Intertitle of the Week: War is Heck

The Kaiser criticises his staff for neglecting a briefing in SHOULDER ARMS.

I’m reading Glen David Gold’s Sunnyside as slowly as possible to prolong the pleasure, and watching along with the book — viewing the Chaplin films dealt with in the text as they come up. I’m not sure if there are going to be more than two, but I suspect so: the titular SUNNYSIDE would seem a likely candidate, after all.

SHOULDER ARMS is the film Chaplin’s friends advised him not to make. A comedy about WWI? From a director/star who had been publicly criticized for his failure to enlist? Gold charts the process by which Chaplin managed to tiptoe around the various land-mines littering the no-man’s land in his artistic path. Casting the German enemy as Keystone Kops pus things on a fantastical footing, and showing the travails of the working soldier in a sympathetic light, Chaplin made a film which, while not of his highest standard, must have offered cathartic relief to audiences at the time. And a few bits are really good, notably the gags in the flooded trench.

This is where Chaplin goes to sleep, underwater, breathing through a gramophone horn, and this is where I expected to see him wake up, after the extended fantasy sequence that sees him disguised as a Tolkein ent, meeting Edna Purviance (who manages to seem French just by skilled use of body language) and capturing the Kaiser (played by brother Sydney). This would mean that the rainy, miserable part of the film would be reality, and the rest a dream. Instead, Chaplin wakes up all the way back in basic training, which seems a bit extreme, but was probably another way for CC to cover his ass: the critics can’t object to a film about the war if the protagonist (“the doughboy”) never actually makes it “Over there.”

In his novel, Gold does a great job of thinking his way inside Chaplin’s head, but by having Chaplin express misgivings about the “It was all a dream” ending, perhaps he gives CC too much credit. Chaplin would use the hackneyed device again, and in any case was not highly educated or a man with much experience in dramatic writing apart from what he did for the movies. He was inventing his own rules, “writing” by way of rehearsal, and would sometimes take the easy way out when he found himself painted into a narrative corner. And as I’ve suggested, the dream stratagem may have been used, not out of desperation, but to defuse the possible offense of his subject.

My favourite image in SHOULDER ARMS is actually this chauffeur, whose appearance (funny and sinister) is accompanied by a stab of horror movie music in Chaplin’s score.

Anyway, the film is also striking for the things it anticipates: an early tracking shot along a trench looks just like PATHS OF GLORY, only with the Little Fellow in it instead of big fellow Kirk Douglas. Makes Kubrick look a bit cheeky for suggesting that Chaplin was all form and no content. Chaplin’s serial number is 13. Michael Crawford in HOW I WON THE WAR is 131313. Richard Lester, that film’s director, certainly knows his silent comedy. When Chaplin holds a wine bottle aloft so an enemy sniper’s bullet can de-cork it, he’s anticipating Frank Finlay in THE FOUR MUSKETEERS…