(Anthem Art and Culture), by Gary Morris (Editor), Bert Cardullo (Introduction), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Foreword). London and New York: Anthem Press, 2009.
— David Hudson, IFC.com
Given the complete control Chaplin had over the films, the twelve Mutuals are not as Chaplinesque as one might expect. In only one — Easy Street, the greatest — does he appear as an actual tramp. Only one — The Vagabond — has the deliberate pathos of The Tramp and The Bank, and in The Vagabond Charlie gets Edna instead of losing her. In fact, most of the shorts end quite happily.
The Floorwalker, Chaplin's first film at Mutual, does have a fairly coherent plot, though it falls apart at the end. The film opens in a fancy department store and we meet an officious floorwalker (Lloyd Bacon3) who, we come to notice, looks quite a bit like Charlie. After harassing a clerk, Bacon (right) heads upstairs, where he runs into agitated store manager Eric Campbell. "They're onto us!" exclaims Campbell, after pushing secretary Edna out the door. The two start emptying the contents of the office safe into a Gladstone bag. Meanwhile, downstairs, the real Charlie has entered, and takes advantage of a display of toiletries to give himself a shave. Eventually, Charlie encounters Lloyd and they have an early version of the "mirror" gag. Lloyd "hires" Charlie as his replacement, a switch that leads to a considerable amount of irritation on Eric's part when Charlie fails to hand over Eric's share of the cash. The Floorwalker relies on that modern invention the escalator for many of its gags, but the best scene is a face-off between Charlie and Eric. At first Charlie dazzles the lunging big man with his graceful dodges and feints, but when an excess of confidence leads Charlie into a purely aesthetic display of balletic technique,4 a crashing blow from Eric's fist sends him sprawling head over heels.
The Fireman, the second film, has a more rudimentary, and more old-fashioned plot. Charlie spends quite a bit of time beating up on his co-workers, though with not quite as much malice as in his earlier films,5 and saves Edna, not all that convincingly, from a burning building.
Charlie escapes with Edna in a Gypsy wagon, which allows them to set up house together. Once they're alone, Charlie provides Edna with a bucket of water for a clean-up. When her notions of hygiene fail to meet his standards, he aggressively scrubs her face and fixes her hair.9 In his autobiography, Chaplin describes the pride he felt as a boy in his mother's appearance and how upset he became when she began to let herself go as her mental condition declined. "All you do is sit around this filthy room and look awful," he told her, adding, in retrospect, "Poor Mother. How I regret those words. I never realized that she was weak from malnutrition."
Once this painful scene ends, the grotesque plot grinds forward. "The Living Shamrock" is exhibited; Edna's mother sees it and collapses: "My Baby!" The rich folks come flying into the forest in their gleaming limousine. Charlie's attempts to impress Edna by sketching her himself have fallen flat. He's no artist. When the limo arrives, Edna leaps inside, leaving Charlie with infinitely less than nothing. How lucky — how blessed — are those who have never loved! But wait! She's coming back! It's Charlie that she really wants!
One AM (right), Chaplin's classic solo performance, takes us far, far away from the tormented subtext of The Vagabond. Chaplin is a society drunk, stumbling home alone into a very unwelcoming house, filled with vicious stuffed animals, treacherous staircases, diabolical rugs, pernicious pendulums, and much much more.
Easy Street ranks easily as one of the greatest comedy shorts ever made — a unique blend of brilliant slapstick and sweet yet tongue in cheek utopian vision. Chaplin transports to Hollywood the Victorian slum of his childhood, which will reappear in The Kid and City Lights. Chaplin's tramp is seriously down and out here, missing his vest, his collar, his tie, and even his cane — almost naked, really. He's so desperate he's even willing to seek charity from a Salvation Army style revival meeting, where, of course, he encounters Edna. Determined to tread the straight and narrow, he chooses an exceedingly high-risk occupation — police officer in the Easy Street precinct.
In terms of laughs, The Cure is barely a step down from Easy Street. Charlie is a rich dude trying to dry out in a fashionable spa. The "massage/wrestling" sequence, featuring Charlie wiggling his fanny in a bathing suit, must have had audiences roaring.
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Chaplin's My Early Years, out of print but available second hand through the web, makes fascinating reading. His My Life in Pictures, also out of print, has wonderful photos and memorabilia. Joyce Milton's 1996 biography Tramp regards Chaplin short of idolatry, which is as it should be. Jefferey Vance's Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema (2003) is pricey but has wonderful photos as well and probably can be gotten second hand at a reduced price.
1. At Keystone Chaplin made 74 films in one year, many of them less than ten minutes long. At Essanay, films were cut as negatives, to save processing costs. Deleted footage was thrown away without ever being developed.
