Keepers: The Greatest Films of a Moviegoing Lifetime

by Richard Schickel

  So back to counting—22,250 movies. Not many of them were pleasurable at any level, but you learn as much about film from the bad ones as you do from the good ones. Thankfully, there are enough of the latter to make this book a feasible undertaking. W. H. Auden, in one of his superb critical essays, wrote that masterpieces are for the “High Holidays of the Spirit,” suggesting that the intensity of the responses they engender is not something that we can freely indulge. It would be too much for us, put too much pressure on us. We need the routine, the merely all right, if only as a benchmark against which to measure the extraordinary when it happens along.

  The main thing I want to stress is the pleasure principle. Movies being movies, they exist, first and foremost, to entertain—especially those made in America. A critic from another country, setting out on a task similar to mine, would probably find very little overlap with my list of favorites. Which is all right with me. We are not drawing up a “best” list. All of the movies I’ve chosen as my keepers are expertly made, of course. There are movies among them that are awkward and clumsy yet are still, in their way, fun—and sometimes instructive—to see. At the very least, I want to reward expertise herein. Especially with American films, I want to praise the sheer professionalism of their making. It is such a dominant industry—I sometimes think its chief glory lies in the fact that so much energy and passion and, yes, cleverness are expended on material that is largely tosh. But very often the sheer slickness of the effort leads us to think—at least temporarily—that the movie is better than it actually is, which may (or may not) sort itself out as the years wear on.

  There are other values, of course, in the contemplation of movies, and I intend to attend to them. But if this book is not a pleasure to read and does not trigger some reflection on your part, then it will have failed in its purpose. You are supposed to argue with me—Why this? Why not that? We should agree to disagree, but I hope in a civilized way. Where once we did not take movies seriously enough, we now, I think, oftentimes take them too seriously, arguing our cases too loudly.

  As I have worked on this book, to be honest, its purpose has changed. I didn’t quite realize it at first, but it has become a history—a personalized history, to be sure, but a history nonetheless. Through the lens of my favorite films, I have written the story of the movies as I have perceived them over the years. There are lots of omissions—I couldn’t see everything, and there are plenty of things I don’t want to comment on—and it is deliberately positive in overall tone. I’ve mostly enjoyed my life at the movies, and I’ve only occasionally felt the need to chastise them herein. Life is too short to dwell heavily on their many sins. That’s for another book that I won’t be writing.

  “It’s only a movie, Ingrid,” Alfred Hitchcock famously said (or perhaps wished he had said) to Ingrid Bergman when she pressed him about how she should play a scene or read a line or some such. Well, yes, of course, that’s necessary perspective. But I came to know Hitch in his later years, and I am here to testify that no man ever took movies more seriously than he did. That is true of almost everyone who has spent his life, cynically or idealistically, in their service. To put it simply: Movies are, in some sense, nothing—a pastime, an evening’s entertainment. And yet they are, for quite a few of us, everything; well, almost everything. On that irony this book is poised.

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  Speaking of Silence

  Silent film is, let’s face it, something of an inconvenience to movie history. Mary Pickford once said that it would have been more logical if movies had evolved toward silence instead of the other way around. It’s a rather arresting statement, but I guess she meant that silence implied a removal from reality, one of the limitations on which art normally depends. Opera, dance, even the stage are not “real”; all are highly stylized representations of reality, effective to the degree that their conventions separate these works from raw, unmediated reality. To state the case most radically, silents are, with exceptions, more romantic, more abstract, than talking pictures. I sometimes think they are not movies as we understand the term.

  They obviously partake of some of their values. But notably in their acting styles, and in their preferred genres, they are different from sound movies. For proof of that, you need only look to Chaplin or, indeed, Pickford herself. They are major artists, of course, but I think neither would have had the impact they had if sound had preceded them to the screen.

