by Mark Cousins
Chaplin directed his first feature The Kid in 1921. It tells the story of an unmarried mother (played by Chaplin regular Edna Purviance) who is forced to abandon her baby son. Chaplin’s tramp finds him and brings him up. Aged five the boy (Jackie Coogan) works for his foster father, breaking windows so that Chaplin can reglaze them. Eventually the kid is taken away to an orphanage by the social services, Chaplin fights to get him back and the situation is resolved ambiguously. Coogan gave one of the freshest child performances in movies to this date.
It is possible to see The Kid and hardly laugh. Indeed this is true of much of Chaplin, but it is impossible to ignore his deeply felt work. Some of the imagery of The Kid, for example, derives directly from Chaplin’s own childhood. The street lamps are modelled on those in the London of his youth and the gas meter takes shillings rather than quarters. The room inhabited by father and son is based on one that Chaplin lived in as a boy. During the year of filming, Chaplin refined and deepened moments, weaving them together with innovative detail. The tramp father-figure wants to do well by the child and attempts to teach him to live in a civilized way. At one point he fashions a nightgown out of an old blanket and, so inventive is Chaplin as director and actor, we somehow see a cosy nightgown before our eyes. When finally released, The Kid was a huge hit, taking $2.5 million at the box office.
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The locations and styling of The Kid derived in part from Chaplin’s childhood memories. Director: Charlie Chaplin. USA, 1921.
Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (USA, 1925), City Lights (USA, 1931), Modern Times (USA, 1936) and The Great Dictator (USA, 1940), a satire on Adolf Hitler, made him one of the most influential filmmakers of the first four decades of movie history. George Bernard Shaw called him “the only genius developed in motion pictures”. Chaplin changed not only the imagery of cinema, but also its sociology and grammar. In the Soviet Union they admired what they saw as his social criticism, which contributed to rumours that he was a communist. This resulted in his being denied re-entry into America in 1952, his adoptive home of forty years, after a trip to the English premiere of his film, Limelight (USA, 1952). Such was the mark left by Chaplin that many subsequent comedians adopted a uniform to express their comic persona. In France, from the late 1940s onward, Jacques Tati followed in Chaplin’s footsteps, varying his schema as fastidiously as had his mentor. In Italy during the 1940s and1950s, the Neapolitan comedian Toto, who didn’t have a uniform but whose work drew its poignancy from the pathos of Chaplin, was a huge star. Also in Italy, the actress Giulietta Masina gave doe eyed, child-like performances in La Strada/The Road (Italy, 1954) and Le notti di Cabiria/The Nights of Cabiria (Italy, 1957) which derived directly from Chaplin. More interestingly, Jean-Pierre Léaud, a great actor of the 1960s and subsequently, performed at the fast speed of Chaplin in his silent films and, when turning a corner sometimes decelerated with a hopping skid as Chaplin did when chased by a villain.
Chaplin’s influence was even more direct on Harold Lloyd. The Nebraskan son of a photographer, Lloyd débuted, aged nineteen, in a 1912 Edison movie, The Old Monk’s Tale. In the subsequent years, he tried and failed to find a comic persona as rich as Chaplin’s. After starring in over 100 short comedies over four years and on the brink of retiring, he and his producer tried him in large, round dark-framed glasses, the first element of his screen persona.5 It would be five years of more films and more trial-and-error before this fully emerged – an athletic, ballsy dreamer, both aggressive and lyrical; a mixture of a jock and a nerd. “The cunning thought behind all this was to reverse the Chaplin outfit … All his clothes were too large, mine were too small.” But it was not a simple reversal. Lloyd’s comic presence was as rich as Chaplin’s. Although he did not take a director credit for his films, he was the driving force behind them and frequently vetoed pieces of action as well as camera angles. On screen, his persona was apparently meek, but would explode suddenly with force and anger. He was an unpredictable boy next door.
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Both the costume and facial expressions of Giulietta Masina in La Strada, reveal the continuing influence of Chaplin’s pathos, more than three decades after The Kid. Director: Federico Fellini. Italy, 1954.
