The Sunday Intertitle: Gamin(e)

The choppy narrative of MODERN TIMES could have worked in Chaplin’s favour when he’s incarcerated for the first time: the story can shift over to introduce our leading lady. Instead, he has himself immediately released, offscreen miracle cure effected — his white-coated shrink (Dr. Kugelschlapp, never to be seen again) whacks him heartily on the back after cautioning him to avoid excitement. Charlie walks out of what looks like a library into a dervish-like montage of Dutch tilts. Finds his way to the docks, and innocently involves himself in a labour protest attacked by police.

This is fascinating for reasons beyond Lumet’s great line — “My God, the execution!” — Chaplin avoids making his character politically aware. He’s just trying to helpfully return a red flag. But the film can be political: a peaceful protest is attacked by cops on horseback. I’m not aware of a great many other films of the thirties which show that kind of action. Even at Warners.

You can argue that Chaplin’s indirect approach — surely a lot of audiences don’t think about the underlying assumptions about cops versus workers here — perhaps robs the commentary of punch. But the fact that it’s even there is remarkable. And doubtless a black mark on Chaplin’s FBI file, though the Feds don’t seem too hot at textual analysis.

This is all just an unusually longterm set-up for a meet cute, since on that same waterfront dwells wild-eyed banana snatcher Paulette Goddard, “the gamin.” The most prominent spelling mistake in cinema.

The whole character is interesting. Edna Purviance may have occasionally played juveniles, but this is the first major Chaplin heroine I can think of explicitly typed as a kid. (Merna, in THE CIRCUS, under her father’s thumb until recued by marriage, is a strong candidate though.) The former Ziegfeld girl was 26, old by Chaplin’s usual standards, but he casts her young to make up for it. The two were dating, but kept their relationship non-specific for the press, since marriage was not in their immediate plans.

Chaplin wrote in his plans for the film that there would be no hint of sex in the screen relationship. Probably wise, given his by now apparent middle-age (a spry forty-seven). But then he introduces his co-star lustily eating a banana, which, given his own must-publicised orality, could be a Freudian signifier or what I’m sure I don’t know.

Paulette, as Chaplin’s first leading lady since Edna to star in more than one movie with him (THE GREAT DICTATOR is next), is a significant figure. She encouraged Chaplin to make re-establish contact with his two sons, Sydney and Charles Jr. Sydney recalled sharing a bed with her until it was noticed the boys were getting a mite too old for that, and the pity of it is their pleas — “Why can’t we sleep with Paulette?” — would, by their very ardency, have made the ban more final.

The gamin has some young siblings — don’t worry, too young even for Chaplin — throwaway sentimentality — they’ll get taken away by the authorities, never to be worried about again. The child welfare people, as in THE KID, are a Dickensian social menace. But the true purpose of these characters, like Monsieur Verdoux’s wife, is to justify the gamin’s criminality. Her father, a listless victim of unemployment, is a micro-nod to the film’s social conscience.

The fact that Charlie is arrested by the docks and bundled into a police wagon suggests to me that Chaplin may have intended the tramp and the gamin to meet up immediately after his initial arrest. But instead we now get a whole prison sequence, leaving Paulette’s introduction lying there, not so much a plot thread as an off-cut, waiting to be picked up later.

So now we’re off to jail…

Meaningful Beauty

Rounding off my WOMAN OF PARIS coverage as it seems important to get to THE GOLD RUSH for the holiday season. It’s a snowy, festive film.

I’ll tell you who’s good in AWOP — Nellie Bly Baker, the secretary at the Chaplin Studio, who plays a masseuse. Chaplin apparently knew she could mimic him well enough to do the role. He just cuts to her nearly impassive face as Edna is getting a rubdown and discussing her love life with friends. Silent condemnation from La Baker, her eyes deliberately unseeing. Marvelously understated — it’s only the regularity of the cutaways that makes her attitude very clear indeed.

So, although I don’t hugely love the movie, I’m massively impressed by the storytelling. Like the way a shirt cuff, dropped from a drawer, reveals to Carl Miller’s character the fact that Edna has a lover. A very Lubitschian conceit.

Again, against the elegance of the narration is the corniness of the story. Edna’s struggle to choose between love and luxury implies a sophistication that is belied by the third act melodrama: Miller at first seems set to murder Menjou, then shoots himself. His mother takes the gun and sets off to kill Edna. At this point, improbabilities have piled up past the point I can take them seriously. And then Edna and mom bury the hatchet and go off to do good works.

