Recent purchases from The Bookworm and the All You Can Eat Bookshop.
The flat is lousy with Marxian biographies now, and since I’ve made two video essays on a box set of their Paramount works, I’m not sure I’ll ever have cause to do the research and actually read the things. I just get a warm glow from owning them, and for having bought them cheap, and from not being able to move in the hideously cluttered Shadowplayhouse. Books as insulation.
Sexual Stratagems is full of essays by writers I like on filmmakers I like (Guy-Blache, Dulac, Deren), and the giant Selznick is as lavish as the man himself could have wished. Karl Brown’s memoir of camera assisting for Griffith HAS to be essential. I remember his vivacious appearance in Brownlow & Gill’s Hollywood, wildly enthused yet still properly sceptical of his former boss. The reason I might not get around to those in a hurry is John D. MacDonald.
These are the ones I’ve read. About five more I devoured are on loan to my mum, who is now similarly addicted. Only a few more Travis McGee’s to go. I’m consuming them out of sequence, based on having cleaned out the Bookworm’s supply and then grabbed whatever was cheap on AbeBooks. One will have to be a Kindle edition for economic reasons. I’m saving the last in the series till last.
The bad things about the series are closely connected to the good things: the independence or inconsistency of MacDonald/McGee’s sociopolitical positions keeps you guessing. Conservative with progressive flashes, romantic with cynical underpinnings or vice versa. The occasional ugliness — McGee is a roister-doisterer who respects women as people except sometimes he doesn’t — works as a frictive element. The fact that there’s a perceptible formula McDonald writes to — McGee will get horribly injured before the end, he will lay at least one beautiful woman, he will refuse another to show he has standards — adds a cosy element to the mayhem. The plotting is mostly unpredictable and exciting, the prose is beautiful in an unflashy way. Occasionally McDonald will write something that just isn’t plausible, in such a way that you wonder how a smart guy could slip up so badly. There’s one where the mystery solution is that three formerly (sorta) law-abiding citizens in a small social circle independently turned into murderers. Shades of A SHOT IN THE DARK, but McD doesn’t see the funny side.
But generally the crafting is good, and the research or life experience — probably mostly the former (McDonald mostly sat and wrote, I think) but cunningly disguised as the latter is constantly diverting. Never a dull spot.
McGee is a great series character — he takes his licks and emerges basically unchanged at the end of each novel. So he’s not quite suited to the movies. Could have worked on TV. I guess we got Magnum P.I. instead. Ugh. But that had John Hillerman. I was about to call him America’s greatest living actor, but it turns out I missed his death in 2017. I bet the Oscars roll call of the dead missed him out too. Damn.
— those were the words four-year-old Jackie Coogan used to introduce himself to Chaplin. David Robinson notes that, with Chaplin’s love of words (something we might not expect from a silent comedian), this was bound to endear him as well as impress him. It’s also a good job description of Chaplin, and his magic act in the following sequence from THE KID shows him a veritable Cagliostro.
“I must go now, but I’ll return,” says Edna, anticipating Chaplin’s VO in THE GOLD RUSH: “I am going, but when I return, I will come back again.”
Jackie’s illness is too sudden and unmotivated to work as pathos, at least to my eyes, but it gets us where we’re going: a doctor is called (a good bit from one Jules Hanft) and Charlie happens to admit to not being Jackie’s natural father. The doc, being an officious busybody as well as an idiot, reports the case. Charlie has shown him the note that says “Please love and care for this orphan child,” which does not say “Please put this child in an uncaring institution.”
This is raw stuff for Chaplin, of course, who had been in the workhouse as a boy when his mother became too mentally ill to care for her sons. Nestor Almendros filmed an interview with Chaplin late in his life, and when asked if he was happy, CC replied “Yes, of course, I’ve got money.” Almendros was appalled by this shallow and materialistic reply, but think about what’s behind it.
