Escape, Capture, Escape

Short-lived bids for freedom in THE GREAT DICTATOR (cont).

A man hurries down the street, filmed from what looks like much the same high angle used earlier. Chaplin pulls off a rare (for him) Langian linkage, from everyone saying “Good night” in the previous scene, to the rushing informant here saying “Good morning.”

Word is out (somehow — doesn’t matter how) that Schultz is hiding in the ghetto. The Jewish barber is also wanted for questioning.

(I may have told this one before — reputedly genuine Nazi-era joke. A comedian had been making jokes about the regime — maybe the one about Hitler having a cheese named after him? — and is ordered to report to Gestapo HQ for questioning. He reports to the front desk and they ask him, “Do you have any offensive weapons?” He answers, “Why, will I need them?”)

Comedy business with Chaplin hiding in a small tea-chest (looks undercranked but isn’t), to the surprise of Mr. Mann (Bernard Gorcey).

The Jewish barber is sent to alert Schultz but reverts to silent comedy form under stress — he can’t get the words out. He does it in pantomime, but Reginald Gardner is not a fellow silent comedian so he doesn’t understand. “Did you tell him?” asks Hannah. “Yes,” says Chaplin, hilariously. It’s a slightly abstract humour — I mean, it isn’t funny just because it’s not true. Many things are not true, but not many things are funny. It seems to be funny because it’s OBVIOUSLY untrue and SORT OF true at the same time. Somehow that makes The J.b.’s “Yes” even more wrong.

Business with getting all Schultz’s things together so they can hide on the roof and leave no incriminating traces. Obviously they have to take Schultz’s golf clubs because they would be a dead giveaway. This leads to the J.b teetering on a roof beam out over the street, a hatbox obscuring his vision. This is almost a straight reprise of the blindfolded rollerskating by a ledge in MODERN TIMES. Engages the audience’s poignancy-dramatic irony-Oh no! factor.

I don’t know if Chaplin decided that the terror of high places was too useful a comic device to leave to Harold Lloyd, or if he saw this as a contest he could win. Quite a lot of Chaplin sequences use vertigo peril… THE GOLD RUSH and THE CIRCUS also have high-up suspense sequences. Lloyd tends to win on thrills because his staging is more convincing. Keaton beats all because he wasn’t, it seemed, overly concerned about dying. But Keaton doesn’t milk the mortal peril aspect as avidly as Lloyd.

At any rate, the Jewish barber is saved from a nasty plunge but manages to drop most of Schultz’s possessions into the street. Poor Schultz goes through a rapid loss of personal possessions, sort of like the divesting undergone by Monroe in RIVER OF NO RETURN or Tallulah in LIFEBOAT. Oddly, the heavy falling objects do not alert the stormtroopers. Best not to worry about that.

Nicely thought-out gag where the J.b. falls through a skylight into a bed, apologizes to the tenants, tries to leave by the door, is spotted by stormtroopers, retreats back into the flat, and is grabbed from above by fresh stormtroopers, who have also nabbed Schultz. The potential chase sequence is over before it started. Some strong angles here, but they’re not bravura touches for the sake of showing off, the low angles are pretty well naturally forced upon the camera by the situation.

Walking in step stuff at the prison camp. We can’t really call it a concentration camp because the cruelty involved was beyond Chaplin’s imagination at the time, probably beyond most people’s. The UK is running concentration camps now. Do we fail to revolt against this because we consider these sufficiently different in type or severity, or because we think it’s OK to concentrate the right kind of people, or because our imaginations fail us?

The Jewish barber goes to sleep. The cue for what was, at one point, going to be the cruelest twist ending in cinema: after the big speech at the end, he would WAKE UP, back in his prison camp bed, never having escaped. It would have been very strong. In a sense, it might have made the film even more relevant in a post-war world. But in 1940 it might have been intolerable.

Meanwhile, Hannah and her friends escape to Osterlich, where there are vineyards and a bucolic idyll of the SUNNYSIDE variety, only shorter. We know they’re not safe.

