Twenty-one years post-Olivier, Tony Richardson brings HAMLET to the screen in a bold and cheap undertaking, filmed entirely at the Roundhouse Theatre, using every inch of backstage space, a trick comparable to Welles’ use of the Gare D’orsee in THE TRIAL. The comparison is in the repurposing but also in the fact that the environments don’t really pretend to be the places the script would have you believe they are. We can TELL Welles is using a railway station and that adds to the film’s surrealism. We can tell that the redbrick warren — in fact, a former railway engine shed — of Richardson’s HAMLET isn’t a realistic Elsinore of the late middle ages. This doesn’t exactly impart surrealism — in a sense it imparts a spurious taste of realism, the kind Richardson made his name with. It’s an industrial space. It has grit. And it also emphasises the theatrical nature of the venture, since it resists pressing into service as a royal abode, works only as backdrop.
To prevent this setting becoming too glaringly false, Richardson makes his movie almost entirely in closeups. This movie may be tighter than Dreyer’s PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC. To the immense credit of Richardson and cinematographer Gerry Fisher (who may have operated the camera himself, union rules permitting, or there may be an uncredited wizard at work), the shots are incredibly mobile and inventive, constantly reconfiguring the compositions to switch from one character to another, regroup characters, reposition and reframe individual characters, in some really quite long takes.
Here I was going to quote David Thomson’s amusing Richardson takedown from his Biographical Dictionary of Film, but I’ve just discovered it’s not on my shelves. I definitely didn’t throw it away because Richardson’s wrong about Richardson. But apparently I found some reason to make shelf space for something else. Thomson claims that Richardson was a demonstrably lousy filmmaker. I think a short burst of HAMLET gives the lie to that supposition — you can insist that Richardson never made a film that worked, if you like — that’s subjective, and I would disagree but it’s a claim you can stand behind. But whether Richardson’s HAMLET works as a whole, what we see here is quite a lot of skill. I mean, tons.
The curse of Scottishness, embodied by John Laurie’s Francisco in the Olivier, is now passed to Gordon Jackson as Horatio, and from him, presumably, to Nicol Williamson’s Dane. Other interested parties: Robin Chadwick as Francisco and John Trenaman as Bernardo, or Barnardo if you believe the IMDb. A number of the spear-carrier types in this production went on to considerable careers — Michael Elphick, Anjelica Huston, Roger Lloyd Pack, but these two stayed just as useful background.
Richardson starts off on red brick — start as you mean to go on — then glides DOWN to a brazier, viewed from the inside, Francisco poking at it. We don’t see anyone’s breath but we feel the cold, I think — just from the acting. We cut to see who’s coming, and then it’s all one take!
Only blunder — Jackson should have waited a second before delivering his last line, so he could get his glasses off and stop masking his face with his hand. But that’s the kind of error you get in long takes, the price you sometimes have to pay. With video assist and a very long schedule you can maybe solve every case of it (or with CGI retouching, I guess).
Shakespeare makes a mistake, or at least plays fast and loose too — in the full text, we’re told it’s just gone midnight, but then at the end of the scene it’s dawn. But I guess we’re up north, land of the midnight sun. Poor ghost, condemned to fast in fire in between walking the earth, but it’s 90% fire to 10% walking.
Count the number of different compositions we get in this oner.
The ghost does not appear save as a light on the characters’ faces and a Delia Derbyshire electronic music effect.
The same holds true in the second ghost scene (apologies for the glitch in the middle of this one: my fault). A great solution, if you’re uncomfortable with showing a ghost. Richardson, being a realist, approaches the Jonathan Pryce angle — Williamson voices the ghost’s dialogue along with his own, which makes sense — Shakespeare seems well aware that the ghost is telling Hamlet what he wants to hear, what he already feels to be true (“Oh my prophetic soul!”) So anything that brings that out is psychologically valid. But Richardson doesn’t need to cut the first scene, as Richard Eyre did for the Pryce version.
(Frankly, squeamishness about having a ghost appear strikes me as silly, audiences are capable of imagination and accepting things in drama which they don’t ordinarily believe in. But deciding not to show the ghost is interesting to me as an ambitious creative choice.)
