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The Eighth Annual Allan Fish Online Film Festival 2024
Kid Auto Races At Venice (aka The Kid Auto Race ; The Pest): Director / Screenwriter / Actor: Henry Lehrman
Shoulder Arms: Director / Screenwriter / Actor / Producer: Charles Chaplin
By Roderick Heath
Charlie Chaplin. 110 years after he made his debut in the costume of his ‘Tramp character, Chaplin is very possibly still the most recognisable and emblematic performer in cinema history. Even those who have never seen his films, and indeed would not be caught dead daring to watch a silent movie, know on sight the figure with the bowler hat, little moustache, cane, ballooning trousers, and odd ways of ambulating. The mystique of Chaplin feels inextricable from the phenomenon of popular cinema itself. Although movies had around for twenty years by the time his face first flickered upon a screen, Chaplin became the first bona fide superstar of cinema. Perhaps of history altogether. Before, performers had been limited, however far their names travelled, to whatever locale they were in. Then Chaplin was on screens all over the world, completely uninhibited by place or language but exploring life with image and gesture and motion – precisely why, arguably, only a physical comedian like Chaplin was equipped to truly make the best of what cinema was in his day. Chaplin’s life arc has long been inseparable from his art, and indeed Chaplin owed much of his colossal success precisely to the way he made the overt stylisation of his performance, the archetype he stepped into with his costume, somehow nonetheless suggest a lowered veil between performer and audience, that Chaplin was inviting the viewer into his personal mental universe and that he was also accessing theirs.
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And there was truth to this. Chaplin had assimilated his childhood and maturation and turned it into a running blend of high comedy riven with pathos and pain, even horror. Chaplin’s parent, Charles Snr and Hannah, were music hall performers, and Charles Snr had Romanichal heritage on his mother’s side. His parents’ marriage, whilst never officially dissolved, was essentially over just a couple of years after his birth in 1889. His mother, whose singing career never took off, also suffered from bouts of mental illness and venereal disease. Their father never provided support, so young Charles and his brother Sydney both eventually had to go into a workhouse and later to schools for pauper children. When their mother was finally hospitalised, Charles and Sydney were taken in by their father, but his severe alcoholism was also driving him to an early grave. Chaplin later recounted that his first stage performance came one night in Aldershot when he filled in for his ill mother with a short song and dance act. Forced to support both himself and his mother, Chaplin pursued performing as the only thing he could do, and spent a period time sleeping rough around London in the meantime. Chaplin had a steady stream of juvenile parts through his childhood and teenage years, including acting in the play Sherlock Holmes opposite actor William Gillette, who had co-written the play with Arthur Conan Doyle, on several national tours. Chaplin’s skill as a dancer later gained him success in a member of a clog dancing group, but he quit as he felt increasingly attracted to comedy.
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Charles and Sydney started working together and formed a comedy routine called Repairs when Charles was 18. Sydney later helped bring Charlie into the company run by the theatrical impresario Fred Karno, and Chaplin’s growing talent eventually made Karno select him for a team of performers he was sending to the United States – Stan Laurel was also one of the company. Whilst in the US Chaplin started an act he called “the Inebriate Swell,” an upper-crust souse, and this became his calling card. During his second American tour in 1913, Chaplin received an invitation from the New York Motion Picture Company, whose Los Angeles-based subsidiary Keystone Films had recently lost a star comedy performer, to give replacing him a shot. Chaplin watched some Keystone movies and found them a bit slapped-together in comedy terms, but the promise of a steady, $150 dollar-per-week contract was undoubtedly tempting. On a more personal level, so too was the chance to change his lifestyle. Chaplin took the offer, arriving at Keystone’s studio early in 1914 and encountering its legendary chief Mack Sennett, who was slightly surprised and a little aggravated by how young Chaplin was. His first movie was Making A Living, directed by and starring Henry Lehrman, released a month after it was filmed. In the meantime Chaplin was cast in Mabel’s Unusual Predicament, opposite Keystone’s biggest female star Mabel Normand. For this film, Chaplin started assembling a costume to give him a distinct screen persona, in a performing tradition with roots in the commedia dell’arte and its stock characters: Pierrot in a bowler hat.
