My contributor’s copies of Keaton’s THREE AGES from Eureka! Masters of Cinema and DIRECTED BY SIDNEY J FURIE from Imprint finally arrived! Like Christmas.
THREE AGES has three pieces I worked on and one more by Fiona and I highly recommend it. The Furie box set is packed full of extras including two video essays by me and I can’t wait to dig into the abundance of other materials.
Some mild confusion may be engendered by the contradictory accounts in the Keaton extras. John Bengtson’s typically erudite piece on Keatonian locations includes his opinion that Keaton would not have failed to make his rooftop leap at the climax of the film unless he’d intended to miss. My essay includes a photograph of a battered and shaken Keaton taken just after he slammed into the side of the building and fell to the padding below. It’s very well attested-to. Keaton could make terrific leaps, but the variable in this case is the improvised springboard he uses — could it have become slightly less springy during rehearsals?
As I mentioned before, David Kalat’s spirited commentary track has him adamant that Keaton NEVER considered cutting THE THREE AGES into three shorts for separate release, and that he certainly never spoke of this. I point to the Rudi Blesh biography — Blesh suggests this was a consideration, and he suggests it in between quotes from Keaton, whom he talked to for the book. Now, that’s not conclusive, but I think Keaton would not have missed this possibility — it was very much a Plan C scenario — they previewed the film multiple times and reshot and recut each time, mainly due to problems with the leading lady’s performance. Had a satisfactory result not been achievable, another answer was ready.
Kalat thinks that an “egotistical” filmmaker like Keaton would never have considered the possibility of failure, but “egotistical” is a very strange reading of Buster’s character. There’s self-confidence, for sure, but also humility. Comedy involved, said Keaton, “a certain amount of guess.”
The fact that Keaton had starred in THE SAPHEAD, a previous feature, does not prove that he felt no uncertainty about his first feature as co-writer/director. And even if he felt 100% confident, he also had Joe Schenk to reassure…
To me, it’s not a subject about which absolute certainty is warranted. Keaton may have been 100% certain that we wouldn’t be chopping up the film. But he knew he COULD.
“It’s a kind of musical satire,” says Calvero of the new act he’s been working on with an old friend. Not a very accurate summary — the act does not satirise anything in particular about music and musicians. “A musical burlesque” might have been more accurate, but “burlesque” has unwelcome associations with a specific American theatrical form, parallel to vaudeville and opposite number to the English music hall.
Calvero’s “friend” is played by Buster Keaton, who had entered movies four years after Chaplin and enjoyed a comparable but less stellar career. Their paths had crossed — photographs of them together, with others, from 1918, but Buster claimed in 1952 that they’d known each other since 1912, before either of them became a movie-maker or actor, when Chaplin was touring the US with the Fred Karno company.
Chaplin could, of course, have worked with anyone he wanted in LIMELIGHT. Would Harold Llloyd have come out of retirement (again) if he’d asked? Maybe not, but he could have had his pick of all the old companions. Stan Laurel certainly had mixed feelings about his old Karno colleague — in fact, seems to have rather detested him — but he might have been tempted. I be fascinated to see it — but Stan already had a comedy partner. On the whole, we can be very happy Chaplin and Keaton finally appeared together, while they were both still very able to do visual comedy. If Chaplin hadn’t chosen to put the work into this sequence, we might not know that he could still do slapstick at this level. (Proviso: I’m about to watch A KING IN NEW YORK properly for the first time, so I don’t really know what kind and quality of comedy he gets up to in that one.)
“If anyone says ‘It’s like old times,’ I’ll jump out the winder,” says Buster in the dressing room. Well, he had a certain amount of experience jumping out of windows, not to mention off roofs, cliffs, out of moving vehicles, etc.
Plotwise, at this point, the audience is still in some kind of puzzle-state about who is going to get the girl, to use an outdated phrase, and Chaplin also injects some tension with the suggestion that Calvero might have to cut short his act because of the crowded programme. Nice that so many stars of the stage have rallied to support him, ridiculous that he should be limited to a tight ten minute set.
“That’s all any of us are: amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else,” says Calvero. One of Chaplin’s best epigrams.
