Clown princes: Silent film stars Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton SIR CHARLES SPENCER CHAPLIN (1889-1977) was the son of music hall entertainers Charles and Hannah Chaplin, who separated when little Charlie was one year old. The youngster made his stage debut under tragic circumstances: He was rushed on stage to distract the audience when his mother s voice cracked during a singing performance. The incident signaled the end of Hannah Chaplin s showbiz career, and the start of her psychological decline. Because his father died soon afterwards, and his mother was often in and out of mental institutions, Chaplin's early life was a dreary succession of boarding schools and orphanages, interspersed with occasional stage engagements and periods when he lived in the streets. Thanks to his mother s connections, however, he was able to join a troupe of child dancers, the Eight Lancashire Lads, when he was 8 years old. When Chaplin was 17, his older half-brother, then working for the Fred Karno Company, an English vaudeville organization, found a place for him in the troupe. He remained with Karno, performing in numerous music hall skits, until 1913, when the Keystone Company signed him for the movies. Mack Sennett -- producer of Keystone's slapstick one-reelers, including the popular Keystone Cops comic shorts -- had noticed Chaplin in New York City during a Karno tour. Chaplin began his film career in December 1913 at $150 a week. He never returned to the stage. Charlie Chaplin as The Little Tramp Chaplin hit upon his famous costume -- derby hat, tight frock coat, baggy trousers, out-sized shoes, moustache and cane -- while making his second picture, Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914), though the full pathos and significance of his Little Tramp character would not be fully realized until much later. His comedies were sensationally successful right from the start, even though they were made at a rate of two a week. Within two years of his first appearance in motion pictures, he became one of the best-known personalities in the nation. Soon he was allowed to direct all his films. As he evolved into an internationally popular superstar, his salaries soared: $1,250 a week from Essanay (1915); $10,000 a week, plus a $150,000 bonus for signing, from Mutual (1916); $1,000,000 for eight pictures from First National (1917). By the early 1920s, his box-office appeal was so great that no studio could afford his talents, and he appeared only in films he produced himself. Chaplin's meteoric rise was aided by the emergence of the star system -- the selling of films on the basis of featured performers rather than titles or plots. Indeed, the public's eager reception of the Chaplin screen personality -- along with those of Mary Pickford,
2 Douglas Fairbanks and others -- did much to establish the system. In The Tramp (1915) Chaplin first inserted the note of pathos that was to make his Little Tramp character not only amusing but also endearing. As star, director, and writer of his own pictures, he was in a unique position to explore the implications of the character, admiringly described by author George Orwell as a sort of concentrated essence of the common man. This little fellow, as Chaplin called him, was developed through such films as Easy Street (1917), Shoulder Arms (1918), The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936) and The Great Dictator (1940), the last being his first talking picture. The tramp figure reemerged, briefly, in the autobiographical Limelight (1952), which featured Buster Keaton in a co-starring role. Many enthusiasts rank City Lights as Chaplin s greatest achievement. As Robert Horton wrote for the Amazon.com website: City Lights is a film that best represents the many aspects of director-writer-star Charlie Chaplin at the peak of his powers: Chaplin the actor, the sentimentalist, the knockabout clown, the ballet dancer, the athlete, the lover, the tragedian, the fool. Chaplin elevates the Victorian contrivances of the plot to something glorious with his inventive use of pantomime and his sure grasp of how the Tramp relates to the audience. In 1931, it was a gamble for Chaplin to stick with silence after talking pictures had killed off the art form that had made him famous, but audiences flocked to City Lights anyway. After all the superb comic sequences, the film culminates with one of the most moving scenes in the history of cinema, a luminous and heartbreaking fade-out that lifts the picture onto another plane. (Woody Allen paid homage to the scene at the end of Manhattan.) This is why the term Chaplinesque became a part of the language. Chaplin's personal life was often stormy. He was married four times -- to three of his leading ladies, Mildred Harris (1918), Lita Grey (1924), and Paulette Goddard (1936), and, in 1943, to Oona O'Neill, daughter of the playwright Eugene O'Neill. His first two divorces produced sensational headlines, as did a paternity suit in 1944. There also were headlines when, in 1942, Chaplin called for a second front in the war against Germany; his political stance was attacked, in part, on grounds that he had never become a U.S. citizen. Charlie Chaplin starred opposite Virginia Merrill in his 1931 masterpiece, "City Lights" Chaplin s Monsieur Verdoux (1947), a darkly comical version of the Bluebeard story, angered the American Legion and other pressure groups. In 1952, at a time when he being pressed by the U.S. government for back taxes and linked by politicians and newspaper columnists with allegedly subversive causes, Chaplin set sail for England to promote the London premiere of Limelight. He was in mid-atlantic when he was radioed the bad news: The U.S. attorney general had instructed immigration authorities to deny Chaplin a re-entry visa unless he submitted to an inquiry of his moral worth. Enraged, Chaplin vowed to never return to the United States, and surrendered his re-entry permit in Geneva. Thereafter, he and his family lived at Corsier-sur-Vevey, near Vevey, Switzerland. 2