Chaplin now follows the DW Griffith rulebook: charity workers, social workers and the like are baddies, just like kops. (Something I was told at a party by a social worker: if a department has a particularly bad case, like a child who gets murdered by their stepdad while supposedly being monitored by social services, the department gets its budget cut — of course making further tragedies more likely, not less,)
Incidentally, the doctor gets to do something Chaplin’s supporting cast are rarely allowed to do, post-Keystone: he turns and appeals to the audience. I guess he’s that kind of guy. Charlie’s doing it too, so why not?
The doc blusters off, still complaining about everything in sight — he’s sat on the toilet-chair which broke, the place is filthy, the stairs nearly kill him. Look how tiny Charlie’s hands are. Now it’s September!
Now the two brutes from the orphan asylum turn up. Fantastic the way the one in charge won’t even talk to Charlie, relaying his questions (“Ask him where the kid is,” while Jackie is in plain view) through his doltish underling.
Things escalate fast — these guys, apart from their lack of human empathy, are incredibly bad at their jobs. Chaplin has learned, possibly from Griffith, how to amplify the emotion of a scene with a well-placed closer shot:
jackie saves the day for now, striking both intruders with a hammer and chasing them away. Appropriately enough, I think it’s a chasing hammer. I’m interested in the balance of comedy and drama in the next sequence, the point where Chaplin’s use of comedy and melodrama together reached the sublime. The hammer thumps are something we’ve seen in Chaplin comedies before — THE FATAL MALLET is almost entirely devoted to blows on the head — and it’s gratifying to see these guys receive them, but they’re not played particularly for laughs here. We’re too concerned with the drama to be ready to laugh, I think.
The orphanarium guys return with the film’s chief kop, Tom Wilson. Wilson’s never hugely funny, but that’s fine here, we want a bit of unleavened menace. The supervisor gets a bowl of flour smashed in his face — good, good — but again, it’s part of a dramatic struggle, not funny. Jackie is successfully abducted.
Coogan, interviewed by Brownlow & Gill, describes how his hysteria in this scene was produced simply by Chaplin talking to him, explaining the meaning of the scene, a kind of hypnosis. No child cruelty was involved, though one suspects Jack Coogan Sr. would have been on board if it had been.
That interview is one of the greatest things ever, though I sadly note that Jackie is NO LONGER CUTE. I’m impressed that the camera operator risks a zoom at a key moment, as an emotional intensifier.
Meanwhile, Charlie is struggling with the two heavies, looking straight at us — a little too much? Never mind. Chaplin’s cinema is inherently proscenium-like, our presence as audience is regularly implied, the fourth wall is not only broken, it’s dissolved, and the effect is whatever the opposite of verfremsdungseffekt might be,
The asylum guy gets two more blows on the head, and this is technically slapstick, in the midst of tragedy, so it plays a little oddly but not so it bothers us. Charlie escapes through a skylight and we now get an exciting rooftop chase as he clambers along the houses, actually preceding the child-catcher’s van down the street, before jumping in the back of it and duffing up the supervisor.
The IMDb lists Frank Campeau as the Welfare Officer (a better title than the ones I’ve been giving him) but Campeau, a character guy for Fairbanks and later in many westerns, seems to be a different man with a different man’s face, so I would like to know who this excellent baddie is.
Again, the W.O. getting kicked from the van and left in the dust is very satisfying, but doesn’t play as comedy, exactly. It’s a slightly amusing incident in a dramatic situation in a comic film.
The eventual embrace with Jackie is unbearably emotional. And then, as Coogan noted years later, Chaplin felt the need to top it off with a bit of humour, so he chases the driver away with a series of feints — now that we know it;s going to be alright, we can laugh freely, and it’s a terrific release. Charlie & Jackie then walk off, victorious.
BUT — in a genuinely clever bit of plotting, the doctor now shows Edna the note which Charlie showed him, and the third act is set in motion IMMEDIATELY.
