A man that has once described himself as one thing, and one thing only: a clown.
Looking at Charlie Chaplin’s early life -he was born Charles Spencer Chaplin to parents, Charles and Hannah, who were both music hall entertainers- we see that his family life left much to be desired. Upon his parents’ separation before he was three years old, he and his half-brother Sydney, were left to live with their mother, who was their sole provider, since their father had stopped paying child support quite immediately. The family was very poor since the mother’s illness hindered her ability to perform. Charlie first went on stage at the age of five, to fill in for his mother who was unable to sing at the time. He writes about these times in his book, My Autobiography (page 22):
“When the fates deal in human destiny, they heed neither pity nor justice. Thus they dealt with Mother. She never regained her voice... our circumstances turned from bad to worse. Although Mother was careful and had saved a little money, that very soon vanished... from three comfortable rooms we moved to two, then into one, our belongings dwindling and the neighborhoods into which we moved growing progressively drabber.
She turned to religion, in the hope, I suppose, that it would restore her voice. She regularly attended Christ Church in the Westminster Bridge Road, and every Sunday I was made to sit through Bach's organ music and to listen with aching impatience to the Reverend F. B. Meyer's fervent and dramatic voice echoing down the nave like shuffling feet. His orations must have been appealing, for occasionally I would catch Mother quietly wiping away a tear, which slightly embarrassed me.
Well do I remember Holy Communion on one hot summer's day, and the cool silver containing delicious grape juice that passed along the congregation--and Mother's gentle restraining hand when I drank too much of it. And how relieved I was when the Reverend closed the Bible, for it meant that the sermons would soon end and they would start prayers and the final hymn.
Since Mother had joined the church she seldom saw her theatrical friends. That world had evaporated, had become only a memory. They interim of one year seemed a lifetime of travail. Now we existed in cheerless twilight; jobs ere hard to find and Mother, untutored in everything but the stage, was further handicapped... Occasionally she obtained work nursing, but such employment was rare and of short duration... she was expert with her needle and able to earn a few shillings dressmaking or members of the church. It was barely enough to support the three of us. Because of Father's drinking, his theatrical engagements became irregular, as did his payments of ten shillings a week.”
When he was seven his mother was put in a lunatic asylum and the children were sent back to live with their father, who was an alcoholic who didn’t pay much interest to his children, and his mistress, Louise; though later she was released and took over the children once again. Charles Chaplin Sr. died of alcohol when Charlie was twelve, so when Hannah was once again put in the Cane Hill Asylum, the boys were left in a workhouse in South London, where they worked for several weeks before Charlie attended Lambeth School for Orphans and Destitute Children, and Sydney was sent on a training ship, Exmouth, that was designed to train young boys for seafaring jobs.
Chaplin’s entered the entertainment world rather easily. Sydney returned from sea in 1903, with a will to go on stage after having an amount of success in ships’ entertainments. With his brothers encouragement Charlie offered himself to a West End agent, and instantly found a job as Billy the Page in a touring company of Sherlock Holmes. For more than two years he toured in that role with various companies; and “his career as a legitimate actor was crowned when he was called to London to play Billy in a revival at the Princess's Theatre, starring the co-author and creator of the role, the famous American star William C. Gillette”. By the time he was 17 he was being given top roles as a comedian.
In 1908 Sydney asked Fred Karno to take on Charlie. Sydney himself had been working with Karno, in his “fun factory” -in which he trained young artists, wrote and rehearsed the sketches, and designed the scenery and costumes- for about two years and had shined pretty quickly thanks to his skills as a performer and comedy writer. Charlie signed a contract after a going through a brief trial period. In 1910 he was chosen to be sent on a Karno Company tour of North America; that lasted from September 1910 to June 1912.
