When Charlie Returned While Buster Was Fading

 I have this stack of magazines in the “Chaplin Section” of my office. They usually sit there, month after month, waiting to be opened, read, absorbed. The other day I was looking for an article in another magazine and came across Film Comment, Sept/Oct, 1972, with a special section on Chaplin. It contains 12 essays on Charlie and his films, by various writers and critics of that decade.

Here is the first one. Or at least some excerpts from it. The title: ”The Second Coming” by Charles Silver.

 
It starts off with a quote by Rollie Totheroh, Charlie’s cameraman.
“When his mother came to this country…they had her over on Ellis Island. When she went over there, they started to question her. And they said, ‘Are you the mother of Charles Chaplin? And she said, ‘I’m the mother of Jesus Christ’…she was ‘shell-shocked,” or supposed to be.”

Silver writes:
I knew Chaplin was coming back to America before there was a public announcement. As the word got out, and as I subsequently discussed the visit with my friends in the film world, I am afraid I astounded a great many people by saying, in effect, that this would be the preeminent event of our lifetime. For my adult interest and ultimately my career in films had begun with the 1964 Chaplin retrospective at the Plaza Theater in New York. Never before or since have I been so shaken by an artist and his art, and it is unlikely that I will ever quite recover my bearings.

Silver goes on for awhile about looking for Charlie at The Plaza Hotel in New York, mentioning that Chaplin had stayed there in 1916 while waiting to sign his contract with Mutual. Now, after 56 years, he had come back. After another page and a half, he quotes Andrew Sarris. “The difference between Keaton and Chaplin is the difference between man as machine and man as angel.” Then Silver continues, writing about these two great comics. Sarris prefers Keaton over Chaplin. 

Silver disagrees.

As a body, Keaton’s films lend themselves far more easily to critical analysis than Chaplin’s. Everything is visible on the surface and simple to describe. There is a vigor and glory in Keaton’s films, but they lack the profundity, development and wholeness of great art. More often than not, they reflect the fact that Buster was still a young, unsure artist experimenting, learning - not yet mature. Films like BATTLING BUTLER, SEVEN CHANCES, THE THREE AGES, and GO WEST are only sporadically inspired, having a good sequence here, a dull one there. The other works, especially THE GENERAL are better; they are as good as anything Chaplin did before THE GOLD RUSH.

And finally, and I find this quite touching…

The tragedy, the terrible pity of Keaton’s career can be seen in the collapse evident between the excellent THE CAMERAMAN and the quite bad SPITE MARRIAGE. Keaton was destroyed at thirty three, the age at which Chaplin had made nothing more formidable than THE KID. What Keaton might have accomplished had he been permitted to make his own films as a mature artist we will never know, and I mourn for those lost films as much as anyone. To consider him Chaplin’s equal on the basis of what actually exists, however, is wistful nonsense.

Other essays in the magazine cover THE CHAPLIN REVUE, THE KID, THE GOLD RUSH, among others. I’ll keep those in mind for future blogs on MY TIME WITH CHARLIE CHAPLIN.