2. How do you plot a two-reeler? Laurel and Hardy, who were, for my money, the best of them all, had two answers: "escalating chaos" and "monumental task." In You're Darn Tootin', Stan and Ollie are band musicians, disrupting a performance in a bandshell. Finally expelled from the band, they flee to a city street, where, eventually, their instruments are destroyed. The ill-will generated by this leads first to fisticuffs and then an orgy of shin-kicking and de-pantsing that engulfs dozens of passers-by. Battle of the Century (pies) and Two Tars (cars) offer a similar pattern. "Monumental task" favorites include The Music Box (getting a piano up twenty flights of stairs), Helpmates (cleaning a house), and Towed in a Hole (fixing up a boat). Stan and Ollie (principally Stan, who was the idea man) had a particular knack for "topper" gags that would finish and complete a two-reeler. Chaplin's two-reelers usually end without a bang. While Stan and Ollie's silent shorts, including You're Darn Tootin', Battle of the Century, and Two Tars, have been on DVD for years (in the "Lost Films of Laurel and Hardy" series), their work in talkies is just starting to appear. Apparently, no one gives a damn about them.
3. Bacon segued into directing in the early twenties and directed over a hundred films. His career was a cavalcade of classic American kitsch, including such films as 42nd Street and Knute Rockne, All American. Most intriguing is the tragically unavailable 1930 version of Moby Dick, starring John Barrymore (who'd done Ahab back in 1916), Joan Bennett as "Faith Mapple" (Father Mapple's daughter, you idiot), and May Boley in the slippery role of "Whale Oil Rosie." Almost as intriguing: his penultimate film, The French Line (1954), which presented Jane Russell's boobs in 3-D, leading to this classic piece of flackery: "See Jane Russell in The French Line — she'll knock BOTH your eyes out!"
4. As is obvious from Chaplin's performance, he had been studying ballet to help improve his act. He appeared in newsreels performing basic balletic exercises, though so far as I know he never tried to perform as a dancer. In his few dancing scenes with Edna he spends most of his time trying to kick Eric Campbell in the butt.
5. It's a case, really, of malign neglect as opposed to sadistic intent.
6. Yeah, yeah. He saved Edna in The Fireman. Don't be so fucking literal!
7. "Look up, Hannah! Look up!" cries Charlie in The Great Dictator.
8. In The Face on the Barroom Floor, an early Keystone, Chaplin plays a painter. Since I've never seen the film, I have no idea what it's about. A still shows Chaplin surrounded by nude statues, which come up frequently in his work. The Mutuals, for some reason, have few nudes, though they do appear in Behind the Screen.
9. Poor Edna has to submit to some seriously unglamorous treatment, particularly when Charlie scrubs out her nostrils with an old sock for a washcloth.
10. Chaplin obviously saw Bacon as his "opposite/double," a notion that he played with persistently, though not too explicitly, in many of his later films. He seemed to see traditional artists as opposites/doubles. In The Tramp Charlie loses Edna to a "poet." In The Kid, a society painter gets Edna pregnant. In A Woman of Paris, the full-length feature that Chaplin directed in an attempt to make Edna a star in her own right, Edna's mama's boy boyfriend is a painter.
11. As he did in The Bank, and as he will do again in City Lights, Chaplin nervously covers his mouth with his long, delicate fingers, a classic sign of emotional distress.
12. The Bank (1915) has a much better plot — Charlie winning Edna in what turns out to be a dream sequence and ending up kissing a mop — but Charlie's suffering isn't made nearly as intense. Chaplin would expand on The Vagabond's plot in The Circus (1928), the least known of his feature-length silent films, and this time would give audiences an unhappy ending.
13. Because he's broke! Get it?
14. The plot of the second half of The Count is quite similar to The Jitney Elopement, which Charlie did with Edna for Essanay in 1915. But Edna seems strangely uninterested in Charlie this time around, who, in turn, seems more attracted to a harem girl (Leota Bryan, perhaps) than Edna.
15. Fortunately, the old Jew isn't robbed of all his wealth, nor is he forced to convert to Christianity. Sometimes, you can improve on Shakespeare!
16. "What am I supposed to do with this?" "Throw it against the wall." "That's not funny. Throw it at him."
17. One strange bit, involving a young woman vigorously swinging her leg back and forth, is about female masturbation, according to Chaplin biographer Joyce Milton. (Well, she should know.)
18. Cocaine gags were fairly common in early two-reelers. In an early Harold Lloyd short, Harold revives his Model T with an injection.
19. Chaplin's acceptance of adulthood in Easy Street is remarkable. He's a husband and a cop! How square can you get? Chaplin never showed such maturity again.
20. While in his bathing suit, Chaplin strikes a pose from a once famous/infamous picture, September Morn. Supposedly, a publicist concocted the idea of hiring small boys to stare at the chaste nude while it was displayed in the window of a Manhattan gallery. September Morn was a near equal of American Gothic as a source of gags well into the fifties, but unlike Grant Wood's masterpiece it didn't survive the sixties.
21. The painter this time around is not tall and handsome but short and fat, the actor Henry Bergman (above), who became one of Charlie's most devoted yes-men and appeared in many of his films. Bergman must have had an irritating personality, because every Chaplin biographer emphasizes that he "never married" and that he "frequently appeared as a woman."
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