The New World was an exciting place for Chaplin, it was also a place of creative freedom, since he was not under Karno’s supervision. As the company travelled from New York to California, Charlie found the chance to reveal his creativity in making over what he called inferior comedy. When the tour was over he spent four months at his home in England before happily heading out for a second tour in America. During this second tour he was spotted on stage by a representative of a newly formed film company: Keystone Pictures Studio, which he signed a year’s contract to work with. It was during the second film he made with Keystone (Mabel’s Strange Predictament, though the character was first seen by the public in the movie Kid Auto Races which was released earlier.) that the famous Little Tramp came to be:
“I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat. Everything a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large.” - Charlie Chaplin
“I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the make-up made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked onto the stage he was fully born.” - Charlie Chaplin
Working at Keystone (which was pretty much a film factory, working with no scenario -"we get an idea then follow the natural sequence of events until it leads up to a chase which is the essence of our comedy" (Mack Sennett, chief of Keystone Studios)- in order to turn out eight films a month.) turned out to not be the most pleasant of experiences for Chaplin. He hated his first film (Making a Living - 1914), grew tired of the directors, and even the studio’s leading lady (see: Mabel Normand)- who he found to lack the sophisticated comedy he had learned with Karno. After his first three months he convinced Sennett to let him direct his own movies.
“The Keystone films were Chaplin's film school: in each we see him experimenting with some aspect of film technique -sometimes fast cutting, sometimes leisurely extended takes, sometimes in the way that the shots relate to each other. The New Janitor marks a leap in narrative structure and the first emergence of sentiment alongside his comedy. With Dough and Dynamite he shocked Sennett by making a film in two reels instead of the customary one.”
When the contract with Keystone came to an end, Chaplin signed with the Essanay Film Company, which offered a more favorable contract. The Essanay films were more ambitious and long-running than Keystone’s slapstick comedies. During his time there he made five movies and began to form his own stock company; including Edna Pruviance (who was his leading lady for seven years and his lover) and comic villains Leo White and Bud Jamison.
In 1916, he moved on to Mutual Film Company, signing a contract for twelve two reel movies. Chaplin was given his own studio (The Lone Star Studio) and almost complete creative control. He worked with his own technical unit and his stock company, which continued to grow. Two of the new additions, Henry Bergman and Albert Austin, would remain with him for decades. All movies he made in his Mutual period became classics, and he later referred to this time as the best year of his life.
After his contract with Mutual films came to an end Chaplin signed with First National Exhibitors Circuit, for eight films, produced independently, within a year. Though, due to various problems the movies were delivered in four years. The studio was expecting short comedies, like the one’s he did with Mutual; but Chaplin used this time of control mostly for feature-length movies, his first feature-length being The Kid(1921).
The Kid, by itself, took over a year to produce, and was Chaplin’s masterpiece at the time. It was the first feature-length comedy (an hour and fifty minutes) film that combined both comedy and drama. It is supposed that the subject of the movie was influenced his son, Norman Spencer, who died in 1919, a few days after he was born. It also has indicators of Chaplin’s childhood; the poverty and struggle, the portrayal of welfare workers. Vaudeville performer Jackie Coogan, became the first major child movie star.
In 1919, while still working with First National, Chaplin along with his closest friend Douglas Fairbanks, Fairbanks’ wife Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith co-founded, a film distribution company, United Artists, on which’s board he remained on until the early ‘50s. This development meant complete independence as a film-maker.
The first movie Chaplin made with UA was A Woman of Paris(1923), in which he only had a brief cameo role, as a porter in a train station. It is assumed that Chaplin wanted to stay behind the camera and focus on directing since this was his first drama and that he wanted to show that Edna Pruviance, could indeed act without the Tramp by her side. Although appreciated by critics, the movie was a failure in the box office. Audiences were reluctant to watch a movie without Chaplin in it.
