The Easter Sunday Intertitle: Not One Word

But He answered him not one word, so that the governor marveled greatly.

Matthew, 27:14

Charles Spencer Chaplin turned 133 yesterday, and he's looking very good on it I think we can agree.

By the time of CITY LIGHTS, Chaplin knew a lot about storytelling. The film’s climax demonstrates both his precision and his looseness. The introduction of a gang of burglars (including supporting clown, gag man and assistant director Albert Austin in his final screen appearance) is certainly loose, even sloppy. Though burglars certainly belong to the kind of world Chaplin portrayed, in classical Hollywood narrative one would normally want to set them up in advance of using them. Strictly speaking, anything you use in the third act ought to have been set up in acts one or two.

But the key element in the climax is the drunken millionaire, who HAS been set up, and developed, in acts one AND two. After his defeat in the ring, Charlie bumps into his old sometime friend, who happens to be cheerfully plastered, and his problems seem solved. Of course, Charlie mistrusts this good luck, and he’s right to do so. The first time the drunk sobered up into a stranger, it was a surprise. The second time, it was still unexpected for Charlie, but established a pattern which he now imagines could be repeated. Important to get the cash from him as soon as possible. But he still lapses into complacency. What could possibly go wrong?

The fact that a random burglary happens that very night is used as the necessary complication, Wild coincidence, Vince Gilligan has compellingly argued, is acceptable if it makes the protagonist’s situation WORSE. Chaplin also takes care to establish the burglars already in the house when Charlie and his sometime friend arrive.

So, the burglars result in the police being called, and the millionaire being knocked out, and it turns out a blow on the head can sober you up — his alcoholic blackouts have behaved much like movie amnesia anyway, so this seems logical enough. So the money has been produced and even given to Charlie — he can regard it as rightfully his — but neither the donor nor the cops (idiots right out of Keystone) nor the disapproving butler recognise Charlie’s ownership. So stealing the dough is fully justified… leaving aside the morality of accepting large cash gifts from a man who’s drunk out of his senses. Well, he won’t miss it, and Virginia Cherrill’s blind girl needs it more than he does…

Charlie gets away with the cash, delivers it, and is then arrested. The parting scene is beautiful, and Chaplin posing himself by the phonograph seems somehow symbolic. Charlie is going away for a while, and the reason is — the reproduction of sound.

Chaplin also understood that a story can’t just reach a climax and then stop. If the story is really about something, some kind of coda is needed. This should probably be brief, but it’s essential. It’s where the story gets to establish what it’s really been about.

There follows a time-lapse — fluttering calendar pages. The title cards at the start of the film all said things like MORNING and AFTERNOON. Now we jump from January to AUTUMN. Walter Kerr, in The Silent Clowns, picks up on what’s different here. Charlie, emerging from prison, seems broken. He walks haltingly, almost limping (the return of the old wound from THE TRAMP?) He has no reserve of bravado or superiority to draw upon when dealing with the nasty newsboys (who WERE established earlier). He is as low as we’ve ever seen him.

His downward trajectory has been matched by the no-long-blind girl’s upward one. She now has her own flower shop (were there a few bucks left over from the money Charlie got her?). She can see. But when she sees Charlie being humiliated by the kids, she laughs. We’re being set up for tragedy.

Throughout the story, especially as soon as the prospect of a cure for her blindness was introduced, the tension created by Charlie’s fake rich man act has been felt. He couldn’t have maintained this illusion forever. And certainly with vision restored, his love would see through the pretence.

What’s needed is a miracle, which Chaplin provides. Not entirely as callous as the rest of the world which she’s been able to join, Cherrill’s character — after a brief interaction through the shop window, which serves as a barrier to dialogue, she decides to replace Charlie’s boutonnière, which, like the rest of his costume, is disintegrating.

Handing him the flower causes their fingers to touch, which is the rational part of what happens. The rest is done by their eyes. Charlie’s eyes convey so much love here: she senses that she’s been looked at this way before. She recognises him.

“You?”

And then, “You can see now?” and “Yes, I can see now.” An intertitle that carries two distinct meanings (at least) — the now refers, mundanely, to post-operation sight, and transcendental, to NOW, right now. She can see now what she couldn’t see moments ago. The truth was concealed behind what was visible. The hero was really a poor tramp but actually a hero.

Frederic Raphael says that the unique quality of cinema is that it can end a story with a look. Chaplin most often uses the traditional long shot, the archetypal walk off into the sunset, which he could practically establish copyright ownership of. But here he uses a closeup. As Kerr says, it’s one of those endings you can’t project forward. Depending on your personality, you may feel that this couple face insuperable difficulties, or that everything has been resolved happily ever after. It’s a transcendentally happy ending, but what does it promise? I think we feel everything will be OK. We are in the presence of love. But the details are not explained, that would ruin it.