  Not that, at the time, anyone was complaining. There were, of course, a minority who thought that the movies were silly and stupid and perhaps even immoral, but we can safely say there was, in general, a very high consumer satisfaction with the silents. Throughout the 1910s and into the 1920s, quite a few people were content with that state. There were a number of theoreticians who thought that, far from being a defect, the lack of spoken dialogue was the very thing that set this medium gloriously apart from all the others. By the later twenties, it has been argued by George Lucas, among others, that film had attained a visual sophistication that has not been matched perhaps to our very day. A film like The Crowd (of which more later), with its sophisticated expressionism, argues that point brilliantly—and it was one among many.

  There was, however, a general sense—not really a complaint, more of an unease—that this medium was not yet complete, that sooner or later it would have to talk and sing and wisecrack. And from the time feature-length films became the industry standard, much effort and treasure was expended on marrying sound to film, until that was achieved, first with a series of Warner Bros. shorts and then, of course, with the 1927 feature The Jazz Singer, which was, in truth, only a part talkie and, as a film, about as bad as they come. Panic and greed competed briefly but, all things considered, sorted themselves out rather quickly. A few voices mourned the passing of the old order; D. W. Griffith, for instance, thought that a universal language was being lost. It was a lot easier to translate a few intertitles for the foreign markets and rely on richly modulated pantomime to tell a story than it was to dub pictures with voices not belonging to the players on the screen, or sometimes to make whole new versions of the film in alien tongues. But Griffith himself was pretty much a back number by then.

  There were, however, some minor but palpable losses. It’s probably true that the silent era was the most prosperous period the movies ever enjoyed. Woody Allen has argued that this was largely a matter of costs. Sound effectively doubled the expense of production and the complexity of filmmaking. The free and easy way of knocking off epics on a relative shoestring mostly disappeared for much of sound’s first decade; the predominant genres became relatively low-cost comedies and crime pictures, not that many in the audience paid much attention, such was the continuing appeal of the moving image.

  There’s no question that movies lost some of their spaciousness when actors started speaking in them, that the taste in acting styles became rougher, more urban and less exotic, that definitions of both male and female attractiveness became more naturalistic. (One cannot imagine James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson becoming silent picture stars.) Similarly, writing also grew wittier as men and women who’d had a hit play or novel in New York were shipped west, seemingly by the trainload, to enter into the well-paid studio servitude, complaining all the way to the bank. The myth—well, all right, the half myth—of servitude to an idiot system took stubborn hold. No one seemed to notice that this was a true golden age of the movies, lasting pretty much until the advent of television.

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  Exceptions

  My loyalty, historically and emotionally speaking, is to the first two decades or so of the talkies. That’s not because I was seeing many movies in the first part of that era. It’s because, coming late to them, I somehow found it romantic and glamorous and enormous fun. Back when I was first beginning to appreciate movies at some slightly sophisticated level, we were much closer to the silent era—perhaps twenty-five or thirty years from it. (My late father-in-law told me of seeing riders in Ku Klux Klan outfits, thunderi
ng down Broadway, promoting The Birth of a Nation, and that didn’t seem far distant to me.) It was what we had for history; we were too close to the snappy thirties and forties—a less grandiose period in any case—to truly appreciate it. It would need to simmer for a while in memory.

  I’m going to omit from lengthy consideration here the Marx Brothers. They seem to me to have slipped down history’s page in recent decades. Chico is never really funny with his lame Italian accent. Harpo works his mime pretty well, but his innocence wears less well. Groucho is, of course, the wiseguy supreme, and he is the only brother who had a career outside the family troupe—a prosperous one. They managed some sublime bits, but somehow our (maybe I should say “my”) affection for them is now muted. The three of them do not add up to one great comedian, try as they might, and God knows they tried.

