Recognized as one of the greatest actors in movie history, Charlie Chaplin drew from his impoverished childhood in South London to create the 'Tramp', an undaunted cavalier from the 19th Century trying to survive the materialistic, isolating, technologically-driven 20th Century. Thanks to the endearing charm and spirit of the Tramp, he became the industry's first superstar, signing a contract with the First National Exhibitors Circuit for $1 million in 1918. A life-size cardboard figure of the icon--outfitted in tattered baggy pants, a cutaway coat and vest, impossibly large, worn-out shoes and a battered derby hat--bearing the inscription I AM HERE TODAY was enough to produce a line around the block during the late 1910s. He controlled every aspect of the filmmaking process (producing, casting, directing, writing, scoring and editing the movies in which he starred) and by 1917 was exposing 50,000 feet of film for a two-reel (2000 feet) Mutual comedy, an astonishing shooting ratio of 25 to 1, which would later swell to 100 to 1.
Born into a home of enough gentility to keep a maid, Chaplin watched his family lose everything at a very early age. Both parents were music hall entertainers and his father, who eventually died from alcoholism in 1901, abandoned the family for another woman when Charlie was three years old. His mother's continued performing led to his own debut at the age of five, but it wasn't long before mental illness forced her from the stage into an asylum, condemning Chaplin and older half-brother Sydney to a childhood spent between public charity homes and fending for themselves on the streets. Avid fan Sigmund Freud remarked: "He always portrays one and the same figure . . . himself as he was in his early, dismal youth." His observations of the little jobs and stratagems that allowed the least fortunate members of society to survive would pay off handsomely in later years, though the cruel deprivation scarred him irrevocably. His son Sydney said of him: "He was the most insecure man I ever knew. I wanted to tell him, 'Dad, you made it!'"
Though not from Lancashire, Chaplin began his career in earnest in the summer of 1898 as one of the Eight Lancashire Lads, a children's musical troupe touring England's provincial music halls. By the age of 16 he was playing the featured role of Billy in William Gillette's West End production of "Sherlock Holmes" (1905). At the prompting of his brother, Chaplin then secured a spot in Fred Karno's music hall revue, quickly becoming its star attraction. He remained with the Karno troupe for seven years until film producer Mack Sennett discovered him during his second tour of America in 1913 and signed him to the Keystone Company. Chaplin's European music hall style was out of place in the mechanized world of Sennett, who ran his studio with production-line efficiency, churning out two films a week and allowing no more than ten camera set-ups per film. For an actor used to refining a set character night after night with the Karno company, the Sennett method seemed careless, sloppy and crude.
Chaplin's first film for Sennett, "Making a Living" (1914), was mediocre, featuring him in standard English music hall garb racing across the frame for the entire reel. "Kid Auto Races at Venice" (1914), however, was a different story. Borrowing a bowler hat, reedy cane and baggy pants (from Fatty Arbuckle) to go with floppy shoes (from Fred Sterling), he assembled his trademark Tramp costume, forever transforming the cinema. Arriving to watch the races, he discovers a movie camera and crew recording the event, and in an unstructured half-reel of improvised clowning made himself the star of the newsreel while resisting all attempts of the crew to throw him out of the frame. After a four-month apprenticeship, Chaplin, now directing and scripting his shorts, began separating himself from the Sennett style. He moved the camera closer than Sennett permitted, focusing on character to bring a comedy of emotions to the frenetic Keystone world. He also slowed the breakneck Keystone pace, reducing the number of gags per film and increasing the time devoted to each. Though his technique tended to be invisible, he gradually evolved a principle of cinema based on framing: finding the exact way to frame a shot to reveal its motion and meaning completely, thus avoiding disturbing cuts.
