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.

Charlie, H.G. Wells, and the Russian Situation

 

 

 

Looking through some old books in my Chaplin collection, I came across "Six Men" by Alistair Cooke. In it, he profiles H. L. Mencken, Humphrey Bogart, Adlai Stevenson, Bertrand Russell, Edward VIII, and Charles Chaplin. So of course I had to re-read the Chaplin profile.
 
Russell mentions Charlie's conversations with H.G. Wells on the subject of Russia, and references Chaplin's autobiography. In Russell's words, "In his autobiography, Chaplin is frank enough to leave in the recollection of a conversation with H.G. Wells, whose fears of dictatorship and the suppression of civil liberties in Russia are dismissed by Chaplin as growing pains or tactical 'mistakes' not to be compared in grossness with the repudiation of foreign lands."

Given our times now, in 2022, of controversial political positions and conflicts, I thought it would be interesting to hear what Chaplin had to say about Russia in 1935, inspired by comments of Wells.
 
This is from Chaplin's "My Autobiography." Charlie had spent time with Wells in London in 1931, a trip for the opening of "City Lights." They maintained the friendship. This is an excerpt from Chaplin's book.
 
"When Wells visited visited me in 1935 in California, I took him to task about his criticism of Russia. I had read of his disparaging reports, so I wanted a firsthand account and was surprised to find him almost bitter about it.

'But is it not too early to judge?' I argued. 'They have had a difficult task, opposition and conspiracy from within and from without. Surely in time, good results should follow?'"

At that time Wells was enthusiastic about what Roosevelt had accomplished with the New Deal, and was of the opinion that a quasi-socialism in America would come out of a dying capitalism. He seemed especially critical of Stalin, whom he had interviewed, and said that under his rule Russia had become tyrannical dictatorship.
 
Charlie continues. "Of course Russia has made mistakes," I said, "and like other nations she will continue to do so. The biggest one, I think, was the repudiation of her foreign loans, Russian bonds, etcetera, and call them the Czar's debts after the Revolution."
       
Charlie has more to say, at least in his recollection of the conversation, some twenty years later. We all know that Chaplin became fascinated by world politics, especially events in Russia, which eventually caused him a great deal of trouble with Congress and the American public.
 
But there is one more quote I want to end this with. It's non-political, and is revealing about Chaplin. Again, from his Autobiography:
 
"Elsewhere I have said that sex will be mentioned but not stressed, as I can add nothing new to the subject. However, procreation is nature's principal occupation, and every man, whether he be young or old, when meeting any woman, measures the potentiality of sex between them. Thus is has always been with me.

"During work, women never interested me; it was only between pictures, when I had nothing to do, that I was vulnerable. As H.G. Wells said, 'There comes a moment in the day when you have written your pages in the morning, attended to your correspondence in the afternoon, and have nothing further to do. Then comes that hour when you are bored; that's the time for sex.'"
 
There you have it. A visit with Chaplin and Wells, and a wide ranging discussion on more than politics.