Chaplin’s son Sydney tried to explain the emotional power of this scene, and words quite literally failed him. “It’s murder,” he managed. That doesn’t quite cover it, is somewhat grotesquely inadequate. But words are, in the presence of pantomime raised to an art form, inadequate things. Still, the situation, and the perfect closeups, do get a boost by the perfectly chosen words Chaplin puts in the title cards.

You can see now, Yes, I can see now.

Comedy Star

THE CIRCUS continues. More evidence of the nasty ringmaster mistreating his daughter — he’s starving her. Presumably concerned that she needs to remain slim for the trapeze. This circus is a lot like a movie studio, only he’s not giving her speed a la Judy Garland.

A star is discovered — Chaplin, asleep in the chariot/cart — the seed has been planted — the audience called for him. The ringmaster knows he’s a meal ticket. It IS a bit like Chaplin’s own story, how he was on the verge of getting canned from Keystone for being so difficult, until the box office receipts came in from his first films. The audience had spoken. Mack Sennett does not seem to have been as mean as Al Ernest Garcia is here, though.

Garcia is one of those effective but colourless supporting characters Chaplin liked. He didn’t want the attention on anyone but himself, but the actors around him needed to be very skilled indeed. Garcia plays the drunken millionaire’s butler in CITY LIGHTS and the factory boss in MODERN TIMES, and I’d never put one and one and one together before and realised it’s the same guy.

I recognise Tiny Sandford, the head props man, though — he’s Charlie’s co-worker in MODERN TIMES.

Making breakfast the next morning — there’s a good chicken-strangling gag — and Charlie has a waistcoat pocket full of salt for his meagre repast, rather the way Harpo might. Charlie is very fastidious about food, as we saw earlier with the hot dog. This is all a set-up for the meet cute, for the girl is hungry. Charlie is at first furious when he finds her eating his single slice of bread. A thief — a rival thief — must be fought off. But a girl is another matter. He ends up sharing the bread, and then she eats it so fast she gives him indigestion. Production designer Danny Hall’s painting of a sword swallower doesn’t help him.

Immediately, Charlie is behaving like a father, a benign one to contrast with the nasty real one. It’s his first time in this role since THE KID, the first time his romantic interest has been acknowledged as rather young for him, the relationship ambiguous. A few films later we have MONSIEUR VERDOUX and LIMELIGHT, which take this further — the relationship is played as platonic and paternal. The Paulette Goddard films are slightly more romantic — maybe because they were a couple and it felt safer. It feels to me like Chaplin, unlike Woody Allen for decades, was becoming aware that audiences didn’t want to see him wooing and winning much younger women. Chaplin was rather handsome, but his Tramp guise negated some of that. And his scandalous divorce made any intimation of sexual desire dangerous.

So, anyway, Charlie has met the girl. Now he has to audition as a clown. Told to be funny, he does some Chaplinesque things. A backwards kick, a funny walk, hoisting himself up with his cane. “That’s awful!” says the ringmaster. Now we get a longish sequence where clowns demonstrate routines and Charlie tries to copy their schtick. This seems to be the stuff Walter Kerr objected to so strongly in The Silent Clowns.

For me, the problem is that none of it is particularly funny. The clown routines, performed by regulars Henry Bergman and Albert Austin with Heinie Conklin (a prospector in THE GOLD RUSH, and a specialist in racist caricatures), aren’t terribly interesting, though Charlie laughs and claps to try to convince us. His screwing them up isn’t interesting either. There’s a conflict of response, a confusion — is Charlie destroying the comedy, resulting in something unfunny, or is he destroying bad comedy, resulting in something that IS funny? Maybe the latter is the intention, but it’s not clear to me.

It SHOULD work, since Charlie is working in a mode he knew well — the incompetent and rascally assistant. In the William Tell routine, that’s also the role he’s actually asked to play. It’s the Auguste (Chaplin) and the whiteface clown (Bergman). Arrogant leader and minion who messes up. Workman and boss. Laurel & Hardy. Chaplin had been doing this since Keystone (WORK; HIS MUSICAL CAREER). But making the task performed a comedy routine seems to overcomplicate it.

The William Tell routine is something Chaplin had played with when Scottish comic Harry Lauder had visited his studio. There’s a piece of film. Here, Charlie elaborates it by substituting a banana skin for the apple, making a surreal mash-up of different slapstick ingredients, but it lands in that strange are of is-this-supposed-to-be-funny? It’s not clear that Charlie’s improvisation is worse than the original act.

Then there’s the barbershop act, which gets done very differently in THE GREAT DICTATOR, and had been done differently in SUNNYSIDE, but deleted. This one’s all buckets of foam getting slapped over everyone. There might have been a convincing conflict between a routine that’s all meaningless capering, and one based on character. This had been the actual conflict Chaplin faced and overcame at Keystone. But it won’t do here, I guess, because the Tramp character is not a comedian or a comic genius.

