The Complete History of Kinema #2
The Coming of Sound.
Of course, what’s worth remembering is that Chaplin embraced sound quite willingly — it was dialogue he resented. Having demonstrated that movies could quite happily combine expressive sound effects and music with pantomime, he finally bit the bullet and produced talkies with visual “islands”. Billy Wilder’s melancholy pronouncement “When he learned to talk, he was like a child of five composing lyrics to Beethoven’s Ninth” strikes me as unfair — THE GREAT DICTATOR, MONSIEUR VERDOUX and LIMELIGHT strike me as great films, and if they’re uneven, that unevenness isn’t necessarily the fault of the dialogue — the Adenoid Hynkel scenes in TGD are the comic highlights, and many of them intersperse crisp one-liners amid the slapstick.
This has been part two of my ongoing Complete History of matters kinematic. A couple more installments should do it, I think. (Have I missed anything?)
April 15, 2011 at 2:21 pm
The Silent Chaplin and the sound Chaplin are two different — albeit related — filmmakers. Chaplin reached the apex of silent technique with City Lights and Modern Times. At that point “current events” got in the way, obliging him in his first sound film to stage a concerted attack on the man who had stolen his mustache and defend the Jewish people said thief was preparing to slaughter on a massive scale. Hitler’s supporters (and I am speaking her of so-called “Conservatives”) never forgave him for this. And so Hearst sicced his attack poodle, Hedda Hopper, on Chaplin using a former mistress — clearly bi-polar (as we say today) — as a weapon. Chaplin fought back with his greatest sound achievement, Monsieur Verdoux. On its release only James Agee came to its defense. Limelight is a lovely memory-film about the music hall, designed as a vehicle to launch the great Claire Bloom. As for A King in New York and A Countess From Hong Kong, they are minor works of great charm and beauty.
We are not worthy of him!
April 15, 2011 at 2:40 pm
Japanese cinema only started talking in about 1933. Late to the party.
April 15, 2011 at 3:00 pm
Well, my point is that it’s misleading to call City Lights and Modern Times “silent” — they mainly eschew dialogue, but Chaplin has great fun with sound gags. The swallowed whistle in City Lights would simply not have played in a non-sync film. The Chaplin of the early thirties is no more silent than Tati — he’s certainly a visual comedian, but also an aural one. Just not verbal.
In many ways The Great Dictator may have impelled Chaplin to embrace talk before he would have preferred to, but once he took the plunge he seems to have enjoyed it. I wish he’d kept the islands of pure pantomime going more, but he still found room for that great routine with Keaton in Limelight.
I’m very interested in early 30s Japanese stuff, because it hints at how Hollywood might have gone without sound… but it’s so culturally different you can’t really use it as an analogue.
April 15, 2011 at 4:48 pm
You mean Hollywood should have developed the Benshi ?
April 15, 2011 at 4:59 pm
As long as they didn’t give the post to El Brendel, that could’ve been interesting.
April 15, 2011 at 7:11 pm
Hey! Let’s work El Brendel into every thread from now on! ::evil grin::
April 15, 2011 at 7:50 pm
And to that ignoble end — El Sings Gershwin!
April 15, 2011 at 8:25 pm
There’s an El Brendel Columbia short on YouTube! And a couple with Hugh Herbert! Don’t crash the servers by all watching at once now.
April 15, 2011 at 8:57 pm
Well, I’m feeling magnanimous towards HH after just running Hellzapoppin for the first time since I was a kid. He really fits in there.
April 15, 2011 at 8:59 pm
ha..that El Brendel Gershwin clip was actually amusing..
April 15, 2011 at 10:56 pm
Amusing… well, the M is very close to the B on the keyboard, so I guess I know what you meant to type.
April 16, 2011 at 1:21 am
Billy Wilder could be witty and pointed in his observations as well as ungenerous. His putdown of Chaplin’s sound films is up there with his immortal observation on the Hollywood Ten, “Of the ten, two were talented.”(Which didn’t stop him from supporting the Motion Picture Alliance to defend them and the other eight).
Chabrol in the DVD extra of VERDOUX is very keen in his observation on Chaplin’s use of sound. He sees CITY LIGHTS and TIMES as silent films with soundtracks, THE GREAT DICTATOR as a part silent and part talkie and MONSIEUR VERDOUX as a full sound film.
By the time he made A KING IN NEW YORK, an incredible bold film, fully accomplished in its mise-en-scene, he was very much at the top in terms of technical accomplishment.
April 16, 2011 at 8:50 am
There’s a story about him excitedly showing Lewis Milestone a camera crane on the set of The Great Dictator, his new toy, and Milestone pointing out that Hollywood has been using these for years. I never quite understood that, since Chaplin may have been one step removed from normal Hollywood circles, maybe, but he saw movies. And there’s a crane shot in Modern Times.
I still don’t think it’s right to call City Lights or Modern Times in any way silent — sound is central to the comedy particularly in the latter film. Chaplin’s composing his own scores was unique at the time, and transforms his work, and sound effects are vital to many of the sequences. They may not be talkie, but they’re not silent.
April 16, 2011 at 11:17 pm
Watched A King In New York just a few weeks ago..From The Great Dictator on Chaplin’s films have this foreign ,other worldly quality about them thats hard to describe..Can’t think of anyone else’s to compare them to.
April 17, 2011 at 6:51 am
Robert Aldrich was another one with stories on Chaplin being supposedly Technically backward. He worked as an AD on Chaplin’s LIMELIGHT and said in interviews that Chaplin didn’t know a lot about using “long shots” and only when he saw THE AFRICAN QUEEN did he use it in his movie.
Where did the opening of THE GOLD RUSH come from then?
I think it’s more that Chaplin’s working practices differed from most directors. He wasn’t up on the vocabulary and wasn’t always the most upfront visually but that doesn’t mean he’s any less. As talented as Aldrich is, Chaplin is a far superior film-maker at the end of the day. Leave alone Lewis Milestone.
April 17, 2011 at 10:04 am
Milestone was a superb filmmaker in the early sound days, but unfortunately relied on the same bag of tricks, somewhat scaled down, the rest of his career. Any time the army charges, he’ll recycle those tracking shots from All Quiet.
Chaplin’s films ALWAYS had an otherworldly quality, since they take place in a blend of Victorian London and teens/20s LA. The closest thing is Sunrise, where we go from a mitteleuropean village to Luna Park.
April 17, 2011 at 1:14 pm
Chaplin’s sound films are as good as anyone’s – especially VERDOUX. In honor of his birthday yesterday I posted a few thoughts on the four (excepting COUNTESS, which I have not seen):
http://www.unexaminedessentials.com/2011/04/charles-chaplin.html
April 17, 2011 at 2:09 pm
A Countess From Hong Kong is quite lovely — even though Brando can’t quite figure out what Chaplin is doing. Eric Rohmer was crazy about it.
April 17, 2011 at 3:44 pm
Great work, Jaime. My favourite moment of Countess involves Sophia in outsized pajamas, suddenly transformed into a curvy Italian version of the Tramp.
April 17, 2011 at 9:11 pm
..was watching A Woman of Paris not too long ago and couldn’t help snickering at the thought of little fellow behind the camera trying to tug at our heart strings with this real old time melodramy of missed out misunderstood love..Its the closest silent I’ve seen to compare to his later sound films..not a bad film tho..