3 In 1957, Chaplin produced in London A King in New York, a comedy laden with sermons against the House Committee on Un-American Activities, inane television commercials, and other aspects of American life. The film brought fresh accusations of pro- Communism, which Chaplin specifically denied. In 1966 he wrote, directed, and appeared briefly in A Countess from Hong Kong, starring Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren, which proved to be a critical and commercial disaster. In 1972 he briefly returned to the United States to receive a special Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1975. Even though Chaplin appeared in few films after the advent of sound at the end of the 1920s, his fame has scarcely diminished more than three decades after his death. His early works are continually rediscovered by new generations, and recognized as timeless classics. For me, they are the most beautiful films in the world, said French director Francois Truffaut. Chaplin means more to me than the idea of God. ANOTHER PRODUCT of a performing family, BUSTER KEATON (1895-1966) was born in the tiny town of Pickway, Kansas, while his parents, Joe and Myra Keaton, were touring with their broadly comical Vaudeville act. Originally known as Joseph Francis Keaton, he earned his distinctive nickname at a very early age six months while demonstrating a near-miraculous gift for physical comedy. According to showbiz legend, dutifully recorded by Keaton biographer Tom Dradis, the infant tumbled down a flight of stairs in a boarding house that catered to a theatrical clientele. Legendary magician Harry Houdini witnessed the accident, and was profoundly shocked to see the baby was not only totally unharmed, but actually laughing. Houdini reportedly exclaimed: That s some buster your baby took! Which is why, when he joined his parents on stage at the age of three, the resilient child was dubbed Buster Keaton by his father. Billed as The Three Keatons, the act was a zany combination of acrobatics and miming. While repeatedly risking life and limb on stage, Buster mastered subtle timing and comic falls, and acquired as a lifelong trademark the never-smiling face. He was so skilled that many observers assumed he was a midget disguised as a child. The act broke up in 1917, when it became clear that Joe Keaton s heavy drinking was becoming a dangerous liability to a performance that required extremely precise physicality. Buster, now 21 and a well-established Vaudevillian, had a firm offer to headline his own show on the New York stage. Instead, however, he chose to enter films as a supporting player in a series of shorts made with comedy star Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle. Buster Keaton -- also known as The Great Stone Face 3
4 From 1920 to 1928, as writer-director-star with his own company, Buster Keaton made 19 short films and 10 features, including such silent masterpieces as The Navigator (1924), Seven Chances (1925), The General (1927), Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), and The Cameraman (1928). In these films, he played a calmly stoic young man who exhibits amazing physical dexterity in his naively single-minded but ultimately successful struggles to overcome intractable machines (a locomotive, an ocean liner) or forces of nature (a waterfall, a rockslide). Sixty years before Jeff Daniels played a 30s Buster Keaton in "The General" movie star who wandered off the screen and into the audience in Woody Allen s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), and more than seven decades before Tobey Maguire was transported from his 90s living room to a 50s TV sitcom in Pleasantville (1998), Keaton was smudging the line between reality and fantasy by playing a projectionist who daydreams his way into the movie he s presenting in Sherlock Jr. (1924). Even in his heyday, Keaton often found himself on the wrong end of unflattering comparisons to Charlie Chaplin, his more celebrated contemporary. Viewed in retrospect, however, the dissimilarities between the two comic greats are more pronounced. As critic Andrew Sarris astutely noted in his book The American Cinema, The difference between Keaton and Chaplin is the difference between poise and poetry, between the aristocrat and the tramp, between adaptability and dislocation, between the function of things and the meaning of things... To put it another way: While Chaplin often risks everything, even his life, while soaring on flights of dream-stoked fancy, Keaton customarily remains more earthbound, doggedly ignoring the chaos around him while obsessively focused on purely practical matters. Chaplin romanticizes women as luminous mysteries to be worshipped; Keaton expects a woman to pull her weight even after he falls in love with her. (At one