And now we return you to the palace of Adenoid Hynkel, awaiting a guest…

TO BE CONTINUED

Marx for Trying

I was thinking of getting rid of my copy of Moving Pictures by Budd Schulberg — “Will I ever read this?” — when I opened it at random — a fair test — and discovered that Schulberg had attempted to co-write a Marx Bros movie at Paramount in the thirties, where he was the boss’s son.

BUGHOUSE FABLES was the intended title, which I somewhat approve of, since it has the required animal reference. But is it a common phrase or saying like “monkey business,” “horse feathers,” “animal crackers,” and “duck soup”? (Two of these are by now UNcommon phrases or sayings but I’m prepared to believe that in pre-code days they were familiar to the American public.)

BUT I’m wrong — here’s proof, from 1922, that Schulberg’s title WAS extant.

It was supposed to be about the Marxes running an asylum. I’m unsure about this. The results could easily be tasteless, even for the 1930s, and Schulberg says that part of the impetus was to hit back at the censors who had been objecting to MONKEY BUSINESS. Also, surrounding the Bros with lunatics could easily diminish their powers. The possibilities for spot gags would be endless, but we can hardly have Groucho, Chico and Harpo seeming less crazy than everyone else. Presumably we would have a “lunatics taking over the asylum” scenario and there are strong possibilities for annoying headshrinkers (cue Sig Rumann) and wealthy patrons (Margaret Dumont). But I think the Marxes need a sane, generically-consistent story world to interact with, and be the craziest element of. When Groucho is placed in charge of a sanatorium in A DAY AT THE RACES, the most eccentric person he meets apart from his own brothers is rich hypochondriac Dumont.

Schulberg himself sounds pretty uncertain about whether his efforts to write funny were in fact hitting the mark or Marx (atsa some joke, huh boss?)

The same problem is multiplied by a thousand in Salvador Dali’s Marx scenario, GIRAFFES ON HORSEBACK SALAD. Two animals for the price of one. But not a common phrase or saying, except perhaps in the Dali household. It’s understandable that Dali, a Spaniard, may have misunderstood “horse feathers” and “animal crackers” as pieces of surreal word salad, which they sort of are, but they were also pre-existing expressions which the domestic audience understood.

But the title is merely a clue to the full-blown insanity of Dali’s vision. And while that may sound mouth-watering, most commentators have concluded that surrounding the Marx Bros with an UN CHIEN ANDALOU world already chaotic and surreal would render them redundant, with nothing left to disrupt.

This image derives from a graphic novel adaptation, and you can listen to a subsequently-produced audio version here, for money.

Much, much later, Billy Wilder contemplated A NIGHT AT THE UNITED NATIONS. The title here places the project in the later MGM tradition though I doubt Wilder would have filled the movie with songs. The concept of positioning the Brothers in the context of international politics does smack promisingly of DUCK SOUP though. It would be untrue to say that the gags would write themselves — but I believe Wilder could write them. I’d love to see Chico working as a simultaneous translator. And then Harpo taking over.

Wilder never made a film built around an actual movie clown — his comedies are built around thespians with comedic chops. He uses Marilyn Monroe a little bit like a clown, and Jimmy Cagney as an icon whose famous moments he can built jokes around, but mostly his characters are not totally dependent on casting choices. He did try to work with Peter Sellers, twice, but Sellers had neither persona nor, he claimed, personality.

Wilder did also want to make a film with Laurel & Hardy — he got as far as planning an opening showing them sleeping rough in the last two Os of the HOLLYWOOD sign. So clownwork was something he had an interest in. But I suspect the collaborations would have been fraught. Stan liked to be in charge, and Groucho eventually kicked Wilder out of his house after receiving one too many lectures on the right wine to serve with dinner. (This is all from Maurice Zolotow’s semi-reliable Wilder bio.) It would have been like Preston Sturges and Harold Lloyd trying to collaborate, and finding their mutual respect could not overcome their need to be true to their individual comic muses.

The Sunday Intertitle: He couldn’t get arrested

When a man who wants to go to jail meets a girl who doesn’t want to go to jail, you have a pretty good meet cute on your hands. Paulette Goddard stares in bewilderment at Charlie as he voluntarily takes the rap for her loaf-snatching. (As Elaine May explains in Mike Nichols: A Life, you should only steal flat things. Bread is too bulky. An Elaine May purloined sandwich would consist of a slice of cheese between two steaks. This doesn’t apply if you happen to be Divine, who could shoplift portable televisions, but who among us is Divine?) Charlie appears to her as both hero and lunatic — a fairly accurate impression of him, given what he’s seen.