The follow-up feature to A Woman of Paris, was The Gold Rush in 1925. Chaplin has noted that this is the film he wants to be remembered with, more than just once. In Gold Rush, the beloved Little Tramp returns; and makes his way to Alaska to take part in the Alaska Gold Rush (a frenzy of immigration for gold prospecting, to Yukon, Canada; after gold had been found by the Klondike River late in the 19th century). The Tramp upon coming to a gold rush town, abandons the idea of prospecting, and gets a job keeping another prospector’s cabinet. In the meanwhile he falls in love with a pretty saloon girl, and mistakes her to have fallen for him. It is a bittersweet film, managing to be funny despite the poverty, cold, loneliness and despair that it involves
After that came The Circus(1928), which was nominated for Academy Award for Best Leading Actor and the short-lived Academy Award for Best Director of a Comedy Picture. But the Academy later took Charlie Chaplin out of the competitive categories by giving him a Special Award "For versatility and genius in acting, writing, directing and producing The Circus".
Chaplin made two other silent films after this, although sound films had begun to be made. The first of these is City Lights(1931) and the second is Modern Times(1936), though in Modern Times there is an amount of talk – usually coming from inanimate objects. City Lights too, was not completely silent. Although it contained no dialogue the film’s soundtrack contained synchronized music, sound effects and unintelligible sounds that mocked speech patterns.
Modern Times’ the last movie that the Little Tramp makes a silent film appearance.
“Chaplin began preparing the film in 1934 as his first "talkie", and went as far as writing a dialogue script and experimenting with some sound scenes. However, he soon abandoned these attempts and reverted to a silent format with synchronized sound effects. The dialogue experiments confirmed his long-standing conviction that the universal appeal of the Tramp would be lost if the character ever spoke on screen. Indeed, this film marks the Tramp's last screen appearance, and is arguably the final film of the silent era. Most of the film was shot at "silent speed", 18 frames per second, which when projected at "sound speed", 24 frames per second, makes the slapstick action appear even more frenetic. Available prints of the film now correct this. The film was lengthy recorded - film sessions began on October 11, 1934 and ended on August 30, 1935.
Although not a "talkie", Modern Times includes a synchronized sound track featuring a musical score - composed by Chaplin, foley effects, singers and voices coming from radios, loudspeakers and a Telescreen in the washroom. Towards the end of the film the Tramp's voice is heard for the first and only time as he ad-libs pseudo-French and Italian gibberish to the tune of Léo Daniderff's popular song Je cherche après Titine.
The reference to drugs seen in the prison sequence is somewhat daring for the time (since the production code, established in 1930, forbade the depiction of illegal drug use in films - Chaplin had made drug references before in one of his most famous short films Easy Street, released in 1917.” - Wikipedia
For a long time Chaplin movies were not openly political; other than the Tramp’s struggle with poverty and run-ins with law. Yet, beginning with Modern Times, which blamed the desperation for employment and the financial conditions on the efficiencies of modern industrialization, his movies began to contain stronger statements.
The Great Dictator (1940), Chaplin’s first dialogue film, is an open act of defiance against Hitler and Nazism. It was an unusual movie for it’s time, for when it was being made USA was still in peace with Germany, and had not yet entered the Second World War. Therefore it struck up a reaction in America, yet was received well in Britain. The long-winded closing speech the Jewish Barber, who is mistaken for Anenoid Hynkel (The dictator of Tomania, an imitation of Adolf Hitler) makes at the end is enough to tell what the movie speaks of, in my opinion:
“I'm sorry, but I don't want to be an Emperor - that's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone, if possible -- Jew, gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another; human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there's room for everyone and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone.
The way of life can be free and beautiful.
But we have lost the way.
Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.
The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men, cries out for universal brotherhood for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women, and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.
To those who can hear me I say, "Do not despair." The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass and dictators die; and the power they took from the people will return to the people and so long as men die, liberty will never perish.
Soldiers: Don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel; who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don't hate; only the unloved hate, the unloved and the unnatural.
Soldiers: Don't fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the seventeenth chapter of Saint Luke it is written, "the kingdom of God is within man" -- not one man, nor a group of men, but in all men, in you, you the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.
Then, in the name of democracy, let us use that power! Let us all unite!! Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give you the future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie! They do not fulfill their promise; they never will. Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people!! Now, let us fight to fulfill that promise!! Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness.
Soldiers: In the name of democracy, let us all unite!!!
