When Marlon, Sophia and Charlie Got Together

Today I'm turning over my blog to a former writer for Life Magazine. 
Her name was Dora Jane Hamblin. She died in 1993, in a retirement home in Rome, at the age of 73. 

But on April 1, 1966, she wrote an article about the new movie being produced in London. Written and directed by Charlie Chaplin and starring Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren, the film was generally panned by critics as being "out of date." During pre-production, Chaplin suffered a great personal loss when his brother, Sydney, died in Nice, France at the age of 80. 





Two esteemed visitors to the set during shooting were Gloria Swanson and the film historian Kevin Brownlow. Kevin wrote about his experience that day, which David Robinson included in his magnificent biography of Chaplin. 

Sadly, this was Chaplin's final film.

But, right now, let's listen to Dora Jane Hamblin. These are excerpts of her article. The "Sydney" she refers to here is Charlie's son.

"Walking onto Charlie Chaplin's set at England's Pinewood Studios feels quite a bit like trying to tip-toe into church after the service has started. There are, to be sure, a lot of slamming doors and exploding champagne bottles and actors leaping around like scalded cats, but between the bangs and the crashes there is a silence quite unlike the perfunctory quiet of the ordinary movie set. Everybody's watching Charlie teach some new tricks to a trio of old pros - Sophia, Marlon and Sydney Chaplin. The stars sit rapt, like well brought-up children, hanging on his every word. That is much easier than hanging onto him.

"Marlon is supposed to chase Sophia around the furniture? Charlie takes off in a frantic deadpan dash, to show Marlon how he wants him to do it. Sophia is supposed to flee? Charlie skitters around uttering little yelps of alarm and casting arch looks back over his tweedy shoulder. Sydney Chaplin is supposed to puff on a cigar and make himself sick? Charlie Chaplin wraps his small hand around an imaginary cigar, tilts his head, and everybody not he set can smell the nonexistent smoke.....

"The new picture, though it is the 81st of Chaplin's 52-year movie career, is a first in a couple of significant categories: it is Chaplin's first film in color; it is the first time he hasher directed established stars, let alone a pair of Oscar winners and staggering personalities like Loren and Brando; and it is the first time in years that he has worked for a company not his own. Universal is bankrolling this one at an estimated production cost of $4 million and will distribute it. But Chapin is clearly running it. .... Hardly a day passes that Charlie doesn't mutter 'We're using too much film.' Actually, Charlie's first feature-length film, the six-reeler Tillie's Punctured Romance in 1914, had almost exactly the same shooting time as this present film, 14 weeks.

"'That was very, very difficult, that scene,' Sophia says. 'It was a charlie Chapin scene, you see. Silent, and subtle. He has the timing exactly right when he does it. Charlie never does the obvious thing, like most actors. He turns it all upside down, thinks of the opposite from the obvious thing.' "...

"'In the next few days I thought I had gone raving mad, Charlie had gone raving mad, and it was impossible,' says Brando. 'I can't do fades and triple-takes and things like that, and I was wanting to go to Charlie to say, 'I'm afraid we've both made a horrible mistake. But then it all started to work out. With Charlie it's chess, it's chess at 90 mph.' ...

"He (Charlie) plays one scene in the film. The morning he did it, he hopped onto the set grinning from ear to ear. He slid into the white jacket of a ship's chief steward, and he combed his hair and muttered his lines under his breath and gave that old familiar half-apologetic look just over the left shoulder. His assistant director called 'Action!' and Chaplin opened the door. He put on the walk of an aging chief steward and then the look of a seasick chief steward He made straight for a porthole and tripped over something that wasn't in the script. Just before the assistant director could call 'Cut' he stopped, bent down, picked up an imaginary object and slipped it intones pocked, adjusted his shoulder, walked on. It was very funny.


"'Well, that's my contribution,' he said as he walked off the set. Kona gave him a big kiss and everybody told him the scene was wonderful. The only reason there wasn't a round of applause was that everyone in the place was afraid he might snap at them. 'Quiet, now let's all be adult!'"

And so ends the article. I've included photos from the magazine, which were shot by famed photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt.

Also included is an ad from that same issue which features another very funny man.

Charlie & Buster: What Might Have Been

Jazz musicians used to get together, usually after hours, for jam sessions.

It was a thrill to see and hear these jazz greats sitting in with each other.

Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Stan Getz, Oscar Peterson and Lester Young. Guys who played with their own groups, but still enjoyed the challenge and stimulation of interplay.

What does this have to do with Charlie Chaplin? A lot, I believe. Charlie retained control of his films for most of his life. His final film here, in 1952, was Limelight. It was then, at the age of 63, that he decided to work with Buster Keaton. And that's what I can't understand. Why did it take so long for these two giants of silent film to get together in a movie? Surely someone must have had such an idea.

During the last weekend of September (about a week from now), fans of Keaton will convene in Kansas for the annual Buster Keaton Celebration. Buster Keaton Celebration in Iola, KS    

This year the focus is on Keaton and Chaplin. I'll be there, as I was last year when I learned to appreciate Keaton even more than I had before. Relatives of Keaton, friends, academics (or is it academicians?), an actor who worked with him, the head of the Association Chaplin in Bologna, Italy... they'll be there. I look forward to what they have to say about Buster and Charlie.

In the meantime:

Life Magazine ran an 11-page spread on "Chaplin at Work" in its March 17, 1952 issue. It contained a lot of photographs of the Limelight production, but only a couple show Buster. Here's a short paragraph from that article.

     "Chaplin had carefully planned what to do in his dramatic scenes. But the comedy routines often had to be developed through trial and error and patient improvisation. The scene below with Buster Keaton, himself a star of the silent comedies, began with only the meager idea of a nearsighted pianist and an acrobatic violinist. The two, who had never appeared together before, spent a day of preparation in shirtsleeves organizing the piece of business which would form their act. With utter disregard of their ages (Keaton, 56, Chaplin, 63), they danced and tumbled, experimented, repeated. Over and over Chaplin twirled, tripped, rolled across the footlights into the orchestra pit where worried grips stood by to catch him. Time and time again Keaton staggered from the wings, crashed awkwardly into the piano and fell to the floor in a flutter of music sheets. Stagehands, dancers, musicians sat in bemused groups breaking into laughter, applauding as they watched a show no one else would ever see."

When I've watched Limelight, I'm struck by the number of single shots in what was essentially a duo performance. I prefer the shots where you see both of them on stage.  Instead of including both Buster and Charlie in the shot, Charlie frequently went to the single shots. I think that's a shame, considering that the appeal of this sequence is watching two of the greatest film artists working together.

David Robinson, in "Chaplin: His Life and Art," explains.

     "Keaton worked on the film for three weeks.... It was a sweet gesture of Chaplin's to employ him: Keaton had not worked in comedy for years and was all but forgotten. He arrived, Jerry Epstein recalls, with the little flat hat he had worn in his own films, and had to be gently told that Chaplin already had a costume and business worked out for him. The whole unit was enchanted to see, however, that once on stage, Chaplin and Keaton became two old comedy pros, each determined to upstage the other.... Claire Bloom felt that 'some of his gags may even have been a little too incandescent for Chaplin because, laugh as he did at the rushes in the screening room, Chaplin didn't see fit to allow them all into the final version of the film.'"

Of all the Chaplin out-takes and alternate scenes that have been uncovered and discovered, mainly by Kevin Brownlow, none - as far as I know - show all the magic and inventiveness that certainly occurred between Charlie and Buster during those three weeks. I wonder about Charlie's motives, especially since he did not see fit to mention Buster in his autobiography. But I shouldn't complain. At least he brought Buster in for these few glorious moments. Rather than wonder about what's been left unseen, better to fully appreciate the two greatest comic stars of the silent era.

The applause and laughter will ring forever.