The Easter Sunday Intertitle: Not One Word

But He answered him not one word, so that the governor marveled greatly.

Matthew, 27:14

Charles Spencer Chaplin turned 133 yesterday, and he's looking very good on it I think we can agree.

By the time of CITY LIGHTS, Chaplin knew a lot about storytelling. The film’s climax demonstrates both his precision and his looseness. The introduction of a gang of burglars (including supporting clown, gag man and assistant director Albert Austin in his final screen appearance) is certainly loose, even sloppy. Though burglars certainly belong to the kind of world Chaplin portrayed, in classical Hollywood narrative one would normally want to set them up in advance of using them. Strictly speaking, anything you use in the third act ought to have been set up in acts one or two.

But the key element in the climax is the drunken millionaire, who HAS been set up, and developed, in acts one AND two. After his defeat in the ring, Charlie bumps into his old sometime friend, who happens to be cheerfully plastered, and his problems seem solved. Of course, Charlie mistrusts this good luck, and he’s right to do so. The first time the drunk sobered up into a stranger, it was a surprise. The second time, it was still unexpected for Charlie, but established a pattern which he now imagines could be repeated. Important to get the cash from him as soon as possible. But he still lapses into complacency. What could possibly go wrong?

The fact that a random burglary happens that very night is used as the necessary complication, Wild coincidence, Vince Gilligan has compellingly argued, is acceptable if it makes the protagonist’s situation WORSE. Chaplin also takes care to establish the burglars already in the house when Charlie and his sometime friend arrive.

So, the burglars result in the police being called, and the millionaire being knocked out, and it turns out a blow on the head can sober you up — his alcoholic blackouts have behaved much like movie amnesia anyway, so this seems logical enough. So the money has been produced and even given to Charlie — he can regard it as rightfully his — but neither the donor nor the cops (idiots right out of Keystone) nor the disapproving butler recognise Charlie’s ownership. So stealing the dough is fully justified… leaving aside the morality of accepting large cash gifts from a man who’s drunk out of his senses. Well, he won’t miss it, and Virginia Cherrill’s blind girl needs it more than he does…

Charlie gets away with the cash, delivers it, and is then arrested. The parting scene is beautiful, and Chaplin posing himself by the phonograph seems somehow symbolic. Charlie is going away for a while, and the reason is — the reproduction of sound.

Chaplin also understood that a story can’t just reach a climax and then stop. If the story is really about something, some kind of coda is needed. This should probably be brief, but it’s essential. It’s where the story gets to establish what it’s really been about.

There follows a time-lapse — fluttering calendar pages. The title cards at the start of the film all said things like MORNING and AFTERNOON. Now we jump from January to AUTUMN. Walter Kerr, in The Silent Clowns, picks up on what’s different here. Charlie, emerging from prison, seems broken. He walks haltingly, almost limping (the return of the old wound from THE TRAMP?) He has no reserve of bravado or superiority to draw upon when dealing with the nasty newsboys (who WERE established earlier). He is as low as we’ve ever seen him.

His downward trajectory has been matched by the no-long-blind girl’s upward one. She now has her own flower shop (were there a few bucks left over from the money Charlie got her?). She can see. But when she sees Charlie being humiliated by the kids, she laughs. We’re being set up for tragedy.

Throughout the story, especially as soon as the prospect of a cure for her blindness was introduced, the tension created by Charlie’s fake rich man act has been felt. He couldn’t have maintained this illusion forever. And certainly with vision restored, his love would see through the pretence.

What’s needed is a miracle, which Chaplin provides. Not entirely as callous as the rest of the world which she’s been able to join, Cherrill’s character — after a brief interaction through the shop window, which serves as a barrier to dialogue, she decides to replace Charlie’s boutonnière, which, like the rest of his costume, is disintegrating.

Handing him the flower causes their fingers to touch, which is the rational part of what happens. The rest is done by their eyes. Charlie’s eyes convey so much love here: she senses that she’s been looked at this way before. She recognises him.

“You?”

And then, “You can see now?” and “Yes, I can see now.” An intertitle that carries two distinct meanings (at least) — the now refers, mundanely, to post-operation sight, and transcendental, to NOW, right now. She can see now what she couldn’t see moments ago. The truth was concealed behind what was visible. The hero was really a poor tramp but actually a hero.

Frederic Raphael says that the unique quality of cinema is that it can end a story with a look. Chaplin most often uses the traditional long shot, the archetypal walk off into the sunset, which he could practically establish copyright ownership of. But here he uses a closeup. As Kerr says, it’s one of those endings you can’t project forward. Depending on your personality, you may feel that this couple face insuperable difficulties, or that everything has been resolved happily ever after. It’s a transcendentally happy ending, but what does it promise? I think we feel everything will be OK. We are in the presence of love. But the details are not explained, that would ruin it.