We can see MODERN TIMES as Charlie’s origin story — fittingly enough, since it’s his last appearance as The Tramp (the Jewish barber in THE GREAT DICTATOR both is and is not the Tramp). It’s like Clint Eastwood acquiring his poncho at the end of THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY — Charlie starts as one worker among many, then loses his job and his wits, is put back together by Dr. Ludovico, then finds he can’t settle into any one role, and exchanges his profession for “a life of aimless wandering” as Ulysses Everett McGill might put it.

The Gamin will play a central role — as an underclass wanderer herself, she can show him the ropes.

But for now, Charlie’s noble and opportunistic deceit is thwarted when the “Stop, thief!” busybody puts the finger on the Gamin.

There’s a funny exchange when Charlie extends the appropriated bread product. He shows it to the cop, who shows it to the baker, saying something like “Is this your loaf?” and the baker nods earnestly.

Having failed as criminal samaritan, Charlie decides to eat a hearty meal and refuse to pay, a gratifying and near-victimless way of getting arrested. There’s something very beautiful about the shot of him sliding his mountainous trays along the counter. The scenario puts me in mind of the melancholy death of Clyde Bruckman, Keaton’s old gag man and co-director, who, hard-up since the coming of sound, and sued by Harold Lloyd for recycling gags from THE FRESHMAN for a Three Stooges short, borrowed Keaton’s gun, ate a hearty meal at a swank eatery, and then shot himself dead in the phone kiosk.

There’s no good way to go, but that one has admirable as well as regrettable aspects.

Charlie compounds his initial impudence by smoking a cigar, which he also can’t pay for, while under arrest. Style. You’ve either got it or you haven’t.

Charlie has learned the secret of not caring about society.

Meet cute 2 — in the black maria or paddy wagon if one can still use that expression. After being nauseated by a dyspeptic “gypsy” (Chaplin traducing the Romany people again — in spite of his own probably heritage), Charlie meets the Gamin now that she’s rearrested. The police wagon is surprisingly similar to a bus, and I guess we’re not in the south as there’s a black lady passenger, who Charlie sits on by accident, thrice. Knowing his humour, he’d probably have preferred to sit on a dignified dowager, but it’s not probable that one would be present. Is it, arguably, a compliment that Chaplin instead chooses to settle his tiny bottom on this dour, thick-set woman? She does have dignity, despite her lowly status.

The van is moving very fast (rear projection), hence Charlie’s unsteadiness. A little too fast, as it now crashes and with one bound our heroes are free. Actually, it’s unclear if it crashes — it does a wheelie, seemingly, leaning over at a 45 degree angle with screeching tyres. The implication is that it’s come to rest leaning against a lamppost or something (maybe the one Eric Campbell urigellered in EASY STREET?). But anyway, Charlie and the G are OUT. The kop who’s fallen out with them can easily be reconcussed so they may make good their escape.

Beautiful shot of Paulette waiting at the corner for him to join her. In the foreground, trash cans — his present. In the background, a billboard showing a car, pointed in the direction of escape — the future!

Her closeup reveals an even more pointed detail: a second billboard, showing some kind of pioneer couple, he gesturing towards the landscape ahead — a role-reversal of our current scene. Kudos to production designer Charles D-for-Danny Hall.

Charlie considers whether to escape or not. A Look To Camera is indicated. I should be able to tell you if this is his first in the film, but I can’t remember. It could be. Which would make it his first ever, if this is his origin story. He at first doesn’t intend to go, but what the hell — he can always get himself rearrested later. The G, who has been visibly upset, obviously needs a friend. The decision to escape = the decision to be a Tramp, but it’s not a FINAL one — he will attempt other professions throughout the film, as the Tramp would throughout Chaplin’s career.

FADE OUT. FADE IN — on the road. We are halfway through the film. TO BE CONTINUED.