Time and Tide

Feb 1st — makes sense to link to this piece, which I had a small hand in, over at The Chiseler, for the sixtieth anniversary of the release of NIGHT TIDE. To the very day!

Stranger from Venice

I picked up Simon Louvish’s book Chaplin: The Tramp’s Odyssey, not sure what I could expect from it. David Robinson’s Chaplin is so very, very good, it didn’t seem as if Louvish could cover the same ground in an illuminating way. At least he had the decency to do it AFTER he’s written about nearly every other comic of the twenties and thirties, I thought.

But the book is EXTREMELY good. Not a replacement for the magisterial Robinson work, but a very useful companion.

It reminded me that THE CIRCUS’s sideshow opening sequence was shot in Venice, California, marking the Tramp’s return to his place of origin (in KID AUTO RACES AT VENICE back at Keystone). Which connects up in a couple of weird ways to the new presence in Hollywood of Robert Florey, Chaplin observer and future collaborator (assistant/whipping boy on MONSIEUR VERDOUX).

Florey wrote of seeing Chaplin on his way to Henry’s, the restaurant run by actor Henry Bergman, one night ~

“There was infinite sadness in the spectacle of Charlie, alone in the night. A man whom the smartest salons in the world would have fought to entertain, was quietly walking, alone in the shadows, his hands in his pockets and the brim of his hat pulled down over his eyes. It is true that the life of artists in Hollywood, especially in the evening, when the day’s work is finished, cannot be compared to existence in Paris or London, but to see Charlie Chaplin, alone on the boulevard, like some little extra without a job or a place to live, wrung my heart.”

It’s also a very dreamlike, and a very Chaplinesque image. It’s hard to not to imagine a bowler hat when Florey mentions Charlie’s hat, but of course it wouldn’t have been.

By coincidence — not even a meaningful coincidence, just a regular coincidence, I recently picked up Charles Beaumont’s The Magic Man, a short story collection which includes the little classic Perchance to Dream ~

“Right away the dream started.I was walking along Venice Pier. It was close to midnight. The place was crowded, people everywhere; you know the kind they used to get there. Sailors, dumpy looking dames, kids in leather jackets. The pitchmen were going through their routines. You could hear the roller coasters thundering along the tracks, the people inside the roller coasters, screaming; you could hear the bells and the guns cracking and the crazy songs they play on calliopes. And, far away, the ocean, moving. Everything was bright and gaudy and cheap.”

Perchance to Dream was adapted by Rod Serling for The Twilight Zone, and directed by Robert Florey. But the filmmaker who captured the exact mood of Beaumont’s dream was Curtis Harrington in NIGHT TIDE. And Harrington met Chaplin at a party, and apparently asked him about, not THE CIRCUS, but his earlier Sternberg production, A WOMAN OF THE SEA ~

“I actually asked Mr. Chaplin about it in person, when I was very, very young. I went to my first Hollywood party and there were a lot of big stars there—Charlie Chaplin and Harlan Pressburger, who produced The Shanghai Gesture, so I spoke to him about working with Von Sternberg. I was very busy at this party, you know, to be in the presence of these people I’d only read about (laughs). Anyway, you can read about The Woman of the Sea. […] Robert Florey, the French film director, he also saw it. He wrote about it in his book but it’s only available in France.”

The full interview is here.