Good long takes again. If we were showing the ghost, it would be harder to avoid a shot/countershot strategy, but from what we’ve seen, Richardson and his team could have managed it. There MAY be a hidden cut when the ghost departs and Williamson turns.
Both our versions so far have ommitted H’s talk of his “tables” — maybe because they’re wary about their Hamlets looking too old to convincingly play students. But Williamson does “set it down,” but by scratching on the wall with his dagger, and then visualising the wall as Claudius and knifing it. (Claudius, by the way, is Anthony Hopkins, a year younger than the actor playing his nephew, which is FINE.) What he actually scratches is something like IILITII — passable gibberish. But his method of writing is only good for runic symbols, it’s hard to say one thing while carving another, and anyway, he’s overwrought.
As with Macbeth, Romeo, Juliet, and others, the role of Hamlet is nearly always played by actors older than the character seems to be. (Is Hamlet two ages? How long is he away in England? I get the impression it’s not long at all, but he’s thirty when he comes back.) The assumption is always that a really young actor won’t be able to pull it off, but I imagine there would be gains as well as losses in having someone who looks like they could be a student. Hamlet’s agonies are somewhat adolescent.
Williamson, pasty-pink Scotsman, is nobody’s idea of a student. But he makes a very credible madman. And he covers a wide span between the conversational, making the words seem like he’s just thinking of them as we watch, and the truly freakily overdone. I would like him to keep more cool, but Hamlet is a fairly histrionic fellow I guess (the adolescent side).
Although this is fairly different from Olivier’s approach — and I think Hamlet benefits from a less controlled performance — both approaches are valid, though — both films go for a vaguely Elizabethan wardrobe (hard to work out who Richardson’s designer is — Jocelyne Herbert is credited as production designer, and she did do costumes on occasion — Philippe Pickford is wardrobe master, per IMDb — but I presume he just looked after the stuff and got it onto the various bodies. I like spoken word credits, but they always have to leave out so much.
There’s maybe a dash of medieval in there too. I think, in a film, there has to be some sense that this is a different historical period, so you can have swordfights and stuff. I forget how the Michael Almereyda version handled the swordplay — mainly I remember Ethan Hawke doing “To be or not to be…” in a video store, and when he gets to “…and lose the name of action,” you realise he’s in the Action Movies section. But you can also see WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? on the shelf. Which is the kind of blunder you’d get in a real Blockbuster, but is rather distracting during the big soliloquy.
I’m not going to do the Almereyda. Should I do the Zeffirelli? The old bastard did rather impress me with his episode of 12 REGISTI, so I think I should…
It’s good to start with Olivier’s HAMLET because we have A SPY ON THE SET.
The other Laurence, Laurie Knight, late friend of Fiona and I, was an assistant on this — third AD. But not for the whole shoot, I don’t think. He reports that Olivier wanted to record a real human heartbeat for the ghost’s appearances. He may have heard about Rouben Mamoulian running up and down a flight of stairs so he could get a suitably pounding chest for the transformations in DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE, but the athletic thesp uncharacteristically delegated another assistant — possibly a runner, which would be appropriate — to run around the soundstage once or twist before having the mic pressed to his bosom like a stethoscope.
“Nothing but indigestion!” Laurie reported with a wheeze of laughter. So they quite simply got a drum in.
I really love the way the camera pulses in and out of focus as the pounding comes in. Still an effect that’s rarely copied, but it’s wonderfully expressive.
Asides from Mamoulian, I assume Olivier’s under the influence of CITIZEN KANE a bit, and has grasped how the optical printer can be used to spice up footage and create semi-seamless joins between distinct shots. I even wonder if the focal pulse effect might be created in post. This is a kind of advance on his HENRY V, whose effects all happen for real in front of the camera. We gradually move from theatrical sets to more lifelike one, as if we were being swept up in the “reality” of the play.
The KANE influence is also felt in the deep focus, the chiaroscuro, and the cavernous Xanadu-like space of Elsinore. Instead of the big gimmick of Olivier’s HENRY V: a theatrical performance which slowly becomes “real”, the stylised sets eventually replaced by real locations, HAMLET attempts to create a space midway between theatre and cinema — cavernous, unfurnished, but richly textured.
