A DOG’S LIFE (Charles Chaplin, 1918)

Charles Chaplin’s A Dog’s Life has three settings: the urban vacant lot where the homeless Tramp sleeps with Scraps, his cherished canine companion; the dance hall, where the Tramp meets the girl of his dreams, who is fired for not “putting out” for the male clientele (the place is named the Green Lantern—a wink away from its being the Red Lantern); the street outside.
     When the Tramp desperately tries to get a job at an employment office, his attempts are thwarted by other applicants, who usurp his place on line. Used to being bullied, he rescues others who are bullied: Scraps, from a fight with other dogs; the girl. A thief chooses the Tramp’s sleep-spot to bury a victim’s bill-filled pocketbook—and, on all fours digging with his paws, resembling a dog in the process; Scraps digs up the find, which the Tramp takes as serendipitous—a redressing of the world’s unfairness, which the fantastic presence of multiple vicious police officers conflates with the bullying. The thief steals back the money, but, fueled by a dream of sharing a patch of farm with the girl, the Tramp schemes to claim again the loot as his.
     Writer-director Chaplin, en route to his masterpieces, devises a motif that symbolizes the Tramp’s precarious existence: things with one or more holes in it. One example is the hole in the seat of his baggy pants, out of which Scraps’s own tail spiritedly dangles after the Tramp has hidden her in his pants. In the dance hall, holes in a drape enable the Tramp to steal back the money from the thief by adding his own hands to the knocked-out accomplice across the table. Gunshot holes in a dish, with the Tramp ducking for his life, continue the motif.

A COUNTESS FROM HONG KONG (Charles Chaplin, 1966)

Charles Chaplin’s final film, A Countess from Hong Kong, was initially drubbed for lacking the inspiration of his earlier masterpieces. Andrew Sarris analyzed this assault by “critics” as their self-serving “power play” and called the unfairly maligned film “the quintessence of everything Chaplin has ever felt.” But even Sarris, while praising one scene for being “as comically exhilarating as anything Chaplin has ever done,” found the film “far from Chaplin’s past peaks.” I don’t know. Even with its use of widescreen and color, I consider it a masterpiece.
     The great moment to which Sarris refers involves a U.S. dignitary’s valet in bed, completely concealed by the blanket he is under. Chaplin himself may have replaced the actor playing Hudson (Patrick Cargill, a hoot) for this fantastic moment. At the very least, Chaplin is slyly nudging us to realize that he is thoroughly invested in this explosion of slapstick that sets the bed in hilarious motion.
     Marlon Brando deftly plays Ogden Stewart, a U.S. diplomat whose shipboard suite Natascha, a white Russian emigré-turned-prostitute, invades as stowaway, generating, for her to be hidden, an explosive riot of opened and closed doors, including rushed movements and the attendant sounds. In one of her best performances, Sophia Loren surpasses Brando, whose Ogden, after considerable resistance, falls in love with her Natascha. Chaplin himself charmingly plays an innocently intrusive crew member, while Tippi Hedren is wonderful as Martha, Ogden’s wife. The lightly sentimental score, which captures the vulnerability and suspense of the central romance, is Chaplin’s.
     The ship’s destination is the United States, which barred his re-entry after Chaplin had made Limelight in Britain, his birth country, fifteen years earlier. All his ache is invested in Natascha’s attempt to make it into America sans passport or visa.

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THE KID (Charles Chaplin, 1921)

