Chaplin, the last romantic
Benny Green
The cinema industry spent the season of good cheer expressing grief, either genuine or the other kind, over the death of its most distinguished figure, Charlie Chaplin, yet paradoxically, Chaplin, the most famous and widely-loved film star of all time, was hardly a creature of the cinema at all. Contrary to what has often been written about him, he never really acquired much virtuosity in the technicalities of the cinema art. In particular he was never altogether at ease with the most significant technical advance of his career, the perfecting of the talking picture, an advance he ignored for ten years after audiences had learned to take it for granted, in which quixotic act of defiance he may have been wiser than the industry thought. Chaplin, knowing instinctively that the essence of his art was mimetic, even balletic, held out for as long as was practicable, and by the time he finally succumbed with The Great Dictator, (in Modern Times sound is used only to mock sound), he was already an isolated figure representing a lost age.
Even after he had acquired his amazing range of experience as producerdirector-writer-star-composer-editor, he still seemed not to have mastered the trick of glib, superficial expertise displayed daily by conventional film-makers. To the very end there was something disconcertingly, almost endearingly unconvincing about the day-to-day world as seen through his camera eye. His rooms seemed curiously barren of life, sometimes even of furniture; his streets often looked too deserted, the spectral populations of his Big Cities decimated by some quirk of Chaplin's art which denied is work the verisimilitude of even the most inconsequential B-picture.
For the greatness of Chaplin — and his /hal importance for posterity — is hardly i!inematic at all. It was by one of those ilukes of historical circumstance so outageous as to take the breath away that Thaplin found himself deploying the echnology of one medium, the cinema, to reserve the lineaments of another, the ittlusic Hall, in a one-horse town six 'housand miles away from the grimy iplendours of the old Oxford and the anterbury Music Hall, Perhaps if the oeed of the historical process had been 'aster, it might have been Dan Leno or Attie Tich who ended up fifty years later lutching the bogus baubles of Beverly It so happened it was Chaplin ihose art flowered as the cameras began 4rning, Chaplin who sailed west at the psychological moment, Chaplin who saved the choreography of the Music Hall through his intimacy of relationship with the very cameras which were closing down the halls by the hundred. And the work of salvage continued throughout his life. When in Shoulder Arms he shows us a Tommy in the trenches opening a bottle of wine by holding it up in the expectation of a sniper's bullet, when in City Lights he depicts the anguish of a man unable to go to the lavatory because he is wearing boxing gloves, when in Modern Times he takes an elaborate dive into two inches of water, he is defining the very soul of Music Hall, and he remains to date the only artist of modern times in whose person there resides exclusively a complete folk art.
If there were times when this simple truth became obscured it was often Chaplin's own fault, for he could so ponderously overlay the laughter with social comment as to reduce the witness to a condition of complete aesthetic disarray. The closing speech of The Great Dictator is fustian so blowsy that it sounds like the work of one of Chaplin's enemies parodying his social concern. But the real point about that speech is not that it is badly written, but that it should never have been written at all; Chaplin makes the same statement in mime in the same picture when he shows his demented demagogue taking up a glass of water in mid-speech and pouring the contents inside the front of his own trousers — the slapstick of the Old Mo to bring down a dictator. One day historians will examine the Chaplin case and marvel that any society, even the Hollywood of Louis B. Meyer, could fear such a man as a seditious force. But it did.
If Chaplin really was a revolutionary, then he was an unconscious one, like Dickens, a man with whose attitudes Chaplin has more in common than people have noticed. Like the younger Dickens, Chaplin believed that the world would be improved if only people were more pleasant to each other; like Dickens he believed in the regenerating power of love; he believed a man needed his mother; he believed that childhood is blessed; he believed in the healing balm of laughter; he believed that innocence was not to be defiled, and like Dickens, had some trouble reconciling this latter belief with the romantic inclinations of his private life. The audiences who gazed on these naivetes in his pictures, on his forlorn waifs and his Little Nellish blind girls, put it down to the hearts and-flowers tearjerking of a dead Victorian ethic and forgave him for the same reason as it forgave him his politics, because he moved people to laughter.
That Chaplin understood perfectly what he represented he made clear in two gestures late in life. The first, Limelight, was his attempt to capture on film, once and for all, the music hall experience, and the result was a sorry mess redeemed by interludes of extraordinary brilliance. But who were these sad hobgoblins, the fey damsel, the sad clown who meets the very man going to the theatre to audition for his job, the innocents peering past plump landladies at the inviting waters of the Thames? When Limelight appeared in 1953, popular art had not traded in such symbols for fifty years. Chaplin shows us his Little Nell, crippled by a paralysis whose psychosomatic roots, linked to her sister's prostitution, are severed by the old clown with a few airy diagnostic flourishes. 'Look, I can walk again,' sobs the waif, and the modern sensibility hardly knows where to put its face. Chaplin retrieves the situation only by asserting the authority of comic genius; the violin-piano sketch with Buster Keaton is the finest slapstick sequence in the history of the cinema. It makes Limelight one of the funniest films of all time. And it is pure music hall, music hall's last fond farewell.
Finally in 1964, the most astonishing gesture of all, the Autobiography, a Jekyll-and-Hyde of a book which disintegrates without warning with the departure for New York. But the first seven k chapters, which Chaplin should have had the perception to publish as a separate entity, comprise a masterpiece, one of the greatest accounts of workingclass life ever written. And from it we learn that all his broken clowns are his father and all his sad waifs his mother.
As to the lothario, in chapter four of the Autobiography Chaplin describes how, after his beloved mother, her brain turned by malnutrition, has been removed to an asylum, he comes home to an empty room containing 'a half-filled packet of tea, three-halfpence, some keys and several pawntickets'. Chaplin was all of ten years old at the time, a fact which is interesting in the light of his subsequent susceptibility to a pretty face. The moguls castigated him for that weakness, and may even have been serious about it; with such slobs there is simply no telling. However, where silken dalliance is concerned there is no absolute morality, and a man's appetite for affection is often governed by the extent to which he was deprived of it in childhood. The Autobiography suggests that from the moment his mother was taken away, Chaplin began a lifelong pursuit of those two most seductive of all nebulosities, True Love and Tranquility. One hopes that at last, in Switzerland, he found them,
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