Chaplin’s son Sydney tried to explain the emotional power of this scene, and words quite literally failed him. “It’s murder,” he managed. That doesn’t quite cover it, is somewhat grotesquely inadequate. But words are, in the presence of pantomime raised to an art form, inadequate things. Still, the situation, and the perfect closeups, do get a boost by the perfectly chosen words Chaplin puts in the title cards.

You can see now, Yes, I can see now.

The Sunday Intertitle: The Party

Charlie’s second drunken party scene has two great gags: he’s offered a strange dessert, and then tries to eat a bald man’s head which, in fairness, resembles the dessert to a quite implausible degree. When offered the correct dish after trying to spoon up the pate, he refuses. It now has unfortunate associations.

For some reason, Chaplin’s makeup has gotten really crude in this film, and in particular this part of the film. His hair turned white back around THE GOLD RUSH, so there seems no reason for his eyebrows to have abruptly turned so cartoonish, so Grouchoesque.

Then he swallows a whistle. I haven’t asked any of my accompanist friends if this gag would be too hard to play live. I guess anything can be managed, with sufficient prep time and good reflexes. But it is a sound gag, and there aren’t so many of those in earlier Chaplins. Also, though, it’s using the resources available to a cheap pit orchestra. The sounds of the film are pretty well all musical. Even the gunshots would be achievable using standard movie theatre equipment.

This is another of Chaplin’s obsessive “swallow metallic objects” gags, harking back to the childhood trauma of almost choking to death on a coin. Probably made more memorable since Hannah Chaplin’s home-schooled Heimlich solution was to hold little Charlie upside down and pummel him: effectively, a re-birthing experience.

Charlie’s whistle disrupts a music recital, then calls an unwanted cab, then attracts a whole assorted sled team of dogs.

And in the morning, Charlie is ejected, but not before one of his startling gay jokes — CITY LIGHTS as pre-code film? The drunk millionaire, awakening sober, is astonished to find an unfamiliar male bedmate. Chaplin makes sure the suspicion is crystal-clear by patting his chum affectionately on the cheek.

OUT.

It’s worth noting that Harry Myers’ essentially serious-looking face is used to brilliant comic effect when he’s sober. He LOOKS tragic, but IS funny. Oddly enough, though his drunk act is very skilled. it’s his miserable sober guy that really makes me laugh.

This ejection puts Charlie back in his tramp clothes — he’s spent a day wandering about in rich man’s togs (somehow obtained the night before last, fitting his unusual frame to perfection). Now, dropping by the blind girl’s place (where she lives with her grandmother in picturesque Dickensian poverty courtesy of designer Charles “Danny” Hall) he overhears a doctor offering a diagnosis: the girl is sick. Chaplin lets his camera move, in an elegant creeping POV shot that edges round an obstructing wall to get a better view. A very atypical move for him.

The girl being unable to work sends Charlie off to earn some cash. As a street sweeper. Cue dung joke. A pretty good one. Worth hiring an elephant for the day.

Albert Austin appears, a little plumper than in his Mutual days. I only identified him by his cookie-duster, which isn’t even real. More food jokes — Austin accidentally eats soap. He’ll be back later, as a burglar.

Virginia unwittingly unravelling Charlie’s undershirt is one of the few jokes using her blindness directly. We learn that Charlie times his visits for when granny’s away, to enable him to keep up the millionaire illusion. Granny is a remarkably trusting lady.

And now we learn of the new cure for blindness, and also that the rent’s due. And, bang on cue, Charlie loses his job — spending too much time at lunch with his charity case. This crisis leading, very swiftly, to the celebrated boxing sequence…

TO BE CONTINUED

City Sounds

It’s my contention that CITY LIGHTS and MODERN TIMES should not be considered silent films. Both have soundtracks. MODERN TIMES even has spoken dialogue, some of it (not much) synchronised to lip movements, but “part-talkie” doesn’t seem the correct term either. Chaplin has a crack at defining what he’s up to: “A COMEDY ROMANCE IN PANTOMIME” reads the first title after the main one (Chaplin gets his name on both). My point is that Chaplin, quite apart from his magnificent score (his first) uses sound in nearly every scene, apart from those where he uses the absence of it. We’re accustomed to talking about films without words as silent films, so that Tati’s movies get called “quasi-silent” when in fact they have an audiophonic richness much greater than typical movies of their time. Compare CITY LIGHTS to practically any other film of 1931 and you’d find it had more music, more sound effects, more creative use of those sound effects (if such a thing can be objectively measured), more everything except talk. So in rejecting the term “silent” I’m not just being pedantic (though I’m always happy to admit to that), I’m insisting on important qualities in the film being acknowledged.