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Chaplin deliberately placed together bits of costuming that seemed at odds with each-other, as both packaging for and signals of his body’s unruly capabilities, his discordant impulses and flashes of anarchy held together only by a tattered pretence of dignity. As well as a statement of character, the Tramp proved to perfectly encapsulate a moment in time, poised between the affectations of one era and another, just as Chaplin himself was poised between two different continental sensibilities in body and the jagged disparities of his life so far. The Tramp’s ideal of a place in a society that constantly rejects him is rooted in the demarcations of Victorian gentlemanliness and his notion of a poised, forbearing, proudly self-contained man of the world, when he is actually a knot of barely controlled impulses in an assembly of op-shop garments, striving in a time when the nominal ideals of class are giving way to mere strata of power and wealth. He might be someone from a good background who’s fallen calamitously, or he might be someone from the bottom desperately trying to mimic what he takes for the aspiration-worthy. As he evolved, the Tramp gained mannerisms that could point in either direction, an edge of pretension in his maintenance of outlandish pride and savoir faire, his curiously pansexual flirtiness often turned on to disarm, floating on a lode of anarchism held at bay only by a sense that his decorum, his remnant pretences, are the only things giving him identity: as long as he has them, he is not yet an actual bum. The Marx Brothers, for instance, can be seen as splitting the Chaplin persona into pieces – the trickster survivor, the dubious traveller, and the chaos-bringing holy fool. Indeed, just about every screen comedian since has drawn on the template Chaplin offered to some degree or another over the intervening decades, but, notably practically no-one has ever come close to successfully mimicking the most essential part of his persona – the part that seemed to be able to become more sympathetic and empathetic the more pathetic he became.
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Chaplin’s perspective nonetheless was thoroughly that of someone very familiar with being at the bottom of the heap, particularly in his impudent, sometimes quizzical, sometimes downright contemptuous take on authority, his scepticism towards do-gooders, cops of both the legal and moral variety, and his celebration of that tattered pride, that lurching, ever-moving approach to life, somehow both accepting its chaos and rejecting it at the same time. And his audience, the vast bulk of which shared his perspective and experience, loved him for it, for reporting without the usual kind of mediation from above: there is no hint of noblesse oblige in Chaplin’s reportage from the fringe, save the most ironic kind. In any event, Mabel’s Unusual Predicament came out a few days after Chaplin’s second performance in the guise, The Kid Auto Races At Venice, so that film became, as far as viewers were concerned, his debut. Venice in this case being Venice, California. The film was subtitled “Extract from a letter from Charlie Chaplin to his best girl,” a flourish that began the perpetual burring of actor and role together: the Tramp was Charlie Chaplin, and vice versa, at least until Chaplin finally tried to bust out of the association, and paid the price for it. Chaplin was reteamed with Lehrman for The Kid Auto Races At Venice, and Lehrman is listed as the writer and director, although the degree to which either art is applied is debatable. The subject of the movie is already Chaplin’s irrepressible sense of connection to the movie camera, as both subject of its attention and of his fascination. The joke of the short film is straightforward, and exploits a real, unsimulated event, the Junior Vanderbilt Cup, held in Venice, California. This was a rally for “pushcars” with very small, light motors something like modern go-karts but also resembling soapbox racers, starting like those on a ramp for initial propulsion. The race seems to have been a pretty big deal at the time, judging by the audience that’s turned up – a survey of people in their day out finery, a splendid incidental time capsule of both social mores and the environs of Venice in the day.
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Chaplin, as the film would have it, is attending the races, a little pickled. “I made tracks for the track,” a title card supposedly drawn from Chaplin’s letter announces. The movie opens with a newsreel or documentary-like conceit of simply filming the race, but with Chaplin standing on the edge of the race course near the finish line, watching with wobbly fascination. A cop nudges him and tells him to get out of the way, so Chaplin trots down the course, nearing the camera and noticing he’s being filmed. He seems to be breaking the fourth wall, only for a later shot to reveal that a newsreel crew is shooting the event. Chaplin, intrigued and dosed with Dutch courage, starts pestering the crew, constantly trying to get in front of the camera. His lurching progress up and down the fringe of the race route sees him constantly nearly hit by the racers charging by – I bet the drivers just loved having some random actor lurching in their path. Chaplin becomes so annoying the director becomes increasingly aggressive in clearing him from the proximity. The director is played by Lehrman himself, who might well have been authentically piqued at being handed this freakish, man-sized mass of physical verve and independent wit by Sennett and told to make a movie happen, expected to keep him on the rails and within the margins of the Keystone house style. Within a few seconds of the film’s start, some of Chaplin’s about-to-be-signature mannerisms are apparent. He tries to pull together the front of his jacket, at once too tight and too long, aware he looks a bit slovenly, and then sets himself, stiffening his legs right up to his buttocks, pushing his torso forward a little, as if wanting to project an air of jaunty, hearty insouciance, and trots out of frame, twirling his cane with feverish energy, like he thinks he might possibly whir it fast enough until he takes off like the first helicopter.