Olivier said he was driven to that HENRY effect by his concern about matching real sets and unreal dialogue. “Why’s everyone talking so funny?” HAMLET takes a different but parallel route. An environment just odd enough to allow the iambic pentameters not to seem out of place.
From my Making-Of book, The Film HAMLET: Carmen Dillon, tasked with executing Roger Furse’s designs, says, “sets soar into the sky without any attempt at persuading the audience that they do, in fact, support a roof or that they have any geographical relationship one with another.
I’m all in favour of cutting Hamlet, which is outrageously long, and directors shape it and choose what they want to emphasise by their cuts. In Jonathan Pryce’s performance. this whole scene was cut, so that the ghost could be portrayed as a psychological effect, a voice issuing from H’s subconscious. It gave Pryce the excuse for a bravura Linda Blair/Mercedes McCambridge act, and you could argue that the voice’s echoing of H’s own suspicions and resentments is already implied in the text — he’s rather thrilled to discover he’s right to dislike Uncle Claudius.
But these cuts do tend, as Tom Stoppard pointed out, to make the beginning of the play rather stodgy. It’s a bunch of people at a party making speeches. Whereas WD begins his play with the words “Who goes there?” and it’s immediately gripping. Plus the bell tolling midnight, all very atmospheric. Olivier wouldn’t have consciously aimed to make his adaptation seem like a horror film, but the KANE influence ensures it does anyway (I believe Welles may have admitted to a slight James Whale influence on his MACBETH).
Olivier has cast his film very well indeed, without resorting to the Branagh approach of stuffing stars of stage and screen into every crevice. From the urgency of the first lines we drop into the casual, throwaway dialogue that makes this film occasionally quite naturalistic, when Sir Larry himself isn’t around. Francisco and Bernardo are John “We’re all doomed!” Laurie, who would apparently tell you about his own triumph as the Dane as soon as you met him, and Esmond Knight, recently blinded in the war and taking his life in his hands on those unbanistered stairs.
Starting on Laurie is a great idea: a gloomy Calvinist immediately makes the appearance of the supernatural more plausible.
They’re soon joined by Norman Wooland and Anthony Quayle, equally good. wooland maybe the realest and most moving actor in the film. I think Olivier has done great in finding actors who can do the classical bit but also seem believable onscreen. It was maybe easier to find such people then.
Olivier, of course, isn’t of their number. He’s something else.
Next bit: Hamlet meets the ghost.
Cinematographer Desmond Dickinson writes that Olivier wanted to “make the scenes without so much cutting from shot to shot.” There are bits in the ghost’s second appearance where we just stare at his inexpressive silhouette for quite a while, until the shot almost “goes dead.” It seems a good way to allow the audience to concentrate on the words without getting bored. The image is still striking and beautiful, even if it’s not doing anything new. It beats Peter Brook’s moronic idea in his KING LEAR of shooting the backs of the actors’ heads. “Sometimes, with Shakespeare, you don’t want the image to add anything, but you can’t just have a black screen.” I think a black screen would make as much sense as the back of Paul Scofield’s head.
Remember the wise words of Roger Corman: “The eye is the organ most used in movie making. If you don’t engage the eye you’ll never engage the mind.”
The ghost here is John Gielgud — one of the legendary stage Hamets (captured on film by Humphrey Jennings in A DIARY FOR TIMOTHY), later the director of Richard Burton’s version, and one of the most distinctive voices. But the slow whisper and echo effect make him not so recognisable, so that his uncredited performance isn’t a coy gimmick. The ghost would have seemed all the more mysterious by being unknown.
Gielgud at 17.24-19.22
Steven Berkoff had an interesting idea — I don’t know how good his production was, quite possibly ham(let)fisted (he has a way of leaning into things) — but it was an interesting idea. Since the ghost says he’s doomed “to walk the earth,” why not have him in constant motion? And thus Hamlet, having followed him away from his chums, has to keep tagging along. He might even get in front and then have to keep backing up since the ghost can’t stop.
At 3.18 the backlight produces a dark halo around the ghost in the fog. Beautiful.