A tense moment with Calvero alone in the dressing room. He takes a drink. Who can blame him?
“Everyone’s so kind to me. Makes me feel isolated,” he complains to Terry. Chaplin surely knew what he meant by this, when you’ve been the most famous man alive you’ve been showered with kindness and you’ve been very alone.
Calvero does his flea circus act, and it goes over well, but a quick dissolve truncates it. I’m curious as to why Chaplin reprised the routine (still trying to get the most out of an unused idea from 1915?) when it might be stronger dramatically to show an entire act and build the tension about whether the audience really loves it or is just being polite. There’s a tipping point where you KNOW the laughter is real…
Shortly after appearing in LIMELIGHT, Buster contributed comments for a French publication. The following has been translated and translated so it doesn’t sound very Busterish:
“He had prepared and written everything in advance. But once in the studio he improvised within the framework he had drawn.
“To my mind he is the greatest director of comic actors there is. Roscoe Arbuckle, who worked with Charlie, was perhaps the only other great director of comedians.
“I recall that on many occasions I was summoned to the studio by Charlie, only to be told when I got there to come back the next day as he had changed his plan of work and was engrossed in something else. His is the only studio in Hollywood where work is done like that. The rest are just factories!”
So, after shooting in a more or less economical way, apparently Chaplin slowed right down for the big finish, knowing he could best do this kind of comedy on the set, in his own time. And he clearly invited Buster’s wholehearted collaboration, welcoming his ideas.
I dismiss entirely the rumour of a jealous Chaplin cutting Buster’s best stuff. He appears to have ruthlessly cut lots of material from himself too, to get the sequence to the right length for the movie it climaxes. The movie also demands that Calvero play a major role, not be eclipsed. The fact that the scene accords each clown equal time strikes me as an act of great generosity.
Saura on the right.
There’s a story about Carlos Saura visiting Chaplin late in the Great Man’s life, and tactlessly launching into a panegyric about how great Keaton was. I mean, come on, man. You can have that conversation with anybody else, anytime. Talk to Chaplin about Chaplin. No doubt Saura assumed that Chaplin, in his seventies and with that astonishing career behind him, ought to be self-confident. And sure, he ought to have been.
Chaplin brooded. And, much later in the evening, he blurted, apropos of nothing, “But I was an artist. And I gave him work.”
The fact that Chaplin couldn’t recognise that Keaton, in his own way, was an artist too, is tragic. But hell, he DID give him work. Keaton’s latter years are mostly happy, considering what his 1930s were like, but he didn’t get to do his thing freely in many good films. LIMELIGHT allows him a really nice sequence, in which his ideas were welcome.
Calvero and “friend” disappear behind a screen for a quick change, emerging seconds later, already in character: the Calvero-musician officiously directs the Buster-musician towards the stage.
Buster gets the first gaglet, walking straight into the piano. In a film about old age, the two men now play men even older than themselves in a skit based on senility and decrepitude.
Buster, who could play the piano, strikes the first note and his sheet music cascades into his lap.
Chaplin has anatomical problems meanwhile — his head disappears into his collar. Then a leg mysteriously retracts partway into his capacious torso.
Durational gag: while Chaplin rings changes on the cartoon leg trouble, Buster just struggles with the Sisyphean stream of paper pouring from his piano. The pages are all getting disarranged, and we never see them convincingly sorted, so it’s amazing the eventual concert doesn’t becomes a weird atonal cut-up routine.
The leg pantomime is excellent. Disturbing, even. By kicking the leg out, Charlie can get it back to its original not-very-long length, but then it just retracts again, like a string being wound up into him.
Maybe this opening struggle represents the distinctive styles of the two comics. Buster does one thing, once, with intense concentration, letting it be as slow as need be. Charlie does something once, likes the effect, and does it again and possibly again.
If we look at how Chaplin cuts the sequence, we see his sensitivity to Keaton’s stillness. Much of Charlie’s returning of the violin plays out on Buster, silently watching him.
Very strange things are happening inside the piano. Buster, looking under the lid, injures his nose. Charlie, investigating around the other side, tips his violin onto the floor, where naturally Buster will tread on it with one flap shoe and end up wearing it.