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The most telling disparity between the version of the Tramp Chaplin presents in Kid Auto Races At Venice and the more developed persona is the prototype still has one foot unsteadily planted in Chaplin’s drunk act: the Tramp is plainly inebriated, and like many a drunk we’ve all encountered, he becomes fixated on something and can’t leave it alone, the attempts by the director, crew, and cops to move him along only provoking him to further defiance. The costume wasn’t quite complete yet: Chaplin would later go for baggier, freer trousers, where the ones he wears here instead bulge at the front where he’s tied the too-large pants up tightly. The younger Chaplin’s face is slightly heavier, darker and not yet brightened with makeup, his prop moustache a little thicker and bushier. He looks a tad more aggressive and provocative than the Tramp in full flower, and indeed the Tramp proved a little disconcerting to Keystone with his early, slightly fouler edition, which Chaplin would quickly refine into the more familiar, romantic, fool-of-fortune version. Chaplin keeps sticking himself in front of the camera as it surveys the racers lining up to start, the junior drivers with their approximations of manly pith. At another point, the film crew set up further down the road, and Chaplin comes running up in search of them, tripping at some point but recovering and quickly striking a casual pose before the camera, before the director spring out and shoves him away.
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Chaplin, seemingly sobering up and becoming more artful in what has now become a duel of a kind with the habitual Tramp pride already at stake, postures with billboard advertisement cool as he flicks ash from his cigar and then tosses the butt over his shoulder to kick away with his flicked-up foot. Chaplin’s nerve and skill are instantly apparent, in the way he so casually plays out his comic conceits whilst dodging speeding vehicles and oblivious to the real crowd amused by his antics, sticking to his bit to the end with the dedication of a man who knows life falls to pieces the moment the act stops. The chagrined director at various points shoves him hard out of the way onto the road, and later reaches out and drags him bodily out of the frame, recreating the old vaudevillian joke of the hook reaching out for the unpopular performer. By movie’s end the director has given Chaplin a kick in the pants – a gesture the Tramp would usually be delivering to others later. Chaplin now has licence to jump in close to the camera and gain his revenge by making faces right into the lens, marking the only time the movie shifts from full-body shots to a close-up as Chaplin sneers and twists his nose. A descent into pure, childish antic and defiance, taunting the eye of the device that remains indifferent to him, and through it the world. The End. It feels so perfectly apt that Kid Auto Races At Venice is an overt joke about the whole idea of being in front of a camera and performing for it, blending aspects of documentary and fiction in a manner that feels strangely modern. The oldness of Kid Auto Races At Venice is also its newness: it is simplicity itself. One could easily remake it at any public event with an iPhone. Indeed, just about any TV news broadcast from a public space will pick up its selection of onlookers waving or making faces at the camera.
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The obvious joke to make here is that Charlie Chaplin invented photobombing. And whilst not true – the day after the camera was invented, surely someone was trying to get their face in the frame the day after – Chaplin is already betraying a fascination with the art of being an artist that would recur throughout his career, and his already keen understanding of what the gorgonizing gaze of cinema was doing to him and everyone else. In the age of movies, everyone becomes, in their own minds if not on a screen, a movie actor. This births another, related phenomenon, where the authentic and unwitting gains its own kind of mystique, something else Chaplin is tapping in Kid Auto Races At Venice – he is an actor, playing with calculation a character who is lured by the camera, and also a specimen of raw humanity: drunk, dopey, pushy, and vulgar. Chaplin is already looking forward to the age of reality television and internet streaming where both instincts are dovetailed, the urge to perform in life and the urge to look at life unmediated by performance oscillating on the scales. Chaplin would keep hold of this idea and return to it for his The Circus (1928), the plot of which hinges on the Tramp’s capacity to make people laugh but only when unaware of it, performance and hapless activity collapsing into one frame. Decades later, Chaplin would close the loop in A King In New York (1957), where the title character becomes the unwitting star of a TV show without his knowledge, becoming a portal of vicarious entertainment through hidden cameras, where the dinner party he’s supposed to be enjoying keeps being interrupted by advertisements delivered by the hostess.
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Chaplin on camera in the Tramp guise is a new immigrant in at least three senses. As an Englishman taking his great chance not just on American shores but in the still very new-found land that was Hollywood of 1914, a site of moviemaking for only a couple of years. The rising theatrical star who saw another new world opening up in movies. If he’d hesitated, he might have finished up just another broken-down old vaudevillian, or second banana to other stars when it became plain all his breed needed to get in front of cameras and quick if they wanted to keep make a living. And, finally, the man moving from one comic persona, a drunk wobbling with merry obliviousness through the world, to a man all too aware of being in the world, perpetually at odds with it whilst applying all his art of living to weather it. Here he is improvising comedy in front of a real crowd, turning the mechanics of moviemaking themselves into a joke and a subject of anthropological curiosity, filming the world, immortalising what it sees, spinning the straw of the ordinary into the gold of fame and fortune, but Chaplin-as-Tramp violates the understanding that one must be chosen by the camera, not force one’s self upon it: that’s not how the magic box works. Or, rather, how the industry behind the box works. Chaplin off screen knew damn well he had what the camera needed. Chaplin-as-Tramp himself already wears his anachronism on – and as – his sleeve, his attempt to look spiffy out of date and gone to seed. Here are the people of Venice itself, caught in a moment of jollity just before the start of the greatest and most terrible break in western history, World War I some six months away, wearing styles that would themselves look a little absurdly out of date just a few years later, watching the birth of a youth culture obsessed with speed and cars.