I think the least effective part is the visualisation of the King’s death, though I can see why they did it. King Hamlet as a living person is NOT played by Gielgud, but by a Santa Clause-looking guy who overdoes the old dying act a bit, rolling out of his divan and clutching the air. Claudius as poisoner has kind of gone into silent movie acting mode also, Is this the way Hamlet would visualise it? Possibly.
Branagh will cheekily borrow a couple of Olivier’s moves — collapsing face-down when the ghost departs, and kissing his sword when he swears. Shakespeare’s text offers few stage directions beyond “enter” and “exit” and we’re not convinced Shakespeare even wrote those. He does add “writing” when Hamlet makes a note in his tables, but Olivier’s cut the words and the action to make room for his hilt-kissing.
Next: Tony Richardson and Nicol Williamson in 1969.
THE IDLE CLASS, released 100 years ago TODAY begins with very rambunctious, bumptious music. Though Chaplin composed/hummed wonderfully catchy and emotive tunes, their feel does vary a lot depending on who’s doing the orchestration. Here it’s Eric Rogers, known for his CARRY ON film scores, and that’s kind of what this feels like. It’s jaunty, brash, vulgar. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It forewarns us not to expect THE KID.
I’m curious about how I’ll feel about the last shorts CC made before getting fully into feature filmmaking. Will we see him drawing back from the soaring ambition of THE KID? A little, yes, I think. But will this be, in a sense, liberating? With the pressure off, will this allow him to be creative or bold in different ways? Maybe.
The titles (the first of which are missing from the YouTube version) feel subtly modern — this is Chaplin’s 1971 rerelease, which gives us his score, but deprives us I’m guessing of the authentic original title cards. We also seem to be moving rather slowly — as if the frame-rate has been artificially slowed down to eliminate the 16mm speed-up, but maybe they’ve gone a little too far? (I’m watching Criterion’s release; and there isn’t an alternative version on YouTube.)
A series of nicely caricatured upper-class twits disembark from a train at some kind of golf resort. Followed by Edna Purviance, elegantly accoutred:
Her stockings are impressive.
Also getting off the same locomotive is Charlie the Tramp, also presented in a feet-first kind of way. Chaplin gives a lot of thought to his entrances, obviously, and one thing he knows is that each part of his costume/anatomy is instantly recognisable, so he can give the audience a thrill with a minimal glimpse.
Charlie has brought his own golf kit, and an alarm clock — true to his nature, he’s a hobo with pretensions to the upper class. A natural aristocrat in reduced circumstances. Reduced to absurdity.
Meanwhile, another Charlie is abroad in the world. An actual posh person, an inebriate fop with Charlie’s face. A foppelganger, if you will. He could be the rich drunk of ONE A.M., come to think of it. A really smart move by C.C. — he wanted to get away from playing the Tramp all the time, but knew his audience didn’t like to see Chaplin films without the Tramp. So why not make a film where he plays the Tramp, but also someone else? And rather than inventing a disguise, as he had done in A NIGHT IN THE SHOW, or having The Tramp disguise himself, as in THE MASQUERADER, he could display his versatility by playing too markedly different characters who look exactly alike.
(Chuck Jones observed that when sound came into cartoons, you could get away from the old dichotomy of bad characters having to be ugly looking and good ones having to be cute — in Disney’s THE THREE LITTLE PIGS all look the same apart from some subtle differences of costuming, and they’re differentiated by their personalities and attitudes, delivered by dialogue [and song] — but here Chaplin shows that the trick could be done wordlessly.)
Edna is this Charlie’s wife (well, we knew she wasn’t any relation to the first one). She’s wired him to meet her at the station, including a note that she’s glad he’s not drinking. He shoots a furtive glance at his chums in the audience. Theory: having eliminated those awful expository mimes that were de rigeur at Keystone, and more or less eliminated the habitual breaking of the fourth wall, he’s started to allow his special relationship with the camera/us to reassert itself. It was part of the Chaplin character’s very foundations, as in KID AUTO RACES where he literally gets in a fight with a camera crew. He’s scaled it way back, but he always knows we’re looking. Oliver Hardy breaks the fourth wall to enlist our sympathy and the rupture is funny in itself. With Chaplin, there’s no sense of rupture. He always knows. Part of the Tramp’s performance of gentility is for our benefit.