Lloyd is remembered today for the “human fly” stunts that became his trademark. Safety Last (USA, 1923) charts the arrival in town of a hick, who gets a lowly job in a big department store, but pretends to his girlfriend back home that he is the manager. When business fails in the store he concocts a publicity scam: someone will climb the exterior of the building. His double hubris falls flat when he is forced to do the climb. The film was based on Lloyd’s idea — though its thrills had touches of Sennet’s Keystone, where Lloyd had worked several times — a foolhardy one since he suffered from vertigo and had lost a thumb and fore-finger in an accident with a bomb with a lit fuse while filming Haunted Spooks (USA, 1920). The early deception scenes are reasonably inventive, but Lloyd’s twenty-minute climb at the end of the film engenders applause in cinemas to this day for its ingenious vertical choreography. Floor after floor, with the street below almost always visible in shot, Lloyd encounters ropes, guns, nets, a dog, a mouse, a plank and a clock. He did most of the climbing himself without trick photography and with just a narrow platform out of shot below. When the mouse crawls up his leg, Lloyd wriggles hilariously on a narrow shelf. As he finally reaches the top of the building he is struck on the head by a wind gauge, teeters, dances and reels around the edge of the roof defying gravity. Eventually he falls but, as his ankle has been caught in a flag pole rope (48), he swings in a huge arc across the front of the building, over the bustling street way below, in a crescendo of action, upwards into the arms of his waiting sweetheart, Mildred Davis, whom he was shortly to marry and who remained with him until her death in 1969. This indelible moment of 1920s comedy is mysteriously orchestrated, a beautiful idea made incarnate. The most meticulous director working in the late 1920s, Japan’s Yazujiro Ozu, was deeply influenced by Lloyd.6
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Harold Lloyd broke new ground with his athletic but refined stunts. This roof-top scene from Safety Last, in which he has just been hit over the head by a wind gauge, was the climax of a gravity-defiying climb. USA, 1923.
Lloyd’s films did better box-office business than those of Chaplin and during the 1920s he made eleven features in contrast to Chaplin’s four. More technically dazzling and experimental than either of these filmmakers was the unsmiling Buster Keaton. The Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca described him: “His sad infinite eyes … are like the bottom of a glass, like a mad child’s. Very ugly. Very beautiful. Ostrich’s eyes. Human eyes in the exact balance of melancholy.”7
Born Joseph Frank Keaton in Kansas in 1895, he got his nickname Buster from world famous escapologist, Harry Houdini. At first he did not like movies, thinking they were all on a par with the boxing films shown at Tally’s Phonograph Palace. However, in 1917 an event took place which changed his attitude. While visiting a film studio in Manhattan, he met Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, a comic performer and director who became a lifelong influence. Arbuckle allowed Keaton to inspect a camera and so interested was he in its technology, that he nearly “climbed into it”, according to his biographer.
After making fifteen short films with Arbuckle, Keaton, who still had a smiling persona in these early days, started directing his own short comedies. One Week (USA, 1920), about a week in the life of a newly married couple, was a revelation. In a key sequence, their lopsided house is whirled around by a tornado, and Keaton is somehow catapulted through the building to its other side. In another, Keaton puts his hand in front of the camera to protect his wife’s modesty as she takes a bath. The Playhouse (USA, 1921) is even more inventive. While at the theatre, Keaton discovers that it is entirely staffed and its pro-duction performed by himself as stagehands, musicians, conductor, actors and an audience of mixed sexes (49) and ages. In order to achieve these effects, the film had to be shot, masked, rewound and re-exposed with unparall
eled precision, constantly building up composite images on the negative.
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Actor, director and writer Buster Keaton plays both characters in this theatre scene from The Playhouse. The precision required showed Keaton’s mastery of the technicalities of the medium. USA, 1921.