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Chaplin tried to give creative input to his vehicles with the new few movies he made, but found them usually ignored and resented. One of his reunions with Normand resulted in a row and Chaplin was nearly sacked, but Chaplin’s first few roles had already earned appreciation and good notices, obliging Sennett to make nice with the new star, and he acceded to Chaplin’s campaign to direct his own movie proviso that Chaplin would pay back $1500 if the movie failed. Chaplin’s directorial debut, the 12-minute-long Caught In the Rain, was released on May 4, 1914 – yes, Chaplin had been in the movie business for all of five months at that point – and it proved a hit. Soon Chaplin was directing a film a week. Towards the year’s end he took a supporting role as a different kind of character, as “Charlie the city slicker,” in the Marie Dressler vehicle Tillie’s Punctured Romance, directed by Sennett himself. This proved a good move, proving Chaplin could win notice and appreciation even in a character role. Money, and the question of Chaplin’s worth, soon became a sticking point: after Sennett refused to meet Chaplin’s price when his contract came to be renewed, the rival company Essanay offered more than he wanted, and Chaplin moved on. At Essanay Chaplin formed a stock company, found a beloved leading lady in the chance discovery Edna Purviance, and began revising the Tramp character into one more deliberately akin to Pierrot, particularly in the film titled, most fittingly, The Tramp (1915). During 1915 Chaplin started becoming more rigorous and slower in making his movies, and experimented with tempo of comedy, even risking unhappy endings. By year’s end he was also the biggest star in film. In 1916 Chaplin moved to the Mutual Film Corporation and became one of the highest-paid people in the world. In 1917 he was able to finance and build his own movie studio.
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Of course, success stories for one exalted hero tend to be littered with many losers, themselves describing narratives of worth and consequence. Chaplin’s clashes with Normand and total eclipse of her was sad given Normand’s place as one of the genuine woman film pioneers and his precursor as a comedy director-star, and his split with Sennett would prove the first of several bad calls with talent and business that would eventually leave Sennett a destitute and forgotten figure. But that was the movie business, a business in the last throes of its wild-west, free-for-all, survival-of-the-fittest-and-quickest days, and Chaplin both drove and benefited from the centrifuge of the moment. Chaplin would also remember their examples in later art, in The Circus and Limelight (1952). Chaplin’s tendency to court scandal in his private life was still a work in progress, and the disparity between the character he played on screen and the man he was off not yet an issue. For the time being he was a man enjoying well-earned success and also funnelling much of it back into his creativity. The moment of Chaplin’s success also coincided with the war’s outbreak and unfolding, and Chaplin became an emblem of relief from the grimness, even as he began focusing on his own kind of grimness, his Tramp whose problems and travails were at least quotidian. Whilst he did attract criticism from the press for failing to return to England and join the army as World War I raged, servicemen proved to feel him infinitely better employed lifting their spirits in movies than getting his head shot off. To return the appreciation, Chaplin set out to take make a movie about a soldier.
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Specifically, the Tramp as soldier. Within the course of Shoulder Arms Chaplin satirically encompasses all the broad, propagandistic stories about how the war would proceed and comparing it with the reality, a reality that is generally an experience that basically turns everyone involved into Tramps – people putting up with rain, mud, hunger, random torments, vermin, authority figures, and occasional, random attempts to kill you. Chaplin ploughed an amount of effort, money, and time – four whole months – into making the movie that would have seemed bizarre on the Keystone lot three years earlier. It also required no small amount of creative guts, as the idea of making a comedy about the war was one some considered distasteful, and friends warned Chaplin against trying. War in movies was a serious business best left to those making ones about Erich Von Stroheim raping nuns. Shoulder Arms was the second movie Chaplin made at his new, self-named studio. The first was A Dog’s Life (1918), a work that evinced his new, rigorous sense of comic storytelling and shaded effect of character and story, to the point where one critic described as the first total work of art in the realm of moviemaking. Shoulder Arms was in that regard a little bit of a step backward with its loose narrative structure and lack of emotional depth, but was also adventurous in its own – part humour-soaked realism, part fantasy; part paean to the fighting man, part mockery of the entire enterprise.
