The Sunday Intertitle: Cafe Society

Leaving the factory, Charlie is pushed around by a nasty cop, and takes an accidental revenge — stumbling on a chance arrangement of objects, he hurls the last brick of his career. Ever the unconscious anarchist.

The running gag of imprisonment is played one last time. Going to prison is like going to the cinema — when you step outside, the world has changed. But in this case, it’s for the better: Paulette has a job. Dancing solemnly to a hurdy-gurdy in the street, she’s alent-spotted by Henry Bergman, loyal Chaplin supporting actor and gagman in his final screen role. Bergman suddenly looks much older, but then the gaps between films are now years long. He may have lost a bit of weight, or gravity may have started pulling it all down his skeleton. He’d live another ten years, though, and I hope they were happy. Did his cafe stay open? Was it like the one in this film?

Paulette Goddard’s dancing: she was a Ziegfeld girl, but the subtle assistance of a choreographer might have been useful. But I guess the idea is that she’s a charming natural.

The hurdy gurdy and the cafe are right next to the jail on the dockland street we’ve seen previously.

Chaplin recycles his “One week later” title to signal his own release. If I’d known you only got two weeks for lobbing masonry at people, I might have thrown more bricks in my life. The Gamin is waiting for him once more, this time in new clothes. Time for Charlie to start his final short-lived career, as “Smile” plays again.

If MODERN TIMES is a satire on western civilisation in the twentieth century, then I guess this is the part where Chaplin rips the lid off the singing waiter racket. Paulette rapid-fire talks Bergman into hiring Charlie. “Can you sing?” I wonder if this was enough to tip off the sharper viewers in 1936 that Charlie was going to give voice? It’s smart to make us wait…

Charlie, being a silent actor, is naturally dismayed at the prospect. Fingers to throat, he tries to explain the impossibility of it to the G. Somehow, I’m never really bothered by the conceptual clash of characters talking in intertitles but singing vocally.

Meanwhile — the County Juvenile Division issues a warrant for the Gamin for Vagrancy. When I hear the word, I always think of the Vatican newspaper correspondent’s denunciation of Elizabeth Taylor for “erotic vagrancy,” a charge that might apply here, though they meant something else by it. Nobody else ever made the hobo life so appealing.

The form has a bunch of blank entries for “Name,” “Description,” etc, but the big lunk filling it in makes like two scratches of the pen and the thing is somehow complete.

Charlie is waiting tables. As always happens when he crosses a dance floor, he becomes entangled with a dog (well, vaguely similar incidents occur in A DOG’S LIFE and THE GOLD RUSH). He does show some promise in the job, though, falling over and getting up without spilling anything from his highly-stacked tray. On the other hand, as a natural unconscious anarchist, he’s going to have trouble with kitchen doors marked In and Out. They’re swing doors, you see. They open both in AND out. So why can’t they be used interchangeably?

If MODERN TIMES frequently looks back to Mutual days (and beyond), this sequence refers to THE COUNT and CAUGHT IN A CABARET. But Chaplin, giving the Tramp his last solo starring role, is not content just to revisit old favourites. The gags are substantially fresh.

Whimsy! Charlie borrows a drill from a workman to put the holes in a block of cheese.

As Charlie’s longest-suffering patron, Lloyd Ingraham (INTOLERANCE) manages, by the power of acting, to make us immediately unsympathetic towards a figure we might otherwise relate to. He just wants his dinner. But he’s obnoxious about it. The head waiter, played by Fred Malatesta, is another asshole. Faced with these characters, Charlie’s inefficiency becomes a heroic trait

From their movements, the two waiters inadvertently provoked into a fight by Charlie’s door trouble, are clearly silent clowns. The IMDb is silent on the identity of one, but claims the other to be John Rand. I wouldn’t have recognized him, and still don’t. And I missed him in CITY LIGHTS, as the other tramp who dives for a cigar! I guess he’s the one with hair here. As with Bergman, this is his last appearance for Chaplin, though he’d make a few more appearances elsewhere.

Crossing the dance floor with Ingraham’s duck, Charlie is swept up in a sea of humanity and loses the duck to a waiting chandelier. It can happen. Ingraham delivers a study in apoplectic frustration as his tray approaches, then retreats, finally arriving duckless. Retrieving the wandering fowl, Charlie makes a slip-up carving it and the greasy bundle is abducted by a drunken footballer. I never enjoy loutishness in films, whether Charlie is perpetrator (in early shorts) or victim, so this bit makes me feel too much sympathy for Charlie to find it funny.