In 1921, Buster’s friend Arbuckle was accused and then twice acquitted of manslaughter after a woman he was said to have raped at a party — Virginia Rappe — died of a raptured bladder. The story created headlines around the world; Arbuckle’s career was finished and he died eleven years later. In response to this scandal actor-director Wallace Reid’s morphine addiction and the murder of director William Desmond Taylor, a terrified film industry set up, in 1922, a self-regulatory body headed by Postmaster-General Will H. Hays, whose remit was to censor sexual and violent imagery, stories and themes. Dubbed the Hays Office in the late 1920s, the organization drew up a strict line of prohibitions known as the Hays Code, which, together with religous pressure groups such as the Catholic Legion of Decency, inhibited Hollywood’s realistic treatment of sexuality, race, and social problems for nearly three decades. The otherworldly innocence of American closed romantic realism in the ensuing decades can be attributed, in part, to these no-go areas, as can the tone of moral denunciation in the work of directors such as Cecil B. De Mille, who would sometimes depict sexual and decadent scenes in his films, but who would punish his characters for indulging in such behaviour. The Hays Code was eroded in the 1950s, but remained intact until the mid 1960s.
Keaton’s success in short films led to features, each extravagantly physical, exacting and architectural. The scenario alone of Our Hospitality (USA, 1923) is brilliant: Buster is in the home of a family intent on murdering him. However, their Southern hospitality forbids them to be anything other than kind to him while he remains their guest. So he is trapped in the strained embrace of his hosts.
A scene omitted from The Navigator (USA, 1924) illustrates Keaton’s inventive discipline. While his character is welding the submerged hull of a ship, he notices that huge shoals of fish are colliding and so becomes an ocean floor traffic policeman as he directs one shoal to wait as the other swims by. In order to stage this visual gag, he had 1500 rubber fish manufactured and mounted on a lattice that would make them appear to swim in front of the camera. The edited gag was shown in the film’s trailer and had the audience in stitches of laughter, but when it was incorporated in the final film, raised not a single giggle. This was because as Buster was doing his underwater point duty, the heroine was above, alone on the ship and being approached by cannibals. The audience was therefore too tense and cared too much about the girl to laugh at Keaton’s surreal dalliance down below. When tension and laughter were part of the same scene, as in Lloyd’s Safety Last, they worked in combination. However, when they were intercut in this sequence, they detracted from each other. Keaton’s response was to cut the expensive joke.
Keaton learnt how to use comic anticipation to great effect in The General (USA, 1926), in which he plays a Southern train driver whose train and girl are stolen while he is still on board. For the first half of the film, he travels north to the thieves hideout and in the second, reunited with his girl, escapes south again on the locomotive. All the visual jokes and set-ups in the first section are repeated and amplified in reverse order in the second half. The audience realizes the pattern. The film’s climax is, according to Walter Kerr, “the most stunning visual event ever arranged for a comedy, perhaps for any kind of film.” Keaton has returned the train to his native South and as the Northern enemy armies advance, he sets fire to a strategically important bridge. As their train crosses it (50), the burning bridge cracks under the weight of the engine, which rolls and topples into the river. No trick shots were used in this sequence and the train wreck was visible for years to come in Cottage Grove, Oregon. This scene is the best example of what could be called “the sublime” in 1920s cinema, that feeling of awe, verging on terror, engendered by the scale of the film’s production values. The sublime was attainable for several reasons. Labour in the US at this time was cheap, Wall Street had not crashed, imaginations were extravagant and sometimes uncapped and studios had not yet become excessively wary of the scope of directors’ dreams.
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The scale of silent comic cinema is even more impressive in the era of computer-generated imagery. Here, a real train crashes through a real Oregon bridge in the climax of Keaton’s The General. USA, 1926.
Unlike Lloyd, Keaton’s box-office returns did not match the scale of his productions. He was sacked by MGM and eventually became an alcoholic and a gag writer for films such as A Southern Yankee (USA, 1948) and Neptune’s Daughter (USA, 1949). By the 1950s prints of Our Hospitality and The General were lost, but in 1952 the British actor, James Mason, now owner of Keaton’s house, found copies of each in a hidden cupboard. The films started to circulate and in 1965 Keaton attended a retrospective of his work at the Venice film festival, which was greeted with standing ovations. He died the next year.
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Buster Keaton’s interest in machinery and how things are constructed was captured well in this Soviet poster for The General.
Like Chaplin, Keaton was popular in the Soviet Union (51), and the rigorous structure of his films, their feeling for space and land, was greatly admired. His influence can be seen in Arsenal (Soviet Union, 1929), one of the greatest Soviet works. More so even than Chaplin, Keaton’s spatial humour anticipated the long takes of Jacques Tati in France. He succeeded in fusing entertainment values with cinematic invention, which edified the industrial approach to filmmaking. Less than a decade after all the elements of closed romantic realism had fallen into place, the surrealism and improbable ballet movements of America’s great comedy directors were stretching it to its elastic limits.