By the end of his Keystone year, Chaplin had become so popular that Sennett's offer of $750 per week (five times his 1914 salary) was not enough to keep him in the fold. Within that year, he had revolutionized film comedy by introducing characterization, mime and slapstick pathos, his emphasis on character paving the way for the subsequent achievements of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Joining the Essanay Company for $1250 per week plus a $10,000 signing bonus, he embarked on a transitional year between the knockabout Sennett farces and the more subtle comedies of psychological observation and moral debate that mark the mature Chaplin. Though early films for Essanay recalled Sennett, "The Tramp" (1915) looked to the future, firmly establishing the relationship of his screen persona to the respectable social world. After protecting his idealized woman (Edna Purviance) from harm, Chaplin at first mistakes her kindness for another type of love but ultimately realizes the respectable Ednas of the world are not for tramps like him. Taking to the road, his back to the camera, he walks briskly to his future, with a kick of his feet and a twirl of the cane, providing the ending that would dominate his films for the next two decades.
Ranking among his greatest achievements, Chaplin's twelve Mutual two-reelers of 1916 and 1917 were so inventive, intimate and hilariously clever that they brought him worldwide popularity. In "One A.M." (1916), he once again tailored his Karno drunk for the camera. "Behind the Screen" (1916) glimpsed life inside a movie studio, and "The Rink" (1916) put him on roller skates for the first time. "Easy Street" (1917) cast him in his only performance as a policeman while converting the most sordid subjects (i.e., wife-beating, drug addiction, police brutality and rape) into surprisingly funny material for comic routines. He brought drunken chaos to an entire health spa for "The Cure" (1917) before ending his Mutual run with two remarkable films, "The Immigrant" (1917), which identified the plight of a whole class with the solitary tramp, and "The Adventurer" (1917). His non-stop race to escape his police pursuers in the latter was his ultimate tribute to the kind of chase that former boss Sennett had made intrinsic to film comedy. The Mutual films revealed a master at work, stitching mime, satire, sentimentality and slapstick into a seamless whole.
As an independent filmmaker distributing through First National, Chaplin broke out of his popular two-reel format. Though his contract called for 12 two-reelers in one year, he actually took five years to deliver eight films, of which only three were of the specified length. His initial film for First National, ("A Dog's Life" 1918), longer (a three-reeler) and richer than any he had attempted, introduced the mongrel Scraps, an outcast like the Tramp, who must fight to survive in a world of tougher, bigger dogs. He followed with another three-reeler, "Shoulder Arms" (1918), which transported the Tramp to the battlefields of Europe, before suffering a major disappointment with "Sunnyside" (1919), his first not to find favor with the public. More than 18 months elapsed before the appearance of "The Kid" (1921), his most ambitious film yet, which to the consternation of First National had grown from its planned three-reel length into a six-reeler. Elaborating on the friend-ally embodied by Scraps, Chaplin worked hard with his child co-star Jackie Coogan, shaping the boy into a mirror of himself. The result was the biggest hit in motion picture history to that time, excluding D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" (1915).
In 1919, Chaplin along with fellow stars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford and director Griffith founded United Artists, for whom his first film was the atypical (Trampless) "A Woman of Paris" (1923), a comedy of manners and swan song for long-time co-star Purviance. Though quite sophisticated for its time, it flopped commercially but became a powerful influence on Ernst Lubitsch, the eventual grand master of the genre. His next four features returned to the Tramp and his conflict with "normal" social expectations, forming what might be called the "marriage group." "The Gold Rush" (1925), featuring the famous feasting on shoe leather scene, suggested that his striking it rich might make him an acceptable mate, but he was back on the road in "The Circus" (1928) after failing to fulfill the heroine's vision of romance. Audiences rewarded the director's bold move of resisting sound for "City Lights" (1931), proving they would still see a silent film if Charlie Chaplin was the star. The fourth-biggest grosser of the year tells the story of his love for a blind flower girl, and though he facilitates the operation that gives her sight, the abrupt conclusion seems to suggest she will not share her life with a lowly tramp.
