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Charles Chaplin
The most significant figure in Chaplin's life was almost certainly his
mother, Hannah Chaplin. A musical stage actress, separated from
Chaplin's alcoholic actor father before young Charlie could
remember, Hannah decorated the poverty of Charlie's childhood with
both the make believe of theatricality, and the piety of New
Testament stories, with particular attention paid to how the
foundation for Christ's pity and compassion was in an unorthodoxy
that separated him from the strictures of Law and accepted custom.
Charlie had an older brother from an unknown (apparently rich and
Jewish) father, Sydney. The three of them -- Hannah, Sydney, and
Charlie -- worked closely together as a family unit, their survival
dependent on being conscious of one another. Difficulties
accelerated, mixed with blessings. Hannah's voice gave out during a
stage performance due to laryngitis, in front of an unsympathetic
and hostile crowd that booed her off stage. Five-year-old Charlie,
having memorized the songs performed by his mother, took the
stage by surprise and picked up where she left off, winning the
hearts of the drunken spectators. It was his first performance for an
audience – and her last. She took to sewing, but began to suffer
bouts of insanity, forcing her to be institutionalized. Charlie and
Sydney were sent to the boys' workhouse, which served in fostering
Charlie's distrust and dislike for authority. At other periods during
Hannah's insane periods, which came intermittently like bouts of
depression, Charlie and Sydney would live with Charlie's
compassionate but perpetually drunk father, much to the chagrin of
the father's live-in girlfriend, particularly with regard to Sydney not
being in any way related to Chaplin Sr.
The other important character of Chaplin's early life may well have
been a young performer he fell in love with, though she did not
reciprocate, Hetty Kelly. At age 19 he proposed to her, though she
was barely 16. The few dates they had – if they could be called dates
– were uneventful and unhappy for Chaplin, who was unable to earn
the slimmest tender of her affection. Upon saying that he would
never see her again, he was disappointed with her response: "I'm
sorry," an unfortunate acquiescence to his baiting proposition.
Hetty, who would die in the influenza epidemic during World War I,
was for Chaplin "the one audience from the past I would like to meet
again." The tenderness, fear, trepidation, and bashful affection of
the Tramp are apparently reflective of Chaplin's actual shyness,
though he would have many romances through his life – particularly
with very young women – as if he were still trying to capture Hetty
later on through life. The bashfulness of love, with its excited
expectation and let-down of rejection, is featured in all of Chaplin's
work, though he allows himself the fantasy of a happy ending. But
as the Tramp's imagined dinner date (for which he is ultimately
stood-up in reality) in The Gold Rush shows, Chaplin had a unique
grasp on how often Love is often only fulfilled blissfully in solitary
fantasy.
It's these features, aside from The Kid, that form a consistent and
luxuriously stable body of work, making Chaplin's legend: A Woman
in Paris, The Goldrush, The Circus, City Lights, Modern Times, The
Great Dictator, Monsieur Verdoux, Limelight, and A King in New
York. We see the master of silent film ushered, kicking and
screaming, into sound, but we can also mark the thoughts of a
conscious artist creating to his own social detriment as the 20th
century undergoes its own changes. The cycle climaxed in terms of
the greatest commercial success midway through, with The Great
Dictator, which would strangely also destroy him.
City Lights (1931) was the first Chaplin picture released in the era of
sound, and with its opening, the director is eager to ridicule his
aesthetically trendy foe. The first scene of City Lights is a kind of
political event where the top officials in town present a new statue
in the public square. They speak, but the voices Chaplin gives them
are of distorted horns (think Charlie Brown's teacher), so as to
suggest that all of these "words, words, words" really amount to
little more than empty air and noises indistinguishable from each
other. Rather than creating talking heads exchanging dialogue,
Chaplin was interested in using sound to help his own ends. For
example, he composed his own music score, and used sound effects
like whistles and coins clanging for clever jokes, perhaps most
memorable in using a bell for the film's famous boxing match, where
the poor Tramp's neck is attached to a string hooked onto the ring
bell; his opponent punches him, the bell rings, and the round ends,
saving him. He walks to his corner, pulling on the bell, and the next
round starts immediately – where once more he is pummeled
hilariously.
When The Great Dictator (1940) went into production, the subject
matter alone – a farce on Hitler – was not what made colleagues
discourage Chaplin. Rather, American and Britain were still at peace
with Germany at that time of its production (this obviously wasn't
the case when the picture was finally released, and Great Britain
welcomed it while America was hesitant). After fighting began
between the French and Germans, Chaplin was at a dinner with
former president Herbert Hoover. Addressing the problem of the
Nazis, Hoover said that the United States should deliver aid and food
to both sides in the conflict. Chaplin said he would support aid – but
not for the Nazis. Hoover said that all sides must receive aid, to
which Chaplin compromised, but with the stipulation that the people
delivering the food to the starving Germans be Jews. The Great
Dictator is cinematic activism, beating conviction in its satire of
Hitler, here renamed Hynkel (and played by Chaplin), the swastika
replaced by the double cross (a clever double entendre), Germany
being renamed "Tomania". It is a story so important to Chaplin that
he decided to make it his first fully sound film, and as such, he lays
the Tramp, here cast as a Jewish barber, to rest. (Modern Times was
technically Chaplin's first sound film, and was originally conceived as
such, but in its final form it plays mostly as a silent picture – its
sound work, again, being quite clever and reflexive, including the
sounds of gastritis, indicating that Chaplin will give his audience
sound – though not necessarily the sounds they want to hear or even
acknowledge exist in their polite social lives).
Playing these dual roles, as dictator Hynkel and the Jewish barber,
The Great Dictator has its own dualism reflecting the medium of film
and its relationship to the sound format. The barber, though he
speaks, is essentially still an embodiment of the silent Tramp, using
his body to express and communicate in a way that Chaplin's
audience would be familiar. Hynkel, on the other hand, with his
mockeries of Hitler's speeches in a shrieking voice, microphones
always pointed at him, is associated with sound and what Chaplin
sees as a kind of oppressiveness in sound. Sound in The Great
Dictator is always interrupting, jutting out and stomping on top of
reason and beauty. The dichotomy between sound and silence is
excellently rendered in a classic Chaplin joke, where the barber
bursts into a room and pantomimes a warning to his fugitive friend.
"Did you tell him?" Paulette Goddard, again Chaplin's leading lady,
asks. "Yes." The virtues of pantomime acting have been lost in a
talking head world, something sad but nevertheless ample
ammunition for a great joke.
Other scenes in the picture relay the glories of silent movies, and
how the bodies inhabiting the frame are indeed like dancers, the
consonance of movement being like music, asking us to listen – with
our eyes. A long scene with Hynkel dancing alone with an inflated
globe is immediately followed by the barber shaving a man's face in
rhythm to a Brahms Hungarian dance. Ultimately, I think that
Chaplin believes that "listening with our eyes" makes us
participatory viewers, active in the make believe world rather than
lazy, automatic, and passive – and, like a fascist audience or a
Milgrims control group, susceptible to manufactured political hatred.
The very last scene's last word, uttered by the barber who has
unwittingly been mistaken for Hynkel and so has taken his place at
the microphone-laden podium, is "Listen!" And what should we be
listening to? A future of love, hope, and sunshine – visually
abstracted as light breaks through the clouds, the image and
consolation again going beyond language. The Great Dictator
captures the best of both worlds.