Chaplin, from Tillie to Adenoid Hinkel
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1 Chaplin, from Tillie to Adenoid Hinkel The lawlessness of Grimaldi’s Clown might have been expected to produce suspicion, not to say alarm, amongst genteel audiences and middle-class critics troubled by fears about the character’s effects on discipline and social order amongst the lower classes. But with the exception of a letter received by Charles Dibdin, castigating him ‘in the most virulent manner’ for the Clown’s criminality and ‘moral turpitude’, moral opposition to Grimaldi’s character was remarkably scarce. The performer’s skill, we must therefore surmise, lay in his capacity to banish any hints of vulgarity and coarseness from the Clown’s criminality. In any case, this half-innocent, even naïve, character, on the mysterious threshold between human sentience and subhuman savagery, somehow obviated questions about responsibility and punishment. – Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London , 1770-1840, pp.214-15. Charlie Chaplin must be one of the most obnoxious personalities ever to gain a huge international audience. No wonder Hitler imitated his moustache (though not his walk), and no wonder he felt he had to hit back. Tillie’s Punctured Romance (Mack Sennett, 1914) , was the thirty-second film he’d made that year. He’s not The Tramp, but a layabout and a cad, an unscrupulous parasite, now on this woman, now on that, the slob-filling in the sandwich between cute Mabel Normand and enormous Marie Dressler, on one of whose stage hits the film is based. He uses his hop-and-skid-180°-turn over and over again, till you get tired of it: but watch the moment when the two secretaries come into the restaurant to inform Dressler that, her uncle having fallen off a mountain, she’s rich. They ask her if she’s “Miss …” and she says no, she’s “Mrs …”; for Chaplin, reading about her inheritance before she gets wind of it, has left Mabel Normand and proposed to her (slipping over repeatedly in the water with which she’s washing the floor of the restaurant kitchen as he does so). The two secretaries look at him in disbelief: and he does his soon-to-be famous simper, shrugging up his shoulders, tilting his head on one side, and giggling coyly in acknowledgement of the fact that (in all innocence, as