Let’s try to finish THE CIRCUS. This coming week is what they call Flexible Learning Week at Edinburgh University, meaning I have no teaching. They used to call it a non-teaching week, which sounded really bad. “Oh yes, the swimming pool is open. You can go there. But it’s a non-swimming week.” Flexible Learning implies the students will still be acquiring knowledge, just without the aid of teaching. And in truth, quite a bit of learning is done that way, independently, if the student is any good.
A new status quo at the circus: Charlie is to be employed as a property man (a job he filled before, at Keyston) but his really duties are clowning. He just doesn’t know it. Trying to interpret this as a metaphor for Chaplin’s talent just isn’t going to get you anywhere, as Walter Kerr admitted, but you can take it to mean that Charlie is only funny when he’s in a somewhat real situation. I once chatted with a radio producer who was a former circus clown, and he said that he would argue with the other clowns that just running into the ring and throwing buckets of feathers at one another wasn’t any good unless it was part of a SITUATION. He was right! That was my purpose in making my own clown film: I felt the abstract nature of clowning — funny-costumed men doing strange things for no reason — would only be amusing if it were a compulsion, and then you put them in situations where they had to try to behave normally.
The ringmaster seems to be taking a big chance that Charlie will always find himself in an amusing situation when tasked with a serious job, but we’ve been following the guy for fourteen years now and we know that’s basically true. For his next trick, he’s tasked with assisting Professor Bosco, the magician (George Davis, Dutch-born background comic, a baddy in SHERLOCK JR).
All the best bits in THE CIRCUS in involve children or animals, as if you disprove a showbiz dictum. No sooner has he got Bosco’s desk into the ring than Charlie accidentally triggers… everything. Prolonged business with him trying to control the doves, rabbits, geese, balloons and piglets endlessly spewed from Bosco’s trick top hats. The act wouldn’t work well in a circus anyway, since a desk set up required the magician to face in one direction, and the circus works in the round, and are magicians usually featured in circuses anyway? Doesn’t matter. They are of the same approximate branch of showbiz.
The only downside of this plot idea is that having an audience laughing at Charlie is contrary to the usual rules of the Chaplin universe, and arguably makes things slightly less funny. Usually, only THIS audience, US, can see that Charlie is funny. We feel superior to everyone else in the films apart from him, and though we admire him we feel a little bit superior even to him because we know he’s funny when he often doesn’t. Only the leading lady is sometimes amused by him, which is her privilege.
Now the credits sequence crashes into the main body of the film, as the shots Chaplin stole and duplicated to accompany his introductory song get repeated, in their original context: Merna Kennedy on the flying trapeze. With the added business of Charlie throwing her food when the wicked ringmaster’s not looking.
Chaplin uses this routine to get an actual custard cream pie in the face gag in, which is another feature of this film: using the tired old slapstick elements, up to and including the banana peel, but in fresh and surprising ways. If I may presume a creative connection with the Great Clown, maybe we were both asking, What would make this dull stuff funny again?
Charlie is entrusted with odd jobs even when he’s not being held up to the delight of the crowd: cleaning a fish tank — he diligently wipes each fish — a real prop man has apparently divided the tank into two compartments, one with live fish swimming about in front, one in the back with dead fish for Charlie to grab and wipe; and blowing a pill down a sick horse’s neck, a job I could have told them would go wrong. Especially given Chaplin’s long tradition of gags about choking, which I trace back to a childhood trauma here.
Go wrong it does, and it leads somehow to Charlie running into a lion’s cage, which has carelessly been left unlocked, and then getting himself locked in.
As I say, the best bits involve animals. Here, the real comedy doesn’t come from the lion (“the bridge is just suspense!” as Keaton argued on THE RAILRODDER) but from the small yapping dog that happens along at the worst possible time. I’m going to jump ahead to the bit with the monkeys now, because Simon Louvish is very good on that in Chaplin: The Tramp’s Odyssey.
Chaplin apparently told actor/gagman/restauranteur Henry Bergman that he had this idea about being attacked by monkeys while in a high place, and Bergman suggested that a circus might be a logical location/situation. Louvish takes leave to doubt this, speculating that the scene is too perfect a metaphor for Charlie’s plight, mid-way through the film’s troubled shoot, to be anything other than a creative response to the predicament of being in the public eye (up a tightrope in front of a circus audience, or the biggest movie star in the world) and assailed by lesser beings (monkeys, an estranged wife and her divorce lawyers and the press). It definitely works as a reading, and I’m ashamed it never occurred to me. I was too busy admiring the conception and execution.
Well, the dog and lion bit works in a similar way. What makes it hilarious to me is the irony of a man threatened by a slumbering lion, but the thing that’s going to get him killed is a wee dug, which doesn’t even mean him harm but has just decided to bark at him for reasons of its own. “You shouldn’t be in there, are you mad?” it might very well be saying, in its own canine idiom.
Very rapidly the sequence passes through plot (a) developments — the bar falling down and locking Charlie in, Charlie nearly dropping a noisy trough to awaken the slumbering jungle monarch, the dog, and Merna showing up — hope! — and promptly fainting — hope dashed! and (b) Charlie’s quicksilver emotions, fingers in ears (if I can’t hear the dog, it isn’t making a noise), trying to calm the dog, pleading with the dog, taking a firm line with the dog, praying to the almighty. It’s like the five stages of grief, minus acceptance. And another bit of cleverness, Charlie splashing water from the trough/tray he nearly dropped, to try to awaken Merna. He is indeed a Props Man.
The main lion here was exactly as peaceful as it appears, though I note that Charlie covers the scene with himself and the beast in separate shots as much as he’s able. He’s still in there are fair bit. And the next-door wildcat, the one he encounters when trying to escape through the partition, was every bit as savage as it appears. Now, we know from the deleted scene that Rollie Totheroh was pretty good at splitscreen effects when required, so Chaplin could presumably have faked all his more dangerous interactions here, but it looks like he decided to risk it. I see none of the exposure fluctuations that make the twins scene look ever-so-slightly fake, and the lions’ and Charlie’s responses seem too perfectly synchronised to be anything but dangerous reality.
Merna eventually recovers, Charlie feigns bravado, but a snarl from the lion sends him up a flagpole, which introduces the idea of him trying to impress Merna with aerial feats…
But did the sick horse ever get his medicine?
TO BE CONTINUED
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