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A film reviewer for Time magazine since 1972, Richard
Schickel has attained the stature of a dean of movie history
and criticism. Rather than merely turn in his weekly copy,
collect columns in occasional book form, and appear as
a guest in other people’s documentaries, Schickel has
quietly built a respectable body of studies on
film about eminent directors (and more pointedly, writer-directors),
as well as a few actors.
Much of this work has been for TV: segments on Hitchcock,
Cukor, Hawks, Vidor, Walsh, and Minnelli for the excellent
1973 “documentary miniseries” called “The Men Who Made
the Movies,” and more recent projects on Eastwood, Cagney,
and Harryhausen. Studies of Arthur Penn and Elia Kazan
enjoyed limited release as features, and now Schickel
has done one on Chaplin which also is playing in festivals
and mainstream houses.
“Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin” attempts to
present the man’s warts and errors, as well as the film
and comic genius, in 131 minutes. Although one suspects
it would be impossible to do this completely in anything
less than six hours, “Charlie” does an excellent and absorbing
job.
The film doubles back to some pertinent details from childhood
and tacks on clips from home movies shot in Switzerland
and on vacation in Africa by a daughter in the 1960s and
’70s (charming but of negligible interest and value).
It also notes the honors bestowed at Cannes and the Academy
Awards late in his life. But its primary arc goes from
1914, when Chaplin began acting in Mack Sennett comedies
as a contract player two years after arriving in the U.S.
on the vaudeville circuit, to 1952 with the release of
“Limelight” and the family’s permanent exile to Europe.
The central conceit of Schickel’s take is Chaplin’s love-hate
(though mostly love) relationship with the public. Hunger
for the crowd, and fear of the crowd, drove his life,
according to friend and “Limelight” costar Norman Lloyd.
Chaplin grew rich playing the poorest of men, and spoke
with embarrassing fervency on behalf of the common man
in the final speech of “The Great Dictator,” yet also
talked of the headless unpredictability of the mob in
“Limelight.” Apart from the intermittent messes of his
personal life, Chaplin did a creditable job of fighting
to keep his artistic integrity and humanity in the face
of superstardom and mass adulation, his son Michael argues.
“Charlie” spends time analyzing the quasi-tramp figure’s
first appearance in the entirely improvised and nearly
plotless “Kid Auto Races at Venice” (1914); offers examples
of innovative camerawork, plotting, and gag design in
his Essenay and Mutual shorts; and notes the subject’s
startling ability to transform one object into something
totally different (for example, a plant leaf into a toothbrush,
or a fire engine into a cappuccino machine). All that
is solid melts into air, Marx declared, but the work of
Charlie Chaplin suggests all that is solid melts into
something else, Schickel writes. He calls this reality-morphed-by-the-mind
trick “central to modernity,” but does not explore or
belabor the point.
It is astonishing to be reminded that after only one year
in the movies and 35 shorts, Chaplin contracted with Essenay
for a salary of $1,250 a week and a $10,000 bonus (just
under 90 years ago, mind you). After only two more years,
he—or rather, his brother Sydney, haggling while the “artist”
stayed above the fray, scratching a violin and standing
in a dry bathtub—negotiated a million-dollar annual contract.
A millionaire and one of the world’s most famous people
at the age of 28! Others (say, Wayne, Eastwood, or Cruise)
may have attained a comparable level of fame and fortune
subsequently, but not at such meteoric speed, and certainly
not with so much more—as a writer, actor, director, editor,
and musical composer—still to come.
Schickel has admitted that starting out, he did not admire
his subject as much as when he finished, which is a good
thing: a work that reflects the process of falling in
love is far preferable to a piece of intended hagiography.
Chaplin’s family was ready to address him in the round
as well: this becomes clear early on when daughter Geraldine
looks the camera right in the eye and says, “He loved
young girls.”
As “Charlie” is not shy to indicate, Chaplin had difficulties
(serious ones) with women, government agencies, and eventually
his public. It mentions the child brides, the ghastly
Lita Grey divorce that halted shooting on “The Circus”
for 9 months and created an underground bestseller of
the lurid 42-page complaint detailing Chaplin’s infidelities
and irregular sex practices. Joan Barry’s armed break-in
and subsequent paternity suit (which a blood test, legally
inadmissible at that time, showed was groundless, but
Chaplin lost in court anyway and dutifully paid child
support for a kid that evidently wasn’t his) also gets
a mention.
Being a powerful film critic, historian, and seasoned filmmaker
gives Schickel a level of access in the industry that’s
not available to many other documentary shooters. Not
only does “Charlie” feature on-camera interview footage
with the usual critics, biographers and historians (Andrew
Sarris, David Thomson, David Robinson, Jeffrey Vance,
Jeanine Basinger); and Chaplin’s children Geraldine, Michael,
and Sydney; but heavy-hitting stars and fans like Claire
Bloom, Richard Attenborough, Johnny Depp, Woody Allen,
Robert Downey Jr., Milos Forman, Marcel Marceau, and Martin
Scorsese.