Charlie extracts from the piano a scary mass of tangled wire. Buster produces a pair of pliers from his baggy pants and the offending trichobezoar is extracted. This works: the piano now plays fine. I’m no musician but this seems unrealistic.
Now it’s hunt-the-violin time. Buster is unaware that he’s acquired a wooden galosh. This is discovered via a VERY nice piece of choreography — the man are close together, looking down, when Buster crosses his legs and the violin-shoe ends up inches from both men’s faces. Slow dawn of realisation.
Buster gets to do a fall when Charlie tears the violin loose while pushing his friend back with a foot to the chest.
Buster then tries to get the music finally started, but Charlie just waves the limp, weirdly fluid broken violin at him. Buster gets his own unique angle in response:
Fortunately, Charlie can produce on demand a fresh untrodden violen from his ass, or from hammerspace (where cartoon characters get their hammers from, qua ACROSS THE SPIDERVERSE), and we’re off.
Wild fast bit — Charlie’s IMP takes over. The camera, entranced, is pulled along by him, speared by his demonic leer. We haven’t seen Chaplin the Satyr all through this film. There was quite a lot of him in Hynkel and Verdoux. Swept away by passion, Charlie kisses his instrument. The same shot of Buster, more or less, is repeated. A miserable blink, befuddled and excluded.
Then the sad bit moves both men to tears. This “musical satire” is all about age and infirmity and emotional incontinence.
Impossible to imagine that Chaplin’s Roma heritage gave him a particular musical language, but this violin theme is VERY gypsy-style.
Then back to the diabolism! Buster loses his piano stool in the frenzy, his hands still somehow still attached to the keys as his body flies away, almost looking for a moment as if he’s suspended on a wire.
As Charlie’s ecstasy of musical self-adoration carries him clear off the stage, Buster plays on, aloof, ignoring the laughter, totally in character as this blinkered old guy just trying to make it to the end of the act.
Calvero lands in the big drum as planned, still playing and is carried off. But now he thinks he’s hurt his back. He has them carry him back on stage so he can address the audience. Again, I think Chaplin was probably a bit influenced by THE RED SHOES.
(Crass question: what will they do with all the money raised if Calvero isn’t around to accept it?)
Buster has made aclear choice — his character knows something is wrong. It’s a good choice: it saves a moment of realisation which could distract from the main event.
The moment when he’s left alone on the stage with a lot of empty space is a heartbreaker. Also, it should have been drawn by Edward Gorey.
A weirdness: as Terry learns that it’s not Calvero’s back, but his heart that’s the problem, and rushes in to see him, the doctor’s voice suddenly changes — the line “I’m afraid he won’t last the night” is an overdub spoken I’m sure by CHAPLIN, disguising his voice slightly but not sounding anything like the doctor (Leonard Mudie).
I’ve seen most of LIMELIGHT in bits before visiting it for this series, and in my brain Calvero played the whole ending, his death scene, still sitting in the drum, but this it NOT SO. They put him in an armchair in the prop room.
“I’ve died so many times.” — a great line. It seems obvious now that he’s said it, but he could easily have missed it.
Norman Lloyd tells us that Buster was directing Charlie during his last moments.
“One of the great moments in the history of dramaturgy!”
It’s a very nice shot, especially when Claire Bloom sweeps into view and out again (tricky rack focus).
Chaplin wrote himself a beautiful death.
But he had decades left to live and two more movies to make…
LIMELIGHT again. A decent bit of stagecraft: Chaplin wants Calvero to feel he’s in the way, so he has him overhear a love scene between Terry and Neville. Since they chat on the doorstep, as young lovers have done since the doorstep was invented by Alexander Graham Doorstep, and Calvero has passed out inside the door, it works quite naturally (although I had assumed that he was leaning against the door of his own room, not the lodging house’s front door, but there’s the letterbox — invented by Thomas Alva letterbox — so I was mistaken).
The next day, Calvero tells her she’s wasting her youth on him — the noble bit. Good composition with old CC in foreground and young CC in picture on wall in bg. There’s rather a lot of mantelpiece posing in this scene, though, which adds to its staginess.