This is the trouble with comic plot ideas — they have to be serviceable story engines that move things along and lead to a climax — but they also have to create opportunities for amusing things to happen. Charlie’s inability to be funny on cue fulfils the former but not the latter, or at least, not in this scene.

Anyway, Charlie gets fired, not so much for failure to do the required gags, but for getting foam all over the boss, which we recognise as a real no-no. Chaplin now needs to find a narrative excuse to keep Charlie at the circus, and fortunately he’s really good at coming up with solutions. Here he relies on an old favourite (see, for instance, DOUGH AND DYNAMITE): an industrial dispute. The props men go on strike. A replacement must be found. Charlie is using an unconscious prop man as human furniture when Tiny Sandford finds him. He’s discovered again, hired again, the show’s on again.

TO BE CONTINUED

Sun damage

I recall feeling slightly unconvinced by those sections of the (excellent) novel Sunnyside where author Glen David Gold tries to get inside Chaplin’s creative process, but I think I was probably being unfair. Gold talks us through Chaplin’s rejected ideas, and they all sound pretty terrible. Shouldn’t even the non-starters of a genius be somewhat impressive? But looking at SUNNYSIDE the movie, no, perhaps they shouldn’t. Bits of it are very good but bits of it are worse than the ideas Gold has Chaplin throw out.

The L’Apres-Midi d’un Faun dream-ballet isn’t the worst thing in there. It’s inoffensive. But it has no narrative reason for being there. Other Chaplin dreams happen when he’s heartbroken and so they have at least a claim on poignancy. Here, he’s merely downtrodden — a dream of the easy life would make sense, but not this capering around with Grecian nymphets.

Anyway, the wake-up is decently staged. Charlie falls off the same bridge in dream he fell off in reality, whereupon the woodland sylphs toss him a creeper or something and attempt to pull him back up. Upon awakening, he finds himself jolted back to reality and the bridge by a crowd of Sunnysiders, and then sent packing with multiple boots up the arse by the Boss.

“And now, the ‘romance’.” says an intertitle, throwing off a palpable sense of exhaustion and formulaic will-this-do? Rushing up to a house, dodging Henry Bergman, who he just passed on the road as a different character (beard), Charlie plucks some flowers and goes in to see Edna. Also present is “His brother, Willie,” for some reason. Willie is characterised as a village idiot type in overalls, staring into space and smiling while Charlie raps on his forehead. It would seem more logical for him to be Edna’s sibling since he’s in her house, but I think Charlie wants the license to mistreat him… that’s the best reason I can think of for what follows.

Since the boy is being a gooseberry, Charlie invites him to play blind man’s bluff — binding his eyes and sending him outside, where he is imperilled by traffic. David Robinson says this as an interesting experiment in black comedy, I just find it obnoxious. It’s further evidence of Chaplin’s creative crisis, since he’s usually careful to seem sympathetic, at least since the Mutual period.

Still, this undercuts the fairly anemic romance stuff. Charlie presents Edna with an engagement ring, and sings mutely as she plays piano. Then he attempts a gag that would work better as a variation in MONSIEUR VERDOUX — finding a flat note, Charlie excites a tiny goat living behind the piano (!) which baahs each time he hits the note, causing him to think the piano is making goat bleats. This is quite funny but, though you don’t need the sounds to understand it, it would be funnier with the sounds.

The gag develops smartly: a much larger goat appears, and Charlie is even more confused. The goat can also eat the sheet music which isn’t as clever but it’s logical.

Moderately funny business back at the hotel with Charlie cleaning up: picking up tiny invisible specks of dirt and carrying them to a single place.

Enter Tom Terriss as a young man in spats — “the city chap.” SUNNYSIDE as distaff version of SUNRISE. He enters the movie crashing his car into Sunnyside. He’s carried into the hotel by the fat boy, who is, it seems, Tom Wood and not J. Park Jones as previously reported. And Charlie innocently tries to get the comatose city chap to sign the register.

The village doctor arrives, a fake beard in pince-nez and a derby, his gladstone bag bulging with booze and, disturbingly, handcuffs. I think the normally clear line between first aid kit and rape kit is getting blurrier than desirable. As he takes City Chap’s pulse on screen right, Charlie mimics him screen left, using the victim’s own fob watch. Best bit of mime: having briefly held the watch in his mouth, Charlie gives it a theatrical shake in an exact reproduction of classic thermometer business. The doctor then presents his bill, after merely taking the pulse and kneading the patient’s shoulder in a vaguely sympathetic manner. (Like the village idiot actor, the doctor is unidentified on IMDb but I’d say it’s Albert Austin under the whiskers.)