The waiters start singing — not really synchronized — while Charlie rehearses. It’s clear his job retention, always dicey, is going to depend on his voice (!). Unfortunate that in a film with so few words, one of them, via the waiters’ song, should be “darkies.” But I always view this kind of discomfort as salutary. It’s good to be shocked by the recognition that this kind of thing was once casual pop culture discourse.

Charlie has trouble with his lines. Paulette writes them on his cuffs. How she’s going to fit all the verses one I don’t know, but the sheriff has already demonstrated that writing in this film is a magical activity. The lyrics we get to read set up what the song is about, so that when Charlie tells it with Italianate nonsense words and pantomime, we will have a helpful clue as to what he’s on about. It’s the story of a rich old guy seducing a pretty girl: it’s hard to see any self-awareness from Chaplin about this narrative, a familiar one in his life. I think he doesn’t relate to it because he’s not fat.

Full of confidence with his crib sheet on his wrists, Charlie steps out to sing —

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…

The Circus is Leaving Town

So, Chaplin’s THE CIRCUS has been turned into an exciting serial, but last time I neglected to give you the cliffhanger: when Rex the high-wire guy unaccountably disappears (is there ever a reason given?), Charlie, who has been practising on a rope one foot above sawdust, is suddenly enlisted to hopefully break his neck. Hurriedly getting ready, he accidentally unleashes a platoon of capuchin monkeys belonging to Bosco the magician (no reason why either monkeys or a magician would be present in a circus, but I guess it’s possible, barely).

Not being a complete clown, except by profession, Charlie enlists a props man — the wonderful John Rand — to harness him up on a wire so he can perform feats of derring-do and derring-don’t in complete safety without the aid of a safety net. We anticipate disaster, and we are right to do so.

Rand has been one of the more delightful discoveries of my Chaplin deep dive — an incredibly effective clown, without a hugely strong individual personality but with a lot of style. He seems to specialise in frantic characters, often particularly dedicated kops in pursuit of Charlie, as in POLICE. Here, his perpetually flustered manner is usefully deployed as he’s entrusted with another man’s very life.

The monkey assault was, it seems, Charlie’s initial idea for the whole film — “I’m in a high place being attacked by monkeys or something,” Henry Bergman reports him saying. It sounds like someone reporting a dream, which seems appropriate. Of course Simon Louvish sees the sequence as a metaphor for Charlie’s divorce difficulties, which forces him to assume Bergman is lying. But one could still take a psychological approach to the scene (particularly appropriate the more like a dream the idea is — a fragmentary notion arising from the subconscious) and say it’s inspired by Chaplin’s exposed position as a celebrity who performs for a public, and is prey to attack by critics or personal enemies. It’s relevance to the divorce story becomes coincidental, or prophetic. The divorce and scandal merely fulfill the pre-existing anxiety, the nightmare comes true.

As well as John Rand, we have Josephine, Hollywood’s go-to monkey, who co-starred with Keaton in THE CAMERAMAN and Lloyd in THE KID BROTHER and even Laurel and Hardy in BABES IN TOYLAND (unrecognisably costumed as Mickey Mouse!) I’m unskilled at reading monkey markings so I don’t know which one she is, but as a skilled performer she could have been trusted with any of the more elaborate bits of business.

The different uses of Josephine by the three great silent clowns tells us a lot about them. For Lloyd, she’s originally a threat, part of the film’s array of bad guys, but with typical resourcefulness Harold turns her into a tool, a useful decoy, dressing her in his shoes to lure the villain away. Keaton focusses on her role as organ grinder’s assistant: an animal that has been trained to turn the crank on an organ may also usefully or hazardously operate a Gatlin gun in a Tong war, or a movie camera. Though Keaton’s universe is the most whimsically hostile, generally, it’s Chaplin who uses Josephine and her simian friends or relatives as an attack force. David Robinson continually describes the monkeys as awful or vicious, but I see them as awful only in effect. They’re not savagely attacking Charlie, they’re just, you know, monkeying around. Even the one biting his nose seems interested only in messing with him. The monkeys will, potentially, kill him, but it doesn’t seem to me that they WANT to. In fact, the comic irony of the scene is that small, basically harmless creatures become a menace to life and limb(s). It’s the same gag as the wee dog barking at Charlie in the lion cage.