I feel like young Chaplin, who thought in gags, could have made a feature film where a third of the action happens in a single lodging house. He made entire short films confined to single spaces, or nearly so. Old Chaplin does not have the skill set to make a movie come alive with just a couple of characters in a single space, especially without gags. There is some decent subtle camera movement in this scene, but the atmosphere is the opposite of fraught. It’s all too poised.
Scene with Norman Lloyd and Nigel Bruce. NB is dissatisfied with Calvero’s clowning and has asked the agency to send a replacement. “I don’t care if he’s Calvero himself.” NL reveals Calvero’s identity (he’s been appearing incognito) and NB agrees Calvero can keep his job. This unmasking is a bit of set-up for the eventual charity performance, but it’s primary purpose is to set up the misunderstanding that follows…
Calvero meets an old chum — and learns that the clown has been sent to replace him. He doesn’t know, of course, that this idea has been called off. It ought, by narrative law, to trigger a fantastic drinking spell with tragic consequences, rushing into our end scene. Instead, it causes Calvero to disappear — possibly to get drunk, we don’t know. Since he vanishes, Terry has no choice but to get on with her career — montage of foreign tours — a bit of plot seemingly borrowed from Chaplin’s real childhood sweetheart appearing in Moscow when he looked for her in London. (If Chaplin’s fixation on teenagers came from his early, thwarted passion for a girl who died young, it’s curiously reminiscent of Humber Humbert’s sentimental backstory — I’m not sure I believe it as a piece of Freudian scene-setting, though it seems to have happened, all right.)
While Terry dances, Calvero has been busking. I wonder how much of an influence ST MARTIN’S LANE had on this film? Possibly a great deal.
Chance unites Neville with Calvero (as if Chaplin, feeling himself too old to get the young girl any more, must cede the role to his direct descendant, Sydney, keeping it in the family) as Neville prepares to leave for WWI. Just as the movie ought, by normal dramatic laws, be accelerating into the third act, these delaying factors crop up — Calvero’s disappearance, Terry’s tour, Neville’s enlistment.
“How are you doing?” asks Neville.
“Never felt better in my life,” replies Calvero, who will be dead in 29 minutes of screen time.
“I don’t mind coincidence,” said Chaplin, “but I despise convenience.” But here comes Nigel Bruce again, by complete chance, to liven up a dead scene. “There’s something about working the streets I like,” says Calvero. “It’s the tramp in me I suppose.”
Next scene — Terry bumps into Calvero, entirely by coincidence (though I guess she’s looking for him). Chaplin COULD have had either Postant or Neville tell her where to find her old rescuer, but he doesn’t bother to establish this. He would need to get rid of them again if he did that, I suppose. Now the prospect of the benefit show is introduced — it could have been done one scene earlier, as Postant is the natural person to propose it, but Chaplin wants a teary scene with Terry and Calvero. It’s true that the relationship stuff needs working out before we can get to the big finale —
I really like Chaplin’s acting at the end of the scene, where he starts distracting himself from his tears by talking about the comedy act he’s been working on with his friend (Buster, as yet unglimpsed). “I would like a chance just to show them that, that I’m not through yet. I’ve still got ideas, you know! I’ve been working one, been working on one. A comedy act. Myself and my friend. Sort of a musical satire.”
(It’s the stumbles and false starts and repetitions I like — the most naturalistic speech Chaplin ever gave onscreen, I think.)
“And eh, he’s a very good pianist, and, eh, me with the violin.”
“Wonderful!”
“A lot of funny, really very very funny business…”
We fade out as he’s saying this, his expression suggesting he’s trying his best to persuade himself that it’s true. He looks worried, not exultant. It’s beautifully done. I don’t know if he wrote it with all those little hesitations in mind, or if they came as inspirations, or happened because he wasn’t sure of his lines, and it worked. It’s usually best to assume that anything that’s good in a film is the result of talent and bloody hard work, especially with Chaplin, but the stuff that’s best in any film is when you can’t quite believe it didn’t just happen spontaneously.
shadowplay 