One of this documentary’s greatest strengths is the extra
attention it gives to the lesser known and more prickly
works of Chaplin’s oeuvre: “A Woman of Paris” and “Monsieur
Verdoux,” both of which it spends more time on than “The
Gold Rush” or “City Lights.” Scorsese is especially generous
and useful here. He praises the decadence and eroticism
of “Woman,” and says “There’s a calmness about it that’s
terrifying. . . . You know it’s all gonna go bad.” He
describes a favorite shot or two of “Verdoux,” praises
its depiction of “eloquent and elegant and absolutely
horrendous behavior,” and almost cackles as he tries to
imagine how its initial viewers reacted to it. “No one
liked it! It’s a beautiful, but it’s also a very ugly
film.” According to Scorsese, its implicit challenge seems
to be: “how far can I push you and you’ll still love me?”
Pretty much overlooked save in the credits is that most of
the music in his great films, and therefore this documentary,
was composed by Chaplin. David Raksin, who did the arrangements
for Chaplin’s musical ideas in “Modern Times,” is a singular
commentator’s voice: “I admired him very much for the
constancy of his point of view,” he says of Chaplin, and
adds that he “had a mind like a super attic.”
It probably exists somewhere, but I have yet to see a comprehensive
study of Chaplin’s scores. Hardly brilliant music in itself,
but I will never forget the lush blind girl’s theme, or
the nervous strings and chirping winds that support the
hilarious prizefight, in “City Lights.” Chaplin also has
countless musical references and jokes in his soundtracks:
I think of the four-note reference to “how dry I am” as
the tramp and the suicidal millionaire pull themselves
out of the river in “City Lights,” and there is a longer
quotation under the sequence when the tramp is being followed
by a bear on a precarious mountain trail in “The Gold
Rush” that made me laugh out loud in recognition during
this screening, although I neglected to note it down.
One minor but persistent complaint about the print I saw:
some of the classic feature clips were choppy. Both the
final scene of “City Lights” and the speech to the jury
in “Verdoux” had broken sound and video continuity, which
is annoying in a supposedly new film such as this one.
Surely clean prints of both these sequences are not hard
to obtain?
“Charlie” includes some vaunted unseen and/or unreleased
material—rehearsals and outtakes for famous scenes, an
Oona O’Neill Chaplin screen test, color footage of the
giant World War I cannon and closing rally sequences from
“The Great Dictator” shot by a family member, newsreel
clips of Chaplin on vacation in Hawaii and Asia with Paulette
Goddard, the aforementioned home videos from his golden
years, and a party video of Chaplin in a toga, juggling
a globe in an anticipation of the “Dictator” globe dance—but
none of them is particularly vital or memorable. The film’s
true strengths are its writing and analysis, its cast
of guest commentators, and the classic clips that inevitably
inspire awe.
And though it’s trite to say it (Allen is one of the luminaries
who repeats this), the man’s work is timeless. Actor and
mime artist Bill Irwin makes the point when he recalls
a video store owner in the 1980s who told Irwin that he
could screen just about any video in the front window
and people would walk past, but if he put Chaplin there,
“people will stop.”
With any luck, this solid documentary will send viewers back
to the original Chaplin shorts and features they have
always loved, or regrettably have not yet seen.
David
Loftus
dloft59@earthlink.net
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David Loftus probably first saw Chaplin shorts at the age
of 7 or 8 under near perfect conditions: in a makeshift
storefront moviehouse six blocks from his home where 16mm
films were screened on a bedsheet and home-made popcorn
sold for 25 cents in plain brown paper bags. In college
he was too well-behaved a student to skip lectures when
a Harvard prof verbally embalmed Chaucer week after week,
but Loftus sat in the hall reading about Chaplin, Keaton,
and Lloyd in Walter Kerr’s superb and lavishly illustrated
study, The Silent Clowns, instead of taking notes.
Loftus absolutely disagrees with Schickel about the best
sight gag in “City Lights,” however: it is not the elephant
confounding streetsweeper Charlie, but Charlie in tails
leaping out of an expensive car to shove a street bum
away from a burning, discarded cigar butt so he can drive
off puffing it, to the bum’s utter consternation.
Credits
Richard Schickel – Writer and Director
Douglas Freeman, Bryan McKenzie, Richard Schickel – Producers
Thomas Albrecht, Kris Denton, Simon Fanthorpe, Rob Goldie,
John Halliday, Ross Keith - Cinematographers
Bryan McKenzie – Editor
Charles Chaplin – Original Music
Sydney Pollack – Narration
2003, 131 minutes
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