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The idea of Shoulder Arms likely excited Chaplin as a special challenge to his evolving control as an artist, weaving the stuff of his humour out of the intricacies and absurdities of life, and identification with his beset heroes. When the film came out, just two months before the Armistice came, one quality that delighted soldiers was the way it revealed Chaplin had been paying attention to their travails and turned the everyday bother of service in the trenches into the stuff of his comedy, capturing the practically existential absurdity of it all. Chaplin was rewarded with his biggest commercial success yet. Shoulder Arms would, most obviously, open up territory Chaplin would revisit much later and with a fresh urgency for The Great Dictator (1940), a movie where his conspiratorial empathy for the common man and foot soldier turned into a howl of drowned-out humanist pleading, and his approach to blending serious musings and satirical commentary would come with a political and pacifist spin many felt had become excessively blatant. The early war scenes of The Great Dictator return to the same survey of the Great War battlefield, and to a great extent the later reels of the 1940 film would repeat the same basic idea of Shoulder Arms by segueing into a fantasy of displacing the enemy leader and cutting the warmongers off at the ankles, except that where in Shoulder Arms the fantasy resolves wryly with the Tramp waking from a dream, The Great Dictator resolves with a shift into pure rhetoric, trying to force the audience to awaken instead. Later Chaplin would dig even deeper his attempts to balance a disparity in subject matter and tone with Monsieur Verdoux (1947).
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Chaplin’s pride as a filmmaker entirely responsible for his vision proves a cue for a little humour that courts a sense of conspiracy with the audience, as the opening title card, which declares “written and produced by Charles Chaplin”, sees his hand reaching into the frame to write his name, and then eagerly pointing to his own painted image to claim the feat with immodest eagerness, thus managing to indulge and disavow his ego at the same time. The film opens with a line of new US Army recruits being trained in rifle drill: a title card dubs this bunch “The Awkward Squad.” Chaplin’s hero, known as Doughboy but sporting the Tramp’s signature moustache, immediately confirms both his attempt to replicate professional poise and his innate clumsiness as he brings his rifle down in the wrong hand and slams it into the foot of the recruit next to him. Doughboy has all of Chaplin’s flexibility, but this counts against him in his efforts to replicate the pivots and gyrations demanded of him, his lower half acting like an elastic extension that over-rotates and shifts in waddling gait when trying to march. Exhausted, Doughboy dashes into his tent and flops prostrate upon his cot. “Over There,” a title card appears, signalling a shift to the trenches of France, where handmade signs point variously to “Rotten Row” and “Broadway,” and Doughboy strolls mystified along the duck walk as shells land unnoticed in his wake, sending up puffs of smoke and dust.
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Doughboy nonetheless seems ahead of the curve in the arts of frontline survival, the trenches for him being only another kind of slum or dosshouse. He knows to watch out for vermin: he has a rat trap hanging from his tunic, ready to snap any unwitting finger, and a cheese grater which he hangs on the wall to scratch fleabites. He’s billeted in a dugout with some other soldiers, including a sergeant (Sydney Chaplin, who also later plays the Kaiser), after having some trouble getting through the doorway with his well-stocked kit. Across the lines, German soldiers are paraded, inspected, and harangued by an officer of exceedingly short stature (Loyal Underwood). Doughboy stands watch as shells land in the trench behind him and then as rain falls, and begins daydreaming – cueing a witty and innovative use of a split-screen effect – of scenes of the life he’s been forced to leave behind. Letters and care packages come for all the soldiers except Doughboy, who gets so jealous he starts reading a letter another soldier has received over his shoulder, Doughboy’s expressions and the soldier’s moving in concert with the letter’s contents until the soldier notices his unwelcome audience and shuffles off. Doughboy is eventually handed a package from home that went briefly astray, and finds he’s been sent by some kindly soul a package of stone-hard crackers and a block of Limburger cheese that’s so smelly he dons his gas mask before trying to chow down on it, before abandoning all hope: he instead hurls the block across into the German trench, which immediately sends all the Germans fleeing.