  So I want instead to focus our attention on Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton, who stand outside the broad stream of silent film history, proudly sui generis. Chaplin was the greatest star of his era, perhaps of any era, and he was, like Keaton, a grotesque. That’s an important point to make about silent picture stars. The beautiful ones, male and female, tended to be preternaturally so; the comical ones more weirdly strange. When he was off camera, Chaplin was a moderately handsome fellow, but paste on his mustache, dress him in his curious costume, and he became something else. You might say that the singularity of his appearance had the odd effect of universalizing him. That is to say, we had to broaden our definition of humanity to include him. If we did not, we would be forced to exile him. The action in most of his films was meant to make this odd little duck an acceptable member of the human race.

  Which says nothing about his uncanny skills as a mime. This universality was enhanced by the great specificity of his intricate gags. There was rarely any doubt about his intentions; what was most amazing about his work was the way he would extend it beyond all our expectations. It was dazzling to watch him, for instance, play a drunk trying simply to get up the stairs and into bed. In retrospect, the sequence seems perfectly logical, even inevitable, in the way one gag leads to another, but no one ever approached his sheer skill in milking such a relatively simple act.

  If Chaplin had a physical weakness, it was his voice. It was thin and rather prissy. It was a factor, I think (though not the only one), in his long refusal to speak from the screen. And when he started to speak (and, sometimes, speak and speak, as if he wanted to test the limits of his appeal in pictures like The Great Dictator and Monsieur Verdoux), it represented another kind of weakness, a taste for sentiment, which had a distancing effect.

  At the time, this quality was accepted by audiences. It was part of what made Chaplin Chaplin. Later, he was condemned for it, and his stock sank while Buster Keaton’s rose in the not yet finished (though marginalized) debate over the two great silent comedians. Woody Allen is very good on this topic. “When anyone tries to be sentimental or moving, and they fail at it, you know you want to strangle them…you have such an adverse reaction to it.” But as Allen points out, “a portion of the time he didn’t fail at it.”

  He cites in this regard the sublime ending of City Lights, where the blind girl belatedly discovers who her secret admirer is. In that moment he went “for seriousness and pathos and brought it off.” I would certainly add the conclusion of The Kid, where Chaplin must rescue Jackie Coogan’s waif from the officialdom intent on bearing the lad away to the orphanage. It is as masterful an orchestration of comedy, action and pathos as anyone has ever achieved.

  This is an important thing to say about Chaplin. Yes, his sentimentality is sometimes over the top, but it provides a necessary balance to the purity of his comedy, which sometimes runs the risk of becoming totally mechanical, invention piled on invention. It allows us, from time to time, to relax, to take stock of “the Little Fellow.”

  There are, perhaps, more relevant criticisms of him. There is solipsism in Chaplin’s work, immense self-regard, a sense that he thinks he is the only thing the camera really needs to care about. And there is the manic need he had to do everything on the picture. He was always the Man. He had his foils, and they were often very good. But they were interchangeable and disposable.

  We sometimes wish he would relax a little. But in fact, if he was stuck he would simply shut the picture down, keeping the company idle (but paid) until genius struck, which it generally did. It is startling how few (if any) shoddy, half-thought-out sequences survive in the finished films. Some are better than others, naturally, but none of the fully comic ones can be judged full-scale failures. At the height of his fame, people routinely attached the word “genius” to his activities—and I think correctly so, if by that word we mean doing something sublime that he, as much as anyone, could not fully explain.

  So what is my favorite Chaplin film? (And remember, we’re talking favorite, not best.) It would be easy to say City Lights. It’s a very fine film, no doubt about that, somewhat burdened, oddly, by the fact that we tend to remember its love story more than its divine comic sequences. (A boxing match is particularly well done, and Charlie as a white wing, clearing the streets of horse manure, leads to one of the biggest laughs in Chaplin history.) But I’m going to opt for what is probably the least well regarded of his features, The Circus (1928).