Back at the station, Charlie #1 hitches a ride on the back of Edna’s car, selecting his vehicle with a connoisseur’s eye, mounting the rear bumper with insouciance, and then pratfalling off before the suspicious eyes of a kop.
Chaplin as Charlie #2 executes a flawless “pull back to reveal no trousers gag.” This gloriously stupid concept was a great favourite of Monty Python, but the term can be used to metaphorically describe any gag where a wide angle reveals something not apparent in the preceding close-up, resulting in our perceptions of the scene changing on a dime. Here, it’s not just funny because underpants, but because it changes our whole understanding. Charlie #2’s attempts to give up alcohol have not been as successful as Edna believes. Like Charlie #1 in the previous scene, he has fallen off the wagon.
Suspense + improbability — the revelation of our man’s bottomless condition is deferred by the passage of a man carrying a set of curtains. This kind of wild improbability may have earthshaking implications for the whole question of probability in dramatic motion pictures. “I don’t dislike coincidence, but I despice convenience,” was a very nice epigram of Chaplin’s, which goes neatly with the Vince Gilligan Principle, that a staggeringly unlikely coincidence is fine, SO LONG AS IT MAKES THINGS WORSE. This unlikely event actually spares Charlie #2 his blushes, for the time being, so maybe it’s making things better. But probably it’ll make them worse later, by delaying the inevitable until it becomes the disastrous. And it’s just funny in itself. The Roger Rabbit Principle applies: anything is possible, but only if it’s funny.
“And the execution!” as Sidney Lumet said, rapturously, of a moment in MODERN TIMES. Chaplin choreographs an elaborate series of comings and goings in the hotel lobby, in which C2’s demi-nudity is artfully concealed from a series of potential witnesses by the providential synchronisation of everybody’s movements. It gets more and more unlikely, in other words. There’s a “do you believe me so far?” vibe to a lot of silent comedy.
Entering the phone booth is a great topper. And a great way for C2 to discover his faux pas, when he hunts for change in pants pockets that aren’t there. He’s safe from discovery in his present situation, but his present situation is unsustainable. So it’s actually perfect, the worst rime/place for him to realise.
The construction starts to pay off, as Edna’s car arrives at the hotel, Charlie #1 gets off first, then Edna passes into the lobby, missing her panic-stricken, trouserless spouse. C2 eventually escapes his dreamlike public nudity predicament by personating Comte Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa.
We seem to be back to a more familiar silent-movie framerate now: perhaps Chaplin slowed down the opening to ease a modern audience into things.
C2 gains his rooms, but Edna is there ahead of him so, after an altercation with a blow-lamp outside, he springs into bed and feigns invalidity, his top hat and tails rather ruining any hoped-for illusion. Edna gives him a look dripping with contempt and self-sacrifice, and breezes out with her retinue, and Chaplin discovers that the wide shot he’d used to establish the space and show himself retreating to the bedroom now serves to encapsulate his aloneness and defeat:
And the effect is a curious midpoint between pathos and slightly cruel mockery.
Now comes the film’s most celebrated gag — one I stole outright in THE NORTHLEACH HORROR, my little WWII science fiction horror espionage comedy. The original utterly depends on this being a silent film: Chaplin convinces us that, brokenhearted at Edna’s abstinence ultimatum, he’s sobbing helplessly; but no: he’s mixing a cocktail, perfectly indifferent to his disintegrating marriage. If this were a soundie, we might expect to hear him cry, and we’d definitely expect to hear the ice sloshing in the shaker, so the gag would be impossible. My version used a high-powered electric toothbrush and we had to cheat the soundtrack like crazy by fading down the music just as the character turned to face us. This gag was the only moment the stupendously talented Freddie Fox had any trouble achieving.
Chaplin’s version is fascinating — he fools us not only in real time, but retrospectively: to begin with, he’s absolutely miming heaving sobs, not cocktail-shaking. As he turns, his movement morphs into something else, and he tricks us into thinking the something else is what he was doing all along. Amazing.
He really cheats outrageously though: he starts the racking sob movements BEFORE he picks up the shaker (off camera). So what are these movements meant to represent, since it turns out he’s not crying at all? Pure stagecraft and legerdemain.
