this entire project had come from Orson Welles, and depending on whether you read a Welles biography or a Chaplin biography, Chaplin first agreed but then decided he couldn't be directed by someone else and decided to do it on his own (Welles' version) or Welles didn't have anything near a script or the wish to continue but asked for a credit in the picture as in "idea by" anyway (Chaplin's version). In any case, Verdoux showcases Chaplin as an actor and makes one wonder whether he couldn't have tried more roles like this, perhaps not directed by Welles (the clash of mighty egos would have made any Japanese monster movie fight look pale in comparison) but by Billy Wilder or any of the other younger directors. If only.
However, as things turned out, the melodrama of Chaplin's life really could compete with the one in his movies. En route to London where his next movie, Limelight was supposed to premiere, Chaplin got the news that the US attorney had annulled his permission to reenter the United States. It seems so bizarre today: literally banished from a country where he had lived for decades (the official justification was paragraph (c ), clause 134, concerning the refusal of readmittance of foreigners to the US for "moral reasons, and in case of promoting communism". When I researched about the writer Lion Feuchtwanger whom I wrote my thesis about, I came across a letter by Chaplin (they were friends) written shortly afterwards. It was quite bitter and nostalgic at the same time; dreaming of the beauty of California and being angry and hurt at the rejection by America, as he saw it. You very much got the idea of Chaplin and the US as lovers who had separated on a spectacular bad note, each feeling itself betrayed. Billy Wilder, who as opposed to Chaplin had come to America as a refugee of a war-torn Europe, never could understand why Chaplin hadn't become an American citizen decades earlier, or tried to, and thought this was a reason for the American attitude towards him then, combined with the communist suspicions and the Chaplin-the-moral-decadent-issues. As far as I recall, Chaplin was asked once why he didn't apply for American citizenship and said something along the lines of wanting to be a citizen of the world. It certainly wasn't because of British patriotism.
Not that he was free of nostalgia for his English youth, hard as it had been. Limelight, among other things, is a powerful evocation of the English music hall tradition Chaplin had grown up with and which he never forgot. (In his memoirs, he can still quote some of the songs, for example: You won't catch me on the gee-gee's back again,/ It's not the kind of horse that I can ride on./ The only horse I know that I can ride/ Is the one the missus dries her clothes on!) At the same time, it's a movie full of farewells; Chaplin's character, the aging clown Calvero, has lost his audience, and though he saves the young ballerina played by Claire Bloom from suicide and gives her reason to live again, he knows she'll never love him as a man. He drinks too much, and he's not a funny drunk. He experiences the ultimate comedian's nightmare of trying, and trying in front of a silent, stone-faced audience. Terry the young ballerina can organize one last successful performance for him, and for the cinema audience, it's a special treat because it got to see, for the first and last time, Chaplin and that other giant of the silent screen, Buster Keaton, together. But this last success is bought with his death, and what stays in mind isn't that Calvero finally gets some applause again but the scene in the dressing room with Chaplin and Keaton earlier, Chaplin as Calvero staring in the mirror, in his ravaged, make-up less face. If all clowns are truly tragedians at heart, this moment captures it perfectly. As Simon Callow said, Limelight ought to have been Chaplin's last movie, but life is rarely that neat. Essays can be, though. But it wouldn't be fair to end with the picture of Chaplin-as-Calvero staring in the mirror, haunting as it is. So I'll evoke what is the quintessential finale of those early serials that made Chaplin famous world wide. The Tramp has just found out his adored Edna loves another and walks away from the camera dejectedly. He stumbles. Then he straightens up and kicks the cactus which stood there. Cane in hand, steps being just this side between his odd walk and a defiant little dance, he continues to walk, but now we know he'll be alright. The human spirit is irrepressible. And if all of Chaplin's pictures taken together have one message, it surely is this.