Writer-director Charles Chaplin made cinema’s most brilliant satirical comedies, works of genius; but his first feature film, The Kid, has little to recommend it. Obliquely echoing Oliver Twist (the transmutation of the Dickens material is much the most interesting aspect of the film), The Kid shows Chaplin’s Tramp finding and raising an abandoned baby born out of wedlock. Five years later, the boy is kidnapped and returned to his mother, who has since become rich.
     While sitting on the curb with the discarded infant in his arms, Charlie opens the storm drain grating and considers dropping the bundle in—a moment promising a great film. Not only is it hilarious, but it underscores the additional stress that children bring to the poor. Of course, Charlie does not have to face the social stigma that the mother would have faced—and the distancing provided by his split-second contemplation of infanticide, followed by Charlie’s assuming responsibility for the boy’s care, allows us to take in this distinction between mother and adoptive father. Why couldn’t the film have continued in this alert, incisive vein? As it is, only one other aspect of the father-son relationship, when the boy is five, revisits this high standard of comedy: the pair’s teamwork as the boy breaks neighborhood windows with stones (after an hilarious windup for each pitch) and his father trots along, huckstering and installing new window glass! For the most part, though, The Kid consists of one unfunny sequence after another, including a flat, leaden one in which Charlie dreams that the tenement block is some sort of heaven.
     Chaplin poured into the film his sorrow over the death of his infant son and a recollection of his own childhood poverty. Street, apartment, flophouse: all these are threadbare, grimy, realistic.

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THE PILGRIM (Charles Chaplin, 1923)

Religious lunacy and hypocrisy in the American landscape: these are Charles Chaplin’s targets in his sharp, satirical, refreshing The Pilgrim.
     Charlie’s introduction to us is his image on a wanted poster; Charlie has escaped from prison. His striped prison clothes are discovered by a bush. Hilarious cut: Next we see—or, I should say, first we see—Charlie walking down a street, feigning meditation, in his parson’s garb. When he buys a train ticket, he grabs hold of the cage bars by reflex. Charlie will have to break bad habits in order to prevail in his current disguise. When an eloper approaches him to wed himself and his sweetie, Charlie, fearing capture, runs away. Ironically, his own awakened romantic heart is what will transform his “criminal” nature, moving even the sheriff who captures him to release him into Mexico at the Texas border.
     It is in Devil’s Gulch, Texas, that Charlie masquerades as the new pastor, the Reverend Mr. Pim, trying to steal the collection boxes and pantomiming a ridiculous sermon—but any more ridiculous than a real church sermon?—about David and Goliath, in which he identifies as David vis-à-vis the America that oppresses and incarcerates him. The congregation is confused by Charlie’s antics, but a young boy who has been bullied throughout the service by his bourgeois mother applauds wildly.
     “America is here or nowhere,” British author Thomas Carlyle said when asked why, given his love of freedom, he did not move there. At the end of Stagecoach (1939) John Ford suggests that “America” is always somewhere else—in Mexico, as it happens. To Chaplin at the end of The Pilgrim, it turns out there is no America. Nearly thirty years later, this tragic insight proved prophetic in the writer-director-star’s own political life.

MONSIEUR VERDOUX (Charles Chaplin, 1947)

I have just added this, Chaplin’s own favorite among his films, to my 100 Greatest English-Language Films List.

Henri Landru had been guillotined for murdering eight women. Fifteen years later, in 1937, Henri Verdoux met the same fate, with half a dozen more victims to his credit—or debit. From the grave, this “mass killer” speaks to us as disembodied voiceover, describing himself as having been “for thirty years an honest bank clerk until the Depression of 1930, in which year I found myself unemployed. It was then I became occupied in liquidating members of the opposite sex. This I did as strictly a business enterprise, to support a home and a family,” that is to say, his wheelchair-bound wife and young son. This modern Bluebeard, actually, juggled numerous marriages simultaneously, all to those whom he murdered for their money so that the only marriage and family that he cared about could survive in these “desperate times.” Henri was too old to find other employment.
     From an idea by Orson Welles, Charles Chaplin’s tartly funny black comedy, with slapstick interludes, reflects on the recently ended Second World War; looking ahead ten years past Verdoux’s execution, it assumes the form of a political statement. Its centerpiece is yet another of Chaplin’s dazzlingly brilliant performances, this time as a dapper, world-weary cynic who ultimately believes that he did not murder enough people, because, as he puts it, “[n]umbers sanctify.” Through Verdoux, Chaplin is taking aim at war, in particular, the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Relatedly, he is aiming at capitalism, which ruthlessly cuts employees loose when it has no further use for them. Business and war are combined in an unseen figure in the background of the plot: a munitions manufacturer.
     “I’ve never had rum!” En route to his beheading, Henri thus has a new experience: Chaplin’s quiet affirmation of the beauty of life.

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