At the end, C2 toasts the audience, like Alex at the start of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (a thing Kubrick, a Chaplin fan, never even noticed until he saw the rushes).
C1, meanwhile, wanders the links, innocently acquiring other people’s balls and clubs. He doesn’t have to be actively larcenous, just open to developments.
Mack Swain! We missed you, buddy! Although I mainly like him as Big Jim in THE GOLD RUSH, his presence is welcome here.
Amazing bit with a sleeping tramp (Henry Bergman). Our waking Tramp, Charlie #1, knocks a golf ball into the snoring mouth of this prone individual. The ball rises and falls menacingly to the back of the guy’s capacious throat.
Charlie #1 tees up, and for a moment I’m afraid he’s going to smash the guy’s teeth out. But, mercifully, he stomps on the bulbous gut, propelling the ball out and into the air as if shot from a cannon, and he swipes it away with his club (how many takes?). This is worth our applause, but Chaplin isn’t done: it turns out this tramp contains a lot of balls. Every time you compress his belly he shoots forth another one, like some kind of fleshy dispenser.
Finally, the tramp runs out of ammunition and wakes, angry. To him, naturally enough, a stranger pressing his stomach with one foot while he sleeps seems an intrusive imposition: he cannot know the health benefits he is likely to enjoy now that he’s no longer rattling full of gutties.
Chaplin is doing quite well at making golf, which is not entertaining, seem entertaining. PG Wodehouse could do that too, but he could find fun in just about anything. Chaplin is having to distort reality quite far to pull it off, to the point of cartoon gags, whereas the drunken rich guy’s antics have one foot in recognisable reality.
A reverie: Charlie #1 sees Edna on horseback. Immediately he fantasises the old riding accident routine: her horse bolts, he rescues her, and in a dizzying succession of unlikely events, they marry, have a kid, etc. And then we’re back in reality with Edna riding sedately into the distance. It’s like a more benign version of the bandit seeing the wife in RASHOMON.
Charlie goes on causing chaos and starting fights without meaning to. I like how, in this shot, having pelted Mack Swain with balls and trodden on his straw boater, causing Mack to blame an innocent twit and throttle him, Chaplin seems to be visible as a tiny, oblivious silhouette in the extreme distance, top left:
I don’t hugely like the other gags in this sequence though. Time to end it, and Chaplin agrees, irising in on a spluttering twit in deep water. Iris out on a costume ball.
Charlie #2 has dressed up as a knight in armour, but gets his visor jammed. This is giving me PINK PANTHER VIBES and though the party climax in that film seems to derive from TO CATCH A THIEF, along with a good bit of the plot set-up, this movie may also have been in the mix.
But outside it’s daylight, and Charlie #1 gets into another anatomical mix-up gag with another thieving hand. This is a straight repeat of a gag he pulled with Jack Coogan Sr. in his previous hit.
One reason THE IDLE CLASS is scaled-down, less ambitious than THE KID, is that the tightwads at First National had insisted on paying Chaplin the same money he got for a short film, per their contract. Chaplin had spent vastly more time and therefore money on THE KID than he did on shorts, and those were HIS expenses. So this hugely successful film may actually have lost him cash.
So — Charlie #1 is unjustly accused of trying to steal a wallet, of being the possessor of an illicit third arm. Unlike on the golf course, where he was to blame for everything that happened, however unknowingly, here he’s the victim of circumstance. I guess the world of this film is one where everybody is always jumping to the wrong conclusions.
Charlie legs it, and we have yet another park and policeman chase. He finds himself in the driveway, where limos are pulling up for the masked ball, and gets boxed in between cars. To escape this trap, he slips THRU a limo, and emerging on the other side is mistaken for a rich guy in tramp fancy dress. Ten years later, stuck for a plot gimmick on CITY LIGHTS which would enable Virginia Cherrill as the blind girl to mistake him for a millionaire, Chaplin remembered this bit and finally escaped from WEEKS of creative blockage. So thank God for THE IDLE CLASS.
Also: another brief appearance from Henry Bergman. Odd, when you think of it, that a man of such distinctive appearance (basically a human Blue Meanie) should be Chaplin’s chief man-of-a-thousand-faces. All of them fat.
Good gag where Bergman’s kop, who seems to be following C1 with suspicion, turns out to be merely another disguised party guest. The fact that he suddenly puts on a domino mask doesn’t really make sense, but they needed something quick that would make this clear.
C2 is still trapped in his helmet, unable to even take a drink (a straw would solve this problem). So another unlikely but logical situation has arisen. C2 is forcibly anonymous behind his jammed visor, so Edna won’t recognise him. And C1 looks exactly like C2 and his normal clothing has been mistaken for a costume, so she WILL recognise him.
Edna invites Charlie #1 over. This of course makes no sense to him, and he fixes us with a singularly haunting look. This is clearly a dream but he doesn’t want it to end. And anything he does or says could make that happen.
It’s a touching idea — Edna’s fake husband is more sensitive than her real one. And Charlie #1’s fantasy has suddenly come true, for reasons he can’t divine. And again, C1 is the innocent focus of a misunderstanding.
Oh-ho, and I hadn’t even thought of this until now: C2 being stuck in his armour, we can show both Charlies at once without the aid of special effects. C2 does a big double-take at the sight of his wife with another, yet somehow the same, man. In fact, he doesn’t seem to register that his wife’s new beau is a dead ringer for the old one.
And yes, the doppelganger idea would come back in a big way in THE GREAT DICTATOR.
Fight! The rightful Charlie is ejected for starting a brawl, and the wrongful Charlie remains.
Mack Swain, the highland rogue! I like this costume. And Mack is Mabel’s dad. Where is this heading? Nowhere good, I’d guess.
Charlie #1 blows it: “We’re not married.” When you’re in a dream, don’t fight it. Go with the flow.
Mack knocks Charlie #1 down repeatedly with repeated shove to the face, for insulting his daughter. The last time, C1 just lies down by himself. Great low angle of a looming Mack, unusually expressionistic for Chaplin, but justified by the spacial relations.
Chased onto the slippery dance floor, C1 hides under a handy hoop skirt. He could have easily sought shelter ‘neath Mack’s kilt, but then low-angle views would have had to be abandoned.
Bedroom farce: Edna has swooned. C1 is handed her limp form, and shown to C2’s rooms, where C2 is re-outraged to find his wife in the arms of another/the same man.
Fight! C1 spears a cushion on the point of C2’s visor, blinding him, and uses the cushion to deliver punches without hurting his hand. Very practical — surprising there’s no record of this being tried in the middle ages.
Mack arrives, initially siding with C!, but then C2 invites him to peek through his front grille and identify him. In a really good development, C1 is enlisted to help unhelmet the soused spouse. Again, Charlie #1 is wholly unaware of what’s going on or who is concealed in the plate armour.
Weird cartoon gag where Swain coughs and his sporran, for some reason pinned to the bottom of his ribcage, jolts up and down like a catflap.
A bellboy turns up with a hammer — the same exact hammer, I think, Jackie Coogan uses in THE KID. C1 makes various incompetent attempts to tap C2 loose. Result: unconsciousness. Then C1 remembers he has a can opener. Might have been good to establish that earlier in the film, but it’s not what you’d call really important.
I was waiting for a special effect or, more likely, just a closeup of Chaplin in the armour when his visor is peeled off, but Chaplin just goes for a stand-in, and it works.
The situation is uncannily close to the fantasy in BRAZIL where Sam defeats a huge samurai which turns out to have his own face under its mask (Sam-you-are-I). Gilliam unaccountably used a rubber mask cast from Jonathan Pryce’s face rather than getting Pryce to do it, with the result that audiences couldn’t tell that this rubbery visage was supposed to represent the hero.
C! is shown the door now that his unintentional imposture is exposed. He gives Edna a look as he leaves: “This could have been a beautiful thing.”
Edna realises that Charlie #1 is an innocent party in all this and Mack volunteers to go apologise. And in the film’s final misunderstanding, C1 sees Mack coming after him and runs for it — wait, what, he doesn’t? Oh, OK, he tricks Mack into bending to tie a loose shoe buckle, and kicks him up the arse and runs. OK, that’s good too. Not massively clever, but there are times when what’s needed is just a good old-fashioned boot up the bum. Always leave them rubbing their backsides.
shadowplay 