Silence was the medium in which the Tramp lived, but for "City Lights", Chaplin's concession to sound was providing musical scoring and sound effects. From this point on, he would compose the scores for all his sound films, as well as adding musical tracks to silent classics. No longer able to resist synchronized sound, he bid farewell to the Tramp in "Modern Times" (1936), allowing him his only talking sequence on film, a jumble of gibberish in the form of a song. When he took to the road this last time, it was also finally in the company of another, Paulette Goddard (Chaplin's wife at the time). He had made only four films in eleven years, but his output would slow further with his final three American films coming in the next 16 years. "The Great Dictator" (1940), his first full-talkie, combined slapstick, satire and social commentary, casting Chaplin in the dual role of a Tramp-like Jewish barber and Adenoid Hynkel, the Hitler-like dictator of Tomania. In addition to the send-up of Hitler as a maniacal clown, Jack Oakie weighed in unforgettably as Benzino Napaloni of rival country Bacteria, a hysterical take-off of Mussolini.
The Tramp had been a character of 19th Century sensibilities, a leftover from a Dickensian world, but with "Monsieur Verdoux" (1947), Chaplin proved he was firmly in the 20th Century with a resonant film of his times. Another political fable, "Verdoux" presents him as a man who marries rich, repellent ladies and murders them to support his beloved wife on an idyllic farm. The startling transformation of their precious tramp into a murderous Bluebeard turned his once adoring public against him, but his creative expression was right on-target for a post-Holocaust world. "Wars, conflict, it's all business. One murder makes a villain; millions a hero. Numbers sanctify." Equating Verdoux's murderous trade with acceptable professions--munitions manufacturing, stock trading, banking--was clearly years ahead of its time, and its wry humor and pacifist sentiments make it quite contemporary when seen today. Under fire for his liberal views in an era defined by Joe McCarthy's anti-Communist tirades, Chaplin released a final affectionate tribute to his art and its traditions, "Limelight" (1952). Having never become an American citizen, he found his re-entry permit to the USA revoked after he had attended its London premiere and settled with his family in Switzerland.
Public reaction against Chaplin was so rabid that his first European film ("A King in New York" 1957), a slight satire on American consumerism and political paranoia, remained unreleased in the United States until 1973. Chaplin's final film, "A Countess From Hong Kong" (1967), in which he merely made a cameo appearance as a waiter, was even more disappointing, suffering as had its predecessor at the hands of a low budget, tight schedule and a production team of strangers. "Limelight" functions as his cinematic swan song. In his most autobiographical and most underrated work, Chaplin played Calvero, an old, drunken has-been, commenting superbly on his own fabulous career, one which saw the triumph and decline of the physical comedy he had brought to silent films from the English music hall. For the last time on celluloid, he exercised classic pantomime bits recalling the Tramp, like taming a flea and imagining himself a great lion tamer. Chaplin's hilarious routine with the great Keaton (the only time the two appeared together) before Calvero collapses and dies is his last significant screen image, a fitting finale to a wondrous career. Everything after it was strictly denouement.
Twenty years later Hollywood welcomed the Tramp back, presenting Chaplin with an Honorary Academy Award amid the loudest and longest ovation in its history. The frail man of 82, who had long since given up radical politics, also picked up an Oscar the following year for writing the score of "Limelight" (including its hit ballad "Eternally"), eligible since the movie had not played the Los Angeles area before 1972. His final great tribute came when Queen Elizabeth II knighted him in 1975. Chaplin had his dark side. His idealization of women masked his penchant for young girls. His first two wives were 16 when he married them, and his last, 18. He was a total autocrat on the set, demonstrating every bit of business for his actors to copy, and his need to control all aspects of production cut him off from meaningful collaboration. We can forgive him all his failings because of the Tramp and the joy that sublime creature brought to the world. James Agee perhaps said it best: "Of all comedians, he worked most deeply and most shrewdly within a realization of what a human being is, and is up against. The Tramp is as centrally representative of humanity, as many-sided and as mysterious, as Hamlet, and it seems unlikely that any dancer or actor can ever have excelled him in eloquence, variety, or poignancy of motion."