The unusual situation allows Charlie to get a fresh laugh out of the tiredest old joke, the banana peel. It becomes a bigger hazard, and an unlikelier one (though the association with monkeys is strong and logical) and the anticipation caused by its being in his path is even stronger because his path is so damned narrow. Totally unnecessary to add any new wrinkles — just have him slip on it. Also, Charlie’s trousers falling down, an old gag that’s suddenly funny and terrifying, and also adds to the sense of public exposure and humiliation underlying all this.

Chaplin COULD have emphasised the association with his own life and career by having the audience laughing at his peril, assuming it to be part of his act, but instead they react in terror. This augments the tension — those cutaways of horrified faces are really powerful — but it seems less pertinent to the film’s plot and themes. Oh well, he made a sensible choice, one can’t deny it works.

Excellent use of the pole, too.

Oh, along with the nose-biting there’s another oral intrustion, the monkey sticking its tail in Charlie’s mouth. Maybe the detail that convulsed Fiona the most. I’ve written about Charlie’s oral fixation in terms of the choking gag, and related it to a childhood trauma in the best dollar book Freud tradition — Charlie choking on a coin he attempted to swallow as part of a magic act — money, performance, choking — three big themes. The number of times in his films Charlie ingests metal is astonishing. And of course food and its absence are absolutely defining concepts for Chaplin. And we could also note that sexually Charlie was extremely oral (I just typed oran by mistake, a Freudian ape-slip) — the salacious aspects of the divorce involved his enthusiasm for receiving fellatio. Let’s agree that sometimes a monkey tail is just a monkey tail. Ptui.

Incidental research: since this sequence converted Fiona from a non-fan to a full-on supporter, I decided to try it on my parents, who both declared that they didn’t like his stuff (and probably had to suffer through a fair bit when I was growing up) and they’re not silent film enthusiasts. My Mum was particularly strong in her statement that she didn’t like him. My Dad does have a fondness for both Stan Laurel and Harry Langdon. Anyway, they both laughed hysterically. But didn’t act like I’d changed their minds. Which must prove something: some distinction between laughing at and appreciating.

Miraculously surviving his aerial ordeal, Charlie interrupts the ringmaster beating Merna, delivering not only a kick up the arse to the villain, but a sock in the eye. This gets him fired, and he’s discovered by Merna camped outside the grounds the following night. I’ve seen a beautiful illustration of this by production designer Charles D. Hall. It’s a rare exterior set, because Chaplin clearly wanted to see the moon in the sky.

Incidentally, Hall also illustrated the monkey rampage, indicating it was indeed part of the original plan for the film (this was concept art, not set designs) rather than a direct artistic response to the divorce scandal. Charlie now behaves like he did in THE TRAMP, making way for the better man. By getting Rex married to Merna he assumes the role, in modern parlance, of cuck — but here the role is portrayed as noble and selfless, as indeed it is in the circumstances. The ringmaster can no longer push Merna around as she has a protector with rights, a respected star of the show.

(Ringmasters are usually baddies — they’re bosses, of course, making them natural Chaplin enemies, and they seem to have twirly moustaches as part of the job description. Al Ernest Garcia even does a “Curses!” gesture, a little midriff-level air-punch.)

This stuff is played skillfully played: Charlie maintains the guise of being happy for his friends, no horse in this race, until the circus leaves town and he doesn’t join it.

This is one of his great endings — it hadn’t occurred to me before but the sort of crop circle he’s left in is only an abstract suggestion of the patch of pale grass that’s left when a tent is removed. This is more like someone has scuffed up the dirt in a ring. A big top crop circle. (UFOs and circuses are much alike — they visit and depart, people go in and see inexplicable things and lose track of time.)

Chaplin uses a surprising number of shots, for him. The extreme wide is tragedy, as Welles observed. Then a medium of the pensive ex-clown. His eyes meet ours, a return to the camera intimacy that defined early Charlie, but with the intent melancholy rather than humorous.

Closeup of the tattered star on the ground, also. What’s significantly absent is the standard Chaplin head-to-toe framing. Even when he gets up and leave, we’re much wider than that.

Incidentally, I’d like a restoration of the film’s original cut — this star is supposed to be the film’s opening image, but Chaplin altered that when he added the damn song at the start. Opening on the star and then leaving it in the dust at the end would be so neat. And makes the film more explicitly a film about stardom, something which at this time in his life Chaplin was apparently wishing he could leave behind. But he still had quite a few years left to go…

Charlie walks off, back-kicking the crumpled star, and forcing himself into a jaunty walk. Off to the city lights…