THE ROUNDERS is mainly known to me for its closing shot, which introduced Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle to me in Brownlow & Gill’s life-changing series Hollywood. (Me to Brownlow: Your series changed my life and made me become a filmmaker!” Brownlow to me: “You must be broke!” Me to Brownlow: “I am!”) Chaplin and Arbuckle, dead drunk, sinking underwater… one on his way to immortality, the other to obscurity.
A title identifies Charlie as “Mr. Full” — he’s doing the drunk act again, and also wearing a silk hat and an Inverness coat (swanky coat with built-in mini-cape) — so he’s not the Tramp. But he’s got the moustache, just like in ONE A.M. And the cane, and the disreputable boots (out of keeping with the rest). So I guess the walk has become central to Chaplin’s screen persona, even if the rest isn’t secured yet. It seems that it has not been definitely determined yet that the public wants to see Chaplin as a Tramp at all times. He would find that out later, and his experiments with departing from the familiar character would become very, very occasional.
I don’t know if Chaplin really felt the Tramp character limited him unduly. Looking at all he did with it, he would clearly have been WRONG to think so. I think perhaps he just felt that he SHOULD play other characters, because clearly he COULD, and he wanted the world to know it. I mean, he wanted to play Jesus Christ, for Chrissake.
Even though shitfaced, Mr. Full take it upon himself to twist his own ear and emit cigarette smoke from his mouth, as if his head were a contraption. Nobody is around. This little performance is executed for an audience of one: Mr. Full. He doesn’t seem to be aware of us watching, though with Chaplin that’s always a possibility. Chaplin never quite gave up on these little tricks performed for his own amusement, which are almost breaking character, but he did cut down on them as his character got more involved in the world of his stories. It’s possible, I suppose, that Mr. Full isn’t doing this as a conscious trick, but is so drunk his body has become alienated from him, and he feels he NEEDS to operate it like a machine to get results.
Now Mr. Full is staggering around a hotel lobby, just as the proto-Tramp did in his first appearance. Compelled to churn out films at an appalling rate, Chaplin seems to have grabbed at anything he’d already done for other directors, reworking it to suit himself.
Mr. Full seems to be a far less aggressive, more genteel inebriate than the predatory creep of MABEL’S STRANGE PREDICAMENT: bumping into a large man’s backside, he raises his hat politely to the backside, apologising to it, rather than its owner.
I’ve now picked up a second hand Chaplin, the biography by David Robinson, a book even better than its high reputation suggests. Not just a bio but an unbeatable critical study (superior even to Walter Kerr, so far as Chaplin goes). Here he is on the Chaplin hat-tip:
“The traditional historical explanation of Chaplin’s innovations at Keystone is that, despite the doubt and resistance of Sennett and the Keystone comedians, he succeeded in slowing down the helter-skelter pace, and introduced new subtlety to the gag comedy. This is true so far as it goes, but the difference lay deeper. Keystone comedy was created from without; anecdote and situations were explained in pantomime and gesture. Chaplin’s comedy was created from within. What the audience saw in him was the expression of thoughts and feelings, and the comedy lay in the relation of those thoughts and feelings to the situations around him. The crucial point of Chaplin’s comedy was not the comic occurrence itself, but Chaplin’s relationship and attitude to it. In the Keystone style, it was enough to bump into a tree to be funny. When Chaplin bumped into a tree, however, it was not the collision that was funny, but the fact that he raised his hat to the tree in a reflex gesture of apology. The essential difference between the Keystone style and Chaplin’s comedy is that one depends on exposition, the other on expression. While the exposition style may depend on such codes as the Keystone mime, the expressive style is instantly and universally understood; that was the essential factor in Chaplin’s almost instant and world-wide fame.”
Also in the lobby: future Keaton collaborator Eddie Cline. And in the next scene, the eternal bellhop Al St. John. St John, I must say, always catches the attention and holds it. He’s an unusual presence. His solo shorts may or may not be great but he justifies star billing by being TOO ATTRACTIVE TO THE EYE to really work in a bit part. How long before Chaplin gives him the elbow?