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Soon after, an attack is ordered on the German trenches. Doughboy’s fear mounts as the moment to go over the top nears, whilst shells crash around the trench and a serious-faced officer counts down the moments to the attack on his wristwatch. Doughboy looks at his identification tag and notices to his alarm that his service number is 13. Still, he tries with all his might to man up, swatting his chest in macho fashion only to cringe at the hurt he causes himself, and finally striking a heroic, recruiting poster-ready pose as he grabs the ladder to climb up, only for the ladder to tip over and deposit him against the far trench wall. Finally Doughboy does manage to follow his comrades. The twist: next we see Doughboy, he’s escorting all the Germans he’s captured including the tiny officer: asked by one of his own superiors how he did it, he simply replies, “I surrounded them.” Easy to imagine Chaplin’s audience of the day cheering all this with both patriotic glee as their great on-screen avatar of average pluck wins through, as well as awareness of the absurdity in Chaplin’s eliding way of acknowledging that of course he’s awesome at war: he’s the director and star. A point he returns to right at the end with revisionist sting. Chaplin’s instinctive humanism also finds expression when faced with the niceties of wartime side-taking. He literally belittles the enemy, but he also lends their own common-as-muck soldiers some sympathy, portraying the German foot soldier as essentially a race of Tramps, ordinary men beset by bullying and peevish authority. Later, when Doughboy captures the German unit during a charge to take the German line, the German rankers laugh in delight as Doughboy gives the tiny officer a cigarette, only to then bend him over his knee and spank him like a child. Chaplin rounds off the scene with an iris shot on the soldiers being marched off whilst one of Doughboy’s comrades laughs uproariously in the background. In the same key, Chaplin was able to get away with some of his most potent expressions of class anger and contempt for the rich and powerful, in the vein that would steadily amass him the deep enmity of right-wingers over the decades, when filtered through the wartime factionalism, including Doughboy striking a match against the Kaiser’s fancy car and handing over one of his festooning medals to excitable rankers.
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Chaplin builds his comic set-pieces around the frontline soldier’s travails, particularly in a scene where Doughboy’s dugout is flooded by rainwater. With three men cramming themselves on a top bunk out of the water and another snoozing oblivious whilst immersed, Doughboy has to find someplace to sleep, and appropriates the horn of a phonograph to use as a snorkel. Waking later, he rubs life back into one frigid foot but panics when he doesn’t feel anything in the other, only for this to prove to be another soldier’s. After his heroic capture of the Germans, Doughboy seems to be settling in nicely, eating with one of his pals in the trench and now making utility of the sniper bullets whizzing overhead to open a wine bottle. He takes a brief time-out from his luncheon to do a little sniping of his own, chalking up his hits, until an enemy bullet takes off his helmet and he has to stake a point off himself. Job done, he heads off for a nap. Later, during a call for volunteers, Doughboy steps forth with bravado, only to lose intestinal fortitude when the officer tells him, “You may never return.” Soon Doughboy finds himself behind German lines, spying from within a rubber tree costume, hurriedly snapping into appropriately arboreal stances when German soldiers march by. When one German takes up an axe to chop the “tree” down for firewood, Doughboy has to knock him out surreptitiously, and another two when they come to check. Meanwhile Doughboy’s sergeant pal has been assigned to keep watch on German troop movements, hiding under a bridge and sending out radio messages, but he gets caught. Prisoner and escorts pass by Doughboy in his tree disguise: Doughboy ambushes the escort, allowing both soldiers to flee.
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The image of Doughboy in his tree disguise is one of Chaplin’s evergreen (sorry) comic images, and also a nod to the pantomime tradition he was coming out of, with Chaplin’s pale, moustachioed face peering from a hole in the side, arms skewed, and even managing to evoke the Tramp costume with the tree’s flaring trunk-legs, set to mad motion as Doughboy flees the gunning Germans across a field and into the forest. Doughboy finally manages to slip out of costume, leaving it behind like a shed skin to fool his pursuers, and up a drainpipe. He happens upon a war-pummelled farmhouse where the walls have been knocked out by shelling but Doughboy still closes the window and draws the blind to get some sleep on a bed. The owner of the house proves to be a lovely young French farm girl (Purviance) – is there any other kind? – who comes upon Doughboy sprawled on her bed with initial alarm and then a look of amused surprise, a ragged Miranda rediscovering hapless, ordinary men in the brave new world of uniformed warriors. She caringly dabs at his scruffy hand, awakening Doughboy, but he of course pretends to still be asleep to let her continue, allowing him to cop a feel as she places his hand on his knee. Doughboy faces a language barrier as he can’t speak French and the girl is afraid for a moment he might be a German, so he has to improvise a sign language to explain he isn’t.