Chaplin, according to David Robinson, came to work one day all excited about his solution to the story: the two women would go work in a leper colony. This notion was greeted with revulsion by his team, and Chaplin stormed off, taking several days away from the studio. When he returned, the incident was never mentioned. So instead out heroine and her former foe are running an orphanage, still a sentimental solution but less grotesque. One wonders about entrusting Lydia Knott’s mom character with more kids, she didn’t do so well with her son.

Chaplin also planned a meeting between Menjou and Purviance’s characters, but had a happier inspiration in the end: they pass by, oblivious of one another, she hitching a ride on a cart with a band of musicians, he riding in a limo with a crony. The guys asks, apropos of nothing, “By the way, whatever happened to Marie St. Clair?” Menjou gives an indifferent shrug. And at that moment, illustrating neatly the idea of fate Chaplin hints at in the film’s sub-title, the paths cross.

But there’s more. Chaplin pays particular close attention to the musicians Edna is riding with, just as he had to Nellie Bly Baker earlier. The three distinct cutaways to the singer and accordionist carry some poetic meaning, just out of reach of the rational brain. They have nothing to do with anything that’s happening, and we don’t know what they’re singing. And I think it’s their irrelevance that makes them poetic. They’re life, and they’re going on without regard to the melodrama that has just fizzled out.

I would like to suggest that the strange, medievalesque pilgrim troupe that pass by at the end of Fellini’s IL BIDONE, and the strolling players who join paths with Masina at the end of his NIGHTS OF CABIRIA, derive directly from this moment. We know Fellini took a lot of inspiration from Chaplin.

The peculiar time-warped troupe of IL BIDONE provoked a battle between Fellini and his producer. An assistant was asked his opinion. He said they should keep them in the picture, as the scene had beauty. To his surprise, Fellini rejected this argument. No, he said. It had MEANINGFUL BEAUTY.

The Sunday Intertitle: The Wild Party

Maybe my favourite scene in A WOMAN OF PARIS is a scene none of the main characters is even in. It’s the party Edna is meaning to go to, and instead she ends up encountering her lost love. (He’s wearing a mourning armband, a narrative shorthand borrowed from THE IMMIGRANT, which was originally going to take place in the Latin Quarter also: here, the device is a little awkward because it begs the question, how long has Edna been in Paris?)

The thing about the party scene is, it’s FUNNY. In an elegantly smutty way. It shows what Chaplin could have done if he’d leaned into this kind of wit — instead, he opened a door for Lubitsch to go through. It also suggests, maybe, what he was up to with A COUNTESS FROM HONG KONG, the kind of thing he’d have liked it to be.

The establishing shot shows couples dancing while a pair of girls riding on men’s shoulders have a pillow fight. It’s curiously reminiscent of Joe Dante’s RECKLESS YOUTH. A girl (Bess Flowers) dressed only in a long bandage is placed on a dais, and a stout gentleman wraps one end of the gauze around his waist. Then he slowly rotates, and she rotates on her plinth, as the bandage winds round him and unwinds from her.

Chaplin packs this brief bit of business with amusing and characterful reactions: the very interested lady with the monocle; the guy rocking Fritz Rasp levels of loucheness who reacts with sudden real fury when his eyes are playfully covered at the moment of revelation. I suspect Chaplin may have heard of or witnessed such a scene during his Paris trip, but the details are all his invention.

And there’s a lovely pay-off: a chap who has slumped against a wall and fallen unconscious earlier, while Edna was being invited on the telephone, wakes up just in time to get an eyeful of the naked girl who has retreated behind a screen. So he passes out again.

It’s all deliciously naughty, but worked by indirection: we never see a naked form, but understand its impact from the responses it provokes. And that’s a very Lubitschian idea. As Billy Wilder put it, Lubitsch says “One plus one” and leaves it to the audience to provide the “equals two.” You can make the telling of the story funny purely by doing it indirectly — somehow the act of adding it up creates a sense of punchline for the audience. And we laugh partly through being pleased with ourselves.

Not that we’ve done anything clever here. Chaplin has. But he somehow flatters us by creating all the decadence through suggestion.

Just think: film history might have turned out quite differently if Edna had gone to the right address: A WOMAN OF PARIS would have been a naughty comedy about demi-mondaine hi-jinks, might have set the box office ablaze, and Chaplin might have escaped from the Tramp character before THE GOLD RUSH, CITY LIGHTS, MODERN TIMES.

I’m kind of glad Edna made the wrong turn — but also glad that Lubitsch was watching, ready to pounce.