  It was made in the most difficult circumstances. A fire at Chaplin’s studio delayed production for months, and he was undergoing one of his periodic bouts of romantic stress. When he came to write his autobiography, decades later, he spared but one mention for the film and provided no anecdotes about its production whatsoever. Yet it is a marvel of pure comedy—with only a hint of romance (between a bareback rider and a lion tamer). There’s the circus owner (and father of the rider) for not very menacing menace. Mostly there’s three extensive set-piece comedy routines (and a lot of incidental bits, all of which are perfectly executed). The climax features Chaplin doing a high-wire act while beset by a troop of monkeys.

  Doesn’t sound like much, does it? But it’s breathtaking in its intricacy, and its thrills. Of all Chaplin’s extensively developed comic routines, it is, I think, his greatest—especially when you consider that monkeys are fundamentally undirectable. The sequence leaves you breathless, both with laughter and fear. And the film’s only poignancy comes at the very end, when the circus leaves town and Chaplin can only sit in the shadow left on the ground by its ring. Alone again—his preferred situation, obviously—he rises, dusts himself off and waddles jauntily into his unknowable future. Those final shots are, I think, far more hopeful than gloomy, and very lightly done. Chaplin would not be Chaplin without resorting to sentiment, earned or not, dubious or not. We all recognize that. But for him to make this unpretentious film at the height of his fame and then basically forget it almost entirely when he came to write his final summing up, that is something else. “Old men forget,” Shakespeare said. But this is close to a monumental case of memory loss.

  The Circus brings me back to the Chaplin–Keaton debate, in part because it is most like Keaton’s work in its lack of pretense—and because the monkey sequence is as fine as anything Keaton did in blending thrills and comedy. Buster had no philosophical ambitions. He wanted only to make funny films, and as a constructor of gag sequences he was every bit Chaplin’s equal. In recent times, as I said, critical opinion has shifted to Keaton as the greater artist—I believe this is because we now have a far larger taste for the austere than we formerly had. There is also the contrast between their off-screen fates. Chaplin had his troubles, of course, most of them political, but none of them threatened his prosperity or his high regard in critical circles. Keaton, however, was felled by drink and by his careless embrace of sound. (He did not play on his exceptionalism as Chaplin did.) Somehow people eventually could relate to his problems more readily than they could to Chaplin’s, which finally eased his path back to grace.

  I think this dispute is feckless; they are both great and immortal artists of entirely different stripes. I’ll conce
de that Keaton is the more likable human being. But still, of all the stars of the silent screen, they require the least explanation. If you see a film by either one of them with an audience, he owns the room completely. Our laughter is complete and direct; you forget, as you rarely do with other actors of that era, that they are not talking. And in their silence they achieve that “universality” that Griffith believed was the silent cinema’s supreme virtue.

  If, though, Chaplin and Keaton are doomed to be twinned through the ages, we must be careful to preserve their obvious contrasts. Chaplin was, supremely, an actor. He was, putting it simply, working, working, working all the time—decorating the main line of his gag sequences with throwaway bits by the dozen. You might not even notice all of them until you return to the film for further study. Keaton, by contrast, was a study in stillness. That does not mean, obviously, that he was inactive. Far from it. He was as lively as a cricket or a water bug, devising his escapes from a world that was, in its way, innocently—but constantly—malevolent. The point, however, was that Keaton could never show a facial reaction to his troubles—the great poker face and all that. That was the whole joke, the only joke.

  Imagine a career of this magnitude built on variants on a single gag. It is one of the things that commends him to us today. He seems to be doing more with less than Chaplin ever dreamed of, and we respond to that, particularly since he so expertly avoids the merely mechanical in his work. Something of the Victorian always clings to Chaplin. Something of onrushing modernism, not yet fully defined, drives Keaton. There’s an irony in that. Chaplin had obvious pretenses to intellectualism; Keaton had none. But yet he was an intellectual of sorts, in that he was the one working the big theme—modernism and its discontents—while Chaplin (Modern Times aside) did not have a great deal to say on that topic.