Very routine bit with Charlie mopping the lobby while three random guys are sitting in it. Yes, he turns with the mop and wetly knocks hats off. That kind of business. “City chap fully recovered,” reports an intertitle, unnecessarily. These cards have the dutiful tone of a child’s book report. City chap (who has the same initials as Chaplin) has a lighter built into his cane. Which is kind of cool. Charlie is impressed.

In a cutaway shot, Edna gets her fingers stuck in some fly paper — a rare (unique?) example of her getting a solo gag, though it develops in such a conventional way it scarcely qualifies. Similarly, the business of her forgetting what she came to the hotel to buy (it’s also a general store) and Charlie offering suggestions from his shelves unfolds without kicking loose any real comedy at all. OK, him wrapping the final item — enormous woolly socks — in a huge paper cone as if it were a bouquet of flowers, is sort of amusing. All this is just to effect a meet uncute with the city chap, who watches with more interest than I could muster. Edna is dressed like an old lady again, further stressing the resemblance of this movie to a much earlier period of Chaplin’s career.

Charlie gets Edna’s paper money stuck to the fly paper, which is quite a good gag, but it’s cut short — I think we want to see him picking the banknote to little shreds to bring home the hopelessness of the situation.

Seeing Edna strolling amiably with the chap, Charlie performs a head-clutching gesture of operatic despair, I think the biggest and lamest reaction I’ve seen from him. No doubt he’s thinking of how he felt when he caught her with Thomas Meighan. But it’s too much for the film, the situation and the genre. Sitting down and resting his head, Charlie prepares the ground for a second dream sequence. [Iris in.]

Now Charlie prances up to Edna’s house to bring her flowers and sing with her, but finds the city chap already installed at the pianoforte. A musical cuckold, Charlie gazes through the window (the overheard music perhaps recalls Charlie’s experience in childhood of being passionately transfixed by a rendition of “You are the honeysuckle, I am the bee” caught as he passed by a window). Edna gazes blankly at the lighter-cane as if it held some mesmeric power. The lovers smile coyly over a photo album. Much of the comedy in this film is rote, but absolutely all the romance is, a likely result of Chaplin’s loveless marriage following fairly quickly on the break-up with Edna.

Charlie attempts to copy the c. chap’s elegant ways, fashioning crude spats from a pair of the woolly socks (a loose thread spoils the effect) and installing a candlestick on his cane (it blazes with the same inextinguishable fervour as the one Harpo produces from his mackintosh in HORSE FEATHERS, burning at both ends — that would impress me if I were Edna).

Walter Kerr identifies the pathos here as operating on the same unsuccessful level as that in THE TRAMP, but I think it’s much worse. Charlie’s self-pity isn’t affecting whatsoever, whereas his illiterate note in the Essanay film is genuinely pitiable even if the tonal shift isn’t managed well at all. His everlasting candle a wash-out, Charlie crouches on a country road with fingers in ears, awaiting extirpation by an approaching auto. A sudden jolt — the boss kicking him out of his chair — brings him back to reality. His rejection by Edna was all a jealous dream, brought on by seeing her chatting with chap.

Coda: the chap is checking out. He tips his hat to Edna but she turns her back on him sniffily. What on earth has happened between them during Charlie’s dream? Seeing Edna, Charlie rushes to embrace her in an awkward stranglehold, makes to punch the city chap for offences committed during R.E.M. sleep, then gratefully receives a tip from him for carrying his bags three feet to the waiting car. City chap departs and Charlie and Edna embrace.

Critics and scholars have apparently argued about whether the heartbreak leading up to suicide is a dream, or whether the happy ending is the dream, flashing through Charlie’s mind in a split second as he’s mangled by the onrushing jalopy. While that would be cleverer, more unusual and better, making the film a slapstick version of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, it’s absolutely plain that the more prosaic version was Chaplin’s intended reading. The dream is cued up by Charlie resting his head, and he awakens from the same posture. The reason for the confusion is the film’s awkward shape, with TWO longish dream sequences, and the other problem identified by Walter Kerr: while Chaplin often creates poignancy by having his character dream of idyllic happiness (heaven, bread rolls, etc) when he’s miserable in reality, here he dreams of a scenario much worse than his real life situ. But this is perhaps excusable — we DID get the reason Charlie thinks he’s washed up with Edna, right before he went to sleep. So it’s motivated, it’s just not very effective or interesting or amusing or touching.

SUNNYSIDE is pretty fascinating as an example of mature Chaplin operating without inspiration, judgement thrown off, forced to release a film that simply hasn’t gelled. Mysteriously, he called it a favourite film in his 1922 memoir, but dismissed it later. During shooting he toyed with abandoning it in favour of another, equally amorphous and unpromising notion, but he’d invested too much time in it for that option to fly.

The crisis would continue through the next short — I can hardly wait. And you?