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Four years into his directing career, Chaplin’s camera still lingers in the era of makeshift sets and tableaux in Shoulder Arms, his scenes built around key sets – the trench, the soldiers’ dugout, the chateau where the climax unfolds, with the photographic perspective almost all from one, resolute side of the space. But within those structures and strictures Chaplin moves his camera in and out with precision, his technique a well-oiled machine for capturing comic business: not a single gesture is garbled through poor direction or unnecessary editing, and Chaplin understood a key rule of comedy, that the deadpan camera suited it in fundamental ways. The way the frame catches and shapes the action is vital – for instance in the scene of Doughboy reading the letter of the soldier’s shoulder, with its shift towards intimacy, and the feet gag in the flooded dugout. Or, towards the end, when Doughboy in German disguise pretends to rough up the sergeant who’s been captured before an audience of bemused Germans, their regimented ranks contrasting the frantic activity in front. Later Chaplin makes the French girl’s ruined farmhouse into a kind of diagrammatical gag that also makes capital of the flat perspective (and anticipates visual and conceptual variations on the joke in the funhouse of The Circus, and the factory gears of Modern Times, 1936), with Doughboy shutting the window and going to bed despite the missing walls. Chaplin makes use of the fields of space and depth in his frames, like the laughing soldier behind the captured German, and the captive sergeant and his guards.
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When Doughboy first arrives at the front line, Chaplin even deploys a long, smooth dolly shot, trudging forth and then back in the squalid warren where explosions go off scarcely noticed just behind the lurching neophyte soldier. Despite the comedic use, here Chaplin happens upon an early version of the “immersive” technique of later war movies, from Lewis Milestone’s tracking shots in No Man’s Land in All Quiet On The Western Front (1930) through to the lunging steadicam shots through the submarine in Wolfgang Peterson’s Das Boot (1981). He segues into a genuinely effective squall of suspense-building as Doughboy waits for his first attack, with Chaplin cutting to the officer, bent over to read his watch, counting down the seconds to the attack, and then showing the ticking hands working, before returning to Doughboy as he quivers in anxiety and explosions go off about him. Despite the ambition evinced by Shoulder Arms in his awareness that he was making movies for a vast, international audience, and his own evolving pretences as a filmmaker, Chaplin still has one foot planted in the Sennett world with its aura of make-do. He’s very obviously just filming around the fringes of Los Angeles and surrounding hills – you can even see a passing car and some oil derricks far off in the background when the Germans are hunting Doughboy in the woods, and those woods themselves are eucalypt groves. The hyperrealism of Stroheim’s own approach to filmmaking on Foolish Wives (1922) was still a few years off.
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The last portion of Shoulder Arms sees Doughboy being hunted down by the Germans, who at one point bail him up with a machine gun only for him to turn it about on them and flee. The French girl is arrested as for aiding the enemy and taken to a chateau the Germans are using as a headquarters. Chaplin gets in his lampooning jab at those aforementioned Stroheim vehicles as the girl is captured and presented to a lecherous German officer, with the officer and a bearded soldier both obviously relishing the imminence of her fate worse than death – Chaplin moves in for one of the film’s few close-ups to register the weird leer the soldier gives the girl before going out, driving the nominal sexual threat over into a zone of weird, funny, faintly disturbing hyperbole. The officer isn’t an impressive Teutonic sadist but a weedy bloke with an improbable tweaked moustache. Doughboy arrives to save the girl, having tracked her and entering the room by sliding down the chimney: his heroism is still a bit hapless, burning his backside on a pot boiling in the fireplace, but he quickly passes on the favour by jamming a red-hot poker into the German’s butt before knocking him out and shutting him in a closet. Doughboy locks him in and turns to the girl, shrugging at the simplicity of his victory.
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But the ultimate bully soon arrives in the form of the Kaiser with a contingent of staff officers making a tour of the front, forcing Doughboy to dress up in the officer’s uniform and fake his way out of the room, managing to lead he girl out into the yard which is filled with soldiers and also the Kaiser’s motor car. When his sergeant pal is brought in after being captured, he almost gives the game away, so Doughboy pretends to thrash him as a hated enemy. Doughboy, the girl, and the sergeant manage to overcome the Kaiser’s driver and escort, and the girl dresses up as the driver. This cues a delightful little gender-bending joke from Chaplin as Doughboy, trying to improve the girl’s disguise, uses some axle grease to paint a moustache on her and the girl kisses Doughboy with glee, leaving the marks of the moustache on his cheek. Somehow Purviance looks even cuter, and the joke also gives a sly acknowledgement of the fakeness of Chaplin’s own perpetual in-character moustache. Meanwhile the Kaiser within bawls out one of his aides for drinking wine: “Pay attention to the war!” But the Kaiser is soon taken captive by his fake escort and driven back through the lines, with the sergeant warning the American soldiers that they’re coming by returning to his radio.