Hannah, can you hear me? Wherever you are, look up, Hannah. The clouds are lifting. The sun is breaking through. We are coming out of the darkness into the light. We are coming into a new world, a kindlier world, where men will rise above their hate, their greed and brutality.
Look up, Hannah. The soul of man has been given wings, and at last he is beginning to fly. He is flying into the rainbow -- into the light of hope, into the future, the glorious future that belongs to you, to me, and to all of us. Look up, Hannah. Look up.”
The following film Monsieur Verdoux(1947)’s script was inspired by an idea of Orson Welles’ and by the case of serial killer Henri Désiré Landru. Henri Verdoux is a hardworking banker, who gets laid-off from work and begins marrying and then killing wealthy widows in order to provide for his wife and child. At one point this backfires, he gets caught and sent to the guillotine upon dismissing his killings as no worse than the highly praised killing of large numbers in every war. Chaplin had already been criticized publically for not giving support to the Second World War and the movie was frowned upon in the States, but was rather successful in Europe.
“In the same year that Charlie Chaplin began working on The Great Dictator, the House Un-American Committee begins investigating Charlie Chaplin. At first glance, there seems to be no reason for this -- until the second glance. Earlier Charlie Chaplin had done his patriotic part in raising money for the war effort, alongside his long time friends Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford -- raising large amounts of money for the war. Charlie Chaplin was a lifelong pacifist, but he was also a realist who saw that the aggression of the Axis powers had to be stopped. In many ways, Charlie Chaplin was politically naive -- such as speaking at fund raisers for the Communist USSR, whom Charlie Chaplin simply saw as our allies in the fight and by suggesting that America immediately open a two front war to help our "friends" in the Soviet Union. These were some of the reasons that the government began keeping tabs on the immigrant film maker - although he worked for all of these years in America, he maintained his British citizenship, and had no intention of becoming an American citizen"
After the rather harsh reactions his last film caused, Chaplin made the less political, more autobiographical, movie Limelight(1952), which told the story of a clown who had grown old and was no longer loved by the audience. It was while promoting Limelight in Britain that he learned that he was not permitted to re-enter the United States, due to his alleged communist sympathies.
“After Limelight, Charlie Chaplin took another vacation to England, wanting to show his new wife and children his native country. Upon leaving the territorial waters of the United States of America, Charlie Chaplin received a cable, informing him that the State Department had rescinded his reentry permit -- effectively locking him out of the country as an undesirable alien. There were many reasons for this -- Charlie Chaplin's unorthodox political views, the false accusation that he was a Communist, and not least of all, money. There would have been an attempt by the federal government to seize Charlie Chaplin's assets, which were enormous. However, his wife Oona returned to the United States, and promptly took all of the liquid assets, as well as liquidating everything she could -- leaving the government without a penny for its' trouble.”
From 1952 on, Chaplin decided to reside in Europe, saying he did not want to return to “that unhappy country”. He settled in Switzerland, which gave better financial conditions for him to remove his assets from the United States.
“I have no further use for America. I wouldn't go back there if Jesus Christ was President.” - Charlie Chaplin
The first movie he made out of America was A King in New York (1957). He found himself working in a studio that was not his own and with collaborators he was not familiar with. Although this proved to be a problem, along with shortage of money and facilities, the film did well in Europe. It was his last political movie, after making it he stated that comedians and clowns should be above politics.
“I remain just one thing, and one thing only, and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician.” - Charlie Chaplin
His last and only movie after that, A Countess from Hong Kong came ten years later, in 1967. It starred Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren and was based on a script he had written in the ‘30s. The film was not a success and upon facing almost universally hostile reviews Chaplin finally began to feel the effects of age (while nearing the tender age of 80).
After this he wrote two autobiographical books, composed music for re-releases of his silent films and even hoped to direct another film starring his daughter Victoria. In 1972 he returned to America, briefly, to accept an honorary Oscar and to discuss the marketing and re-releasing of his films. In 1975 he was given a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II. By this time his age and frailty were very apparent, and early in the morning of Christmas Day 1977, he died in his sleep at his home.
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