Phyllis Allen plays the scold, Mrs. Full, first seen alone, “nursing her wrath to keep it warm.” Mr. F. tries a winning smile on her. Twice. She’s having none of it. It’s a very Tam O’Shanter marital set-up with very clearly defined roles.
Meet Mr. Fuller: Arbuckle, of course. Equally paralytic in his drunkenness, he has an innocence about him that Chaplin hasn’t quite discovered. Children loved both Chaplin and Arbuckle because they’re both naughty boys. Arbuckle is basically a giant, polluted baby. He staggers into the lobby, mirroring Chaplin’s bit, but doing his own thing with the set-up.
Mrs. Fuller is Araminta Estelle “Minta” Durfee, with her huge wad of hair that seems to have fallen on her scalp like dough, who, as I perhaps haven’t previously remarked, was the real-life Mrs. Arbuckle. She’s bemoaning her husband’s alcoholism, which may have been Minta’s real-life situation.
Minta is mainly responsible for our knowing that Chaplin smelled bad (like Robert Pattinson and Michael Fassbender, allegedly). He had apparently embraced or invented a theory that one should wear a single set of clothes, unwashed, until they disintegrated out. This doesn’t seem to have any particular advantage over the more conventional, society-approved procedure of washing and changing. I guess you save on laundry bills and your clothes fall apart before the moths get ’em.
I don’t know when Chaplin stopped reeking, but his stinginess, embossed upon his psyche by childhood poverty, lasted. Nestor Almendros, filming an interview with C.C. at the end of his life, was appalled to hear him answer a question about whether he was happy with “God, yes. I’ve got money!” But if you grow up in extreme poverty, isn’t that understandable?
Mrs. Full uses the Chaplin cane to hook her husband by the neck: a rare occurrence. Charlie never normally allows anyone else to use his cane. It’s like a fifth limb.
Good bits: Arbuckle trying to pick up his topper, but kicking it away each time; Chaplin falling onto his bed and hooking his feet around the headboard so as to lock himself into a vulgar, arse-up, body-rictus. Minta unlocks him by thrashing his upturned posterior with the cane, which is now officially hers, it seems. A kind of marital emasculation.
Mr. Fuller is a bit rough to his missus, but Arbuckle’s performance makes clear that he doesn’t really know what he’s doing: any brutality is unconscious. As is he, practically, after Minta retaliates with roundhouse slaps to the spherical physog.
That’s all funny enough, but when Fuller starts strangling his wife it’s slightly less amusing. He’s strangling so loud, Mrs. Full can hear him clear across the hall. She sends Mr. Full to the rescue, a curiously futile idea. But it works! Full knocks down Fuller with the door upon entering, but then is set upon by Mrs. Fuller. How dare you prevent my husband strangling me? Then the formidable Mrs. Full counterattacks. How dare you assault my worthless drunk of a husband?
This is all good, well-observed stuff. If you allow that alcoholism and domestic abuse are suitable subjects for “farce comedy” — and on the one hand, this is a terrible, insensitive idea and on the other, they are IDEAL subjects, perhaps the ONLY subjects, for Keystone-type “farce comedy” — then what Chaplin and chums are doing is reasonably accurate knockabout satire.
Mr. Full now tries to extricate his wife from her battle with Mrs. Fuller, but gets knocked flying by a thrust of her pugilistic buttocks. So Mrs. Full is fighting to defend her husband, and thumping her husband at the same time. Because that’s her inalienable right, and no other woman is going to horn in on it. It all makes perfect sense, you see.
Rendered irrelevant to the hostilities they sparked off, Full & Fuller now recognize one another as brothers in inebriation, and sneak off, with Fuller using his cane to filch his wife’s handbag.
Hand-shaking now becomes a terrific bit of business — every time the boys look away, they forget the other is there, and so when they turn back it’s a surprised and they have to shake hands again.