REJECTING CLOSED ROMANTIC REALISM
It was not only erudite critics like Henry Miller who disparaged studio filmmaking in Hollywood and elsewhere. Directors felt steamrollered, stars felt degraded, writers such as William Faulkner and Raymond Chandler drank to forget how they were prostituting themselves, and émigrés from other film cultures such as Greta Garbo, Mauritz Stiller, F.W. Murnau and Otto Preminger were frustrated by the industry’s barbarity. Apart from the stand-alone exceptions such as Chaplin, Lloyd and Keaton, what really marks the 1920s world expansion of style is its dissidence. Just as the clear, narrative, eye-line matched, shot-reverse-shot grammar of closed romantic realism had fallen into place by about 1918, filmmakers around the world started to show their discontent with it. Mainstream, popular entertainment cinema continued to wow audiences in many countries, but the rest of this chapter will describe the seven major alternatives to closed romantic realism which emerged in these years. The filmmakers involved in these alternatives were neither the most talked about nor the most influential, but between them they established tentative possibilities for making movies outside the conventional norms. Some of them were driven by the fact that closed romantic realism did not allow comedy to be sufficiently experimental. For example, the Scandinavians, Indian and American filmmakers, the naturalists, it wasn’t realistic enough to capture social truths. For a group of key French directors, the Impressionists, it was too conventional to register the fleeting perception of reality. For so-called German Expressionists, in contrast to the Scandinavians, it was too enslaved to surface realism and did not delve into the primitive and exotic hidden life of people. For the Soviets, it was politically conservative and its editing was bourgeois. For the most artistically minded filmmakers, it could not cope with abstract questions. For the Japanese, it continued to be a Western novelty, as irrelevant to that country’s frontal films and benshi commentaries as it had been in the previous decade.
The comedy filmmakers outside the Hollywood system were the least dissident of these seven groups. The female characters of Chaplin, Lloyd and Keaton were never well developed and, as we move away from the sexual innocence of their work, we fi
nd in the sexual comedies of the dissidents, more innovation than American censorship would allow after the Arbuckle affair. The undoubted master of this approach was the Berlin-born son of a tailor, Ernst Lubitsch. The former screen performer was twenty-six when he made his first significant film in Germany, Die Augen der Mummie Ma/The Eyes of the Mummy (Germany, 1918) which began with the mocking caption, “This film had a big budget, that is two palm trees, and was shot on locations in Egypt, that is in the Rudesdorf limestone mountains [near Berlin].” This introduction set the tone of the wryest, most ironic career of any filmmaker in this period. He had his first commercial success with Die Austernprinzessin/The Oyster Princess (Germany, 1919) and received rave reviews for the same year’s Madame Dubarry/Passion (Germany), in which Pola Negri played one of Louis XV’s mistresses. His reputation for visual piquancy, the cinematic equivalent of a raised eyebrow or a tart look, was so quickly established that Mary Pickford invited him to America to direct her films. Before embarking on his American career, he made his last German comedy, Die Bergkatze/The Mountain Cat (Germany, 1921), in which a rampant lieutenant gets a new posting and must leave town. His legions of former lovers mob him and a group of their daughters wave goodbye to their father in a scene filled with the sexual innuendo that would soon be banned in Hollywood. In transit, a robber’s daughter falls in love with him and in an astonishing dream sequence, he gives her his heart, which she eats, then snowmen dance. Lubitsch’s masking of parts of the screen and surreal production design in The Mountain Cat was particularly daring and when he went to Hollywood he continued to tweak his films in a similarly subversive way. For example, in Forbidden Paradise (USA, 1924), a stand-off between a chancellor and disloyal officers is portrayed in a series of close-ups. One officer pulls a sword on the chancellor, who in response reaches into his jacket. The camera cuts to the officer who has suddenly stopped the challenge. Perhaps the chancellor brandishes a more impressive weapon? No, he has pulled out a cheque book. The confrontation will be resolved in a more business-like fashion.