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Doughboy and the girl arrive to a hero’s welcome and the Kaiser’s capture means the war’s end. Doughboy gets to take the ultimate Chaplin kick at an authority figure’s backside, giving the boot to the Kaiser when his captive abuses him, but a title card makes the merry announcement of “Peace on Earth and good will to all men.” Except that Doughboy awakens from this wonderful dream in the tent where he fell asleep at the start, still back in basic training, with his beloved fellow recruits come to shake him awake and drag him back out to training. Doughboy’s awakening is a moment that seems at first glance like a last, throwaway joke – of course this has all been a dream, an indulgence of the eternal personal need for fantasies of grandeur and special glory before the reality kicks in. But it can also be taken as Chaplin’s own satiric contemplation of the disparity between the optimistic and patriotic messages and fantasies of how the war would proceed and the reality. Chaplin would return to this motif, if with infinitely greater nuance, at the end of City Lights, which also hinges on dispelled illusions in awakening, of seeing properly, without illusion, an act at once necessary but also painful. The film was released just two months before the Armistice.
Kid Auto Races At Venice can be viewed free on YouTube here
Shoulder Arms can be viewed free on YouTube here
But it can also be taken as Chaplin’s own satiric contemplation of the disparity between the optimistic and patriotic messages and fantasies of how the war would proceed and the reality. Chaplin would return to this motif, if with infinitely greater nuance, at the end of City Lights, which also hinges on dispelled illusions in awakening, of seeing properly, without illusion, an act at once necessary but also painful.
Roderick, I am a Chaplin completist who considers this versatile genius the most renowned figure in cinema. There has never been an artist to match him, and I venture to predict there will never be one moving forward. Your titanic lead-in is wholly fascinating and properly sets the stage for your review of two of his shorts, both of which I’ve seen multiple times. I consider the latter among his greatest films of any length! The set-piece of the Chaplin dressed as the tree is surely one of the most iconic in the cinema, and the comic spin on war is a singular achievement. The mention of Von Stroheim’s film in the context you broach is perfect, and the intricate summaries of the films are riveting. There can never again be a figure with such famous international appeal because of wartime when Chaplin specialized in satire. You properly bring his 1940 THE GREAT DICTATOR into the conversation as well. This masterful essay will be a cherished addition to the WONDERS IN THE DARK archives, and one Allan from above us is smiling with approval.
-Sam
Hi Sam. Yeah, I’ve felt like I’ve owed you this one since the comedy countdown which was…a while ago. I grew up watching Chaplin – some of his shorts used to be on TV regularly in the afternoon when I was a small boy, and The Gold Rush was the first silent feature I ever watched. It’s about time I finally wrote about him.
Thanks a lot for this excellent insightful review Roderick. I love the historical angle as I wasn’t aware about Chaplin’s film start. Like so many, I have been a big fan of Chaplin since an early age. Yet, I haven’t seen either of these films but I recognize some of the images, which echoes your point about how recognizable his character is. Perhaps, I saw the images in montage about his career.
Just finished seeing Kid Auto Races At Venice. Lovely film. Can’t believe that is his character’s debut because some of the antics became iconic in many other features. I am glad I was able to view this.
A spectacular write-up on one of the famous people in American culture, though you do make a persuasive argument for his international veneration. I’ve seen Shoulder Arms, which is a masterpiece, but need to watch Kid Auto Races at Venice.
This essay was super fascinating and informative! Thank you, so much, for this!
Im a life-long fan of silents, particularly Chaplin’s work. So, I culled a lot of information I didn’t already have from this piece.
Hello Sachin, Peter, kubrickkrazy; thanks for commenting and for the kind words. One of the great things about our moment – and there aren’t too many of those so we must celebrate the worthy – is the way something like Kid Auto Races At Venice, which not that long ago would have been an incredibly obscure and hard-to-find relic, is now instantly accessible on YouTube and other sites like it. So much of our cultural inheritance is availabe now. That’s one reason why I wrote this essay and how I was able to write it, and why it seemed to fit the whole point of the Allan Fish Online Film Festival.
A great examination of the person who has become my favorite silent film comedian, a place once held by Buster Keaton. While I love a good pratfall, Chaplin brings so much to his films besides his wonderful gags. I’ve been a fan of Kid Auto Races for a long time, but Shoulder Arms is new to me. Must check it out ASAP!
Hi Mare. I always try to buy out of the forced competition between Chaplin and Keaton – obvious similarities, but also obvious differences too; Chaplin orchestrated, Keaton sublimated. If my feet were held to the fire I’d probably have to say Chaplin too, particularly after some of my recent viewings – the way that Chaplin turns the opening scenes of The Circus into a surreal storm of action or the chase in The Kid into a symphony of emotion is filmmaking at a great height. Anyway. Loved your piece on American Madness. I was just writing an essay on a Capra myself, at long last – you’ll appreciate which one – and was musing how the films Capra actually made his naem with, his pre-General Yen stuff, is highly overshadowed by his later work. A bit like early Hawks and Ford, indeed.