With the wives arguing in the Fuller rooms, the husbands ransack the Full household: the second cane and hat are fetched and the second purse is pilfered. Now as synchronized as Siamese twins, the two freshly-moneyed gentlemen stagger off in search of booze. It’s interesting to see that film grammar of the day requires us to see them pass through the lobby on their way out, even though nothing happens during this part of the voyage. Al St John is placed in the lobby, just for continuity’s sake — he’s got to be in the hotel somewhere, so why not here? — but gets nothing to do.
The wives discover the theft(s) and console one another. Sisterhood! They set off to find, and possibly assassinate, their errant spouses.
Arbuckle hauls Chaplin to “Smith’s Cafe,” which, like all the best establishments, had a doorman in blackface. This is Billy Gilbert, but not the later Laurel & Hardy co-star, Joe Pettibone in HIS GIRL FRIDAY, Herring in THE GREAT DICTATOR. I presume Chaplin knew he was hiring a different Billy Gilbert on that occasion: clearly, Herring/Goering needed to be fat.
Arbuckle and Chaplin abuse the blackface guy just for the hell of it, which makes an already uncomfortable situation even more uncomfortable. “They have suffered too much ever to be funny to me,” Chaplin later said of African Americans. But blackface comedians are fair game.
(Sidebar: King Vidor, talking of the difficulty he had getting HALLULUJAH! made in 1929, said that even the success of Al Jolson didn’t help, a clear and clueless case of category error if I ever heard one. God bless him.)
During this whole segment of the film, Chaplin’s Mr. Full has gone from falling-down drunk to the next level, fallen-down drunk, and is reduced to the status of carry-on prop for Arbuckle. Hauled lifeless into the presence of table service, however, he revives enough to light a match on a bald man’s scalp. We then get a little tour-de-force on the myriad offensive uses a stranger’s head may be turned to.
These two barbarians are pretty great together, if you can get behind the Marxian project of destroying all rational thought and civilized behaviour. Arbuckle uses the tablecloth as a bedsheet, putting his feet up in a winestand and attempting slumber. Chaplin begins to undress. Assailed by waiters, they turn pugnacious. But then the wives arrive like the Seventh Cavalry (not to rescue but to massacre). Their attempts to clobber their befuddled consorts are frustrated somewhat by the men’s inability to stand in place, or even stand at all. One feels that Dante missed a trick by not placing in his inferno a wife attempting eternally to batter her better half who keeps falling on his keister before she can lamp him one.
The husbands flee into the inevitable park. The situation is too urgent even to allow them to pause and abuse the doorman. Strictly speaking, introducing a whole new location, previous unprepared-for, is poor structure, but the appearance of Westlake Park in a Keystone short is so inevitable that one feels no dereliction by the scenarist in resorting to it.
Fleeing their fate, Chaplin and Arbuckle run smack into it — a watery appointment in Samarra — the short film collides with the famous excerpt. Launching themselves in a leaky vessel, and apparently drowning two innocent bystanders, our shitfaced heroes fall asleep as the waters of the fatal pond gradually creep up to absorb them. Arbuckle’s abdomen, a waistcoated Atlantis, remains for a moment after the rest of him has gone, and then all that remains is a top hat.
It’s not markedly more “sophisticated” than previous Chaplin endings (everyone is knocked unconscious or into Echo Park Lake), but it feels much more like a proper ending. Some care (and discomfort) has been put into it. An ending, the Coen Brothers have claimed, is just a bunch of things that, when put together, feel like an ending. But surely a certain compositional shape or attitude is also required. THE ROUNDERS, for maybe the first time in Chaplin’s directorial career, achieves this. And by cutting out extraneous business and characters (even the meaningless drowning couple are there to provide a boat), and focussing on what we might even term an over-arching THEME — the Dysfunctional Relationships of Hotel-Dwelling Drunks — it actually feels like a little story. Without being as funny as THE FACE ON THE BARROOM FLOOR, it builds on that film’s sense of shape and purpose.
shadowplay 