(I see Carl Davis has managed to get his name into the credits, under “Restored for live performance.” I’m happy to see him credited at a live performance, but I don’t see what he’s doing on my DVD. I’d like to see the original titles as they appeared in 1931, thank you. From the credits we do have, more generous than usual, we learn that Chaplin actors Harry Crocker, Henry Berman and Albert Austin are ADs, Rollie Totheroh is joined on camera by Gordon Pollock, the great Charles D. Hall is on set design, and Arthur Johnson is responsible for musical arrangement.

After his Gershwin-inspired opening titles theme, Chaplin gives us the main title again, in lights this time (a curious repetition) and then the first audio joke: the parody of bad film recording, as Henry Bergman and others make their pompous speeches in front of the statue of peace and prosperity, currently a mere sheeted mass. Chaplin’s sound is always very carefully worked out — consider the agonizingly accurate indigestion noises in MODERN TIMES — and this buzzing, distorted saxophones perfectly capture and exaggerates the early weaknesses of sound on disc. And by modulating the tone upwards for the dowager’s speech, Chaplin gets a second laugh, sort of one of disbelief that he’s doing this.

(David Robinson notes that Bergman delivers a real speech, which he has lipread: Bergman effusively thanks Mrs. Filbernut, Mrs. Beedell-Bottom, Mrs. Putt, and the artist himself, Mr. Hugo Frothingham-Grimthorpe-Shafe-Shaferkee…)

Then the sheet rises to reveal Charlie, asleep in the lap of Peace, or possibly Prosperity. (Chaplin had considered starting the film with another dream sequence.) What follows is a classic routine in which Charlie tries to oblige the dignitaries by clearing off, but is hampered by the structure of the statuary, getting his pants speared by the upraised sword of Prosperity, or possibly Peace. Then the national anthem plays and he tries, helplessly, to remain erect for it. As with so much else in Chaplin, it’s a callback to childhood: the big important people are yelling at you to do something, and you’re trying, but your small and awkward body isn’t allowing it.

Charlie continually finds himself inadvertently giving offence, thumbing his nose on the upraised hand of Prosperity, or possibly Peace, then sitting on the face of Peace, or Prosperity, or Pete, or whoever the third figure is. An attitude made all the more vulgar by the fact that Charlie’s trouser seat has just been ventilated. (With surprising attention to continuity, the ventilated trousers will still be in play in the film’s last scene.)

So, in our first scene Chaplin has taken advantage of the soundtrack to reduce the concept of film dialogue to the ridiculous, and used the synchronized music in a way that wouldn’t have been reliably possible in a silent film, where you’re dependent on whoever’s accompanying the movie. He’d have had to include a shot of the sheet music if he’d wanted that exact cue.

AFTERNOON.

Charlie has a run in with some unpleasant kids, including future filmmaker Robert Parrish (FIRE DOWN BELOW), who will also return at the end. Great gags with Charlie’s glove, the fingers of which are detachable (soon, everyone will be wearing them). An obnoxious newsie pulls off one digit, and Charlie removes a second just to snap his fingers under the ruffian’s nose.

Then Charlie rounds the corner and studies some art. The set-up, playing with the assumption (which I take to be Chaplin’s sincere belief) that artistic nudes are just an excuse for lecherous ogling, we see Charlie studying an art deco odalisque, taking care to give equal consideration to a small equestrian study. An advantage of doing what I’ve been doing, watching all Chaplin’s film in order, is that I recognise this idea from WORK, made sixteen years and a lifetime before, but it’s now transformed. The nude is incidental to the joke here, which is about the suspense of Charlie nearly falling down an open street elevator.

This gag doesn’t utilise sound, only music. In fact, being unable to hear the elevator is essential for the joke to work. And by placing the camera in the shop window, Chaplin has a ready excuse for US not hearing anything.

Pay-off: Charlie demonstrates with the elevator operator when he realises he’s been on the brink of breaking his neck, but as the elevator rises, the operator’s eyes come level with his, then keep going. It is Tiny Ward, hulking strongman enemy last seen in SHOULDER ARMS.

It is, by this time in film history, quite unnecessary for Chaplin to introduce Charlie, but he does it anyway: in two scenes we have learned that he is a tramp, that he means well but displays a strange mixture of maladroitness and grace which gets him into trouble, that he is one of nature’s aristocrats despite his social stature, that he considers discretion the better part of valour. But these qualities are displayed not because we need to be shown them as characterisation, but because they’re funny. But characterisation is the essence of Chaplin’s comedy, so maybe you could reverse that proposition and it’d still be true.

There we go: a gentle start to this epic…