point in The General, his character is so exasperated by the clueless klutziness of his lady love that he very nearly strangles her before opting to kiss her instead.) Chaplin might be driven batty by his dehumanizing drudgery on a high-speed assembly line (Modern Times), but Keaton is more determined to impose control over troublesome technology through sheer force of will. Consider one of the many unforgettable moments in The General, the Civil War saga of a Confederate engineer s misadventures while retrieving a wood-burning locomotive hijacked by Union spies. (The title refers to a train, not a military officer.) As Johnnie Gray, the improbably and imperturbably heroic Southerner, Keaton is so busy chopping wood to keep his engine running, he remains totally oblivious as his train passes retreating Confederate forces, then an advancing Union army. His out-of-proportion attentiveness to detail is not unlike that of the bomber crewman in Stanley Kubrick s Dr. 4
5 Strangelove (1964) who fastidiously corrects a flight-log error moments before his bigbang vaporization. Throughout The General, Keaton lives up to his billing as The Great Stone Face, making only the most minute adjustments to his expression to signal shifts between amusement (rare) and befuddlement (frequent), despair (he volunteers for the Confederate army, but is rejected because of his value as an engineer) and exultation (he proves his heroism to the Southern belle who once thought him a coward). Just as important, Keaton also illustrates the hilarious contrast between stillness of form and fluidity of motion that is his hallmark as a comic artist. Ever wonder why martial-artist Jackie Chan is so frequently compared to Keaton? Take a close look at the no-sweat gracefulness of the latter s astonishing physicality in The General. See how Keaton lunges into frames, dives under tables, spins into pratfalls and skips across the tops of moving trains all the while maintaining his unsmiling poise, and never, ever using a stunt double. No doubt about it: Keaton co-wrote and co-directed The General (with Clyde Bruckman) as a star vehicle. But the movie s most notoriously expensive sight gag is keyed to the flabbergasted response of a minor supporting character, a Union commander who watches helplessly while a train falls through a burning bridge and into a river far below. Such excessiveness may seem like small potatoes to contemporary viewers. But back in 1927, the excess was unsettling. Critics and audiences were even more upset by the outrageously dark comedy of a scene in which Keaton fails to notice while his Confederate comrades are felled by a Union sniper. Just in the nick of time, our hero saves himself simply by waving his sword. The loosened blade flies off the handle, and plunges into the enemy marksman. Mind you, we don t see the moment of impalement, just a brief glimpse of the dead sniper. But that was too much for most folks in the 1920s. Critic Robert E. Sherwood complained in Life magazine: Someone should have told Buster that it is difficult to derive laughter from the sight of men being killed in battle. Many of his gags at the end of (The General) are in such gruesomely bad taste that the sympathetic spectator is inclined to look the other way. Time passes, tastes change: In 2000, when the American Film Institute released its list of the 100 funniest movies ever made, The General ranked higher No. 18 than any other silent comedy on the list. (Other Keaton classics in the Top 100: Sherlock Jr., No. 62, and The Navigator, No. 81.) It s worth noting that, in sharp contrast to the other clown prince of silent cinema, Keaton refused to take himself too seriously, either as an innovator or an entertainer. He once told an interviewer: The only one of us who listened and accepted the role of genius intellectual critics thrust upon him was Chaplin. Sometimes I suspect that much of the trouble he s been in started the first time he read that he was a sublime satirist and a first-rate artist. He believed every word of it, and tried to live and think accordingly. Keaton's own career began to decline in 1928, when his company was dissolved and he went to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he was not allowed to write or direct his own films. Then sound came to motion pictures, and spoken dialogue displaced pantomime. By the late 1930s, Keaton was reduced to concocting sight gags for Harpo Marx during 5
6 the filming of such Marx Brothers comedies as Go West (which borrows from The General the sight gag of a railroad car chopped into kindling to keep a steam engine running) and A Night at the Opera. Hampered by personal problems, Keaton nonetheless made a comeback of sorts, appearing in films such as San Diego, I Love You (1944), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Limelight (1952), It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (completed shortly before his death in 1966). He also had the dubious distinction of co-starring with Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon in three Beach Party comedies: Pajama Party (1964), Beach Blanket Bingo (1965) and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965). As his silent masterworks were revived from the late 1940s onward, Keaton gradually regained his rightful rank among the immortals of cinema. Today, his best films are widely regarded as equal, if not superior, to those of Chaplin. 6