Charlie Chaplin’s THE CHAMPION — the title surely chosen for alliterative value — Part Two. Charlie has unwisely volunteered to be sparring partner to Spike Dugan, but fortunately he has picked up a horseshoe en route. Now read on…
The third sacrificial victim is stretchered out of the gym, too limp to even prop on the bench, so they tip him on the ground at Charlie’s feet to sleep off his coma. Charlie motions for the stretcher-bearers to follow him in, saving a bit of time for them since he evidently expects to be socked into slumberland in an instant.
But the fight goes rather the other way — slugging Spike when he’s not expecting it, Charlie sends his body to the floor, rolling over itself from the force of the spinning wallop, whose force owes much to the ironware concealed in CC’s mitt.
Strolling out of the gym, Charlie wallops one of the barely-recovered sparring partners for good measure, not out of any cruelty, simply because when one has a weighted glove one naturally clouts whoever’s around. Production for use.
Dugan recovers quickly, gives chase, but then turns flee-er when Charlie hits him with the shoe-fist again and also kicks him a couple of times — arse, then face, like a gentleman. The attention of the cops — no longer costume-store kops but vaguely credible policemen with one vaguely credible moustache between them — sends Charlie back to the gym, where Spike’s former handlers are eager to put this mighty atom under contract. Good gag where they carry him aloft, he high-spiritedly thumps them, and everyone falls in a heap.
Meet the champ: Bob Uppercut. Arguably he’s not as scary looking as Spike Dugan, and his name is less alarming, but on the other hand he’s big enough that he doesn’t need a small mattress tucked inside his top. See that? All muscle. And fat. For Chaplin is attempting to turn his new heavy, Bud Jamison, into a suitable Goliath, a figure he would finally discover in the form of fake Scotsman Eric Campbell.
Now we see Charlie in training: he has a stripey pullover, a jug of beer, and juggling clubs, with which he duly clubs himself. He picks a fight with another punchbag, as he did earlier in this film and earlier in his career in MABEL’S MARRIED LIFE. In an excellent chapter of Silent Film Comedy entitled Accelerated Bodies and Jumping Jacks: Automata, Mannequins and Toys in the Films of Charlie Chaplin, Alan Bilton remarks upon Chaplin’s ability, indeed, compulsion, to impart life to dummies by his interactions with them. True to Bergson’s thesis about the confusion of subject and object, organic and mechanical, being key to comedy — and true to Marx’s view that capitalism stirs up the same confusion, Charlie makes an enemy of the world.
Some business with giant barbells, Charlie knocking a fellow athlete repeatedly on the head with one of the two great cannonball spheres — just a variant on the kind of business regularly conducted by silent clowns with planks. Walter Kerr remarks on Charlie’s daubing himself with beer, evidently an attempt at personal hygiene and niceness. “The presence of Edna Purviance may have had something to do with an emerging gentility.” This quality had always been present, implied, in the “shabby-genteel” costume. and we’ve seen it emerge in odd moments at Keystone. The fundamental funny thing about Chaplin’s persona may be just this unlikely combination of violence, scruffiness, poverty and ignorance, with grace, delicacy, and fine feelings. When these attributes are balanced, Chaplin can do Keystone style knockabout with a particular attitude that elevates it above mere hooliganism.
Say, where is Edna? We’re almost halfway.
Ah-hah! As “Edna, the trainer’s daughter,” she’s fetchingly dressed in a pugilist’s cap and jumper, a more appealing and shapely look than most of the frumpy frocks she usually gets (women’s clothing in American films of the teens, if you weren’t Theda Bara, were generally wretched).
Charlie starts training very hard to impress Edna, and is soon flirting intently. The unvarying wide shot allows us to see him scratching his arse while doing so, then polishing one boot on the back of the adjacent calf. Edna’s dad intervenes as Charlie is tickling her under the chins. Still, after a spot of running (the Chaplin walk becomes virtually a limp when accelerated), she’s hugging and kissing him. A pair of fast workers.
We end this post on a close-up which is Absolutely Mysterious: its positioning between scenes of Charlie and Bob Uppercut makes it initially impossible to tell what this whosis is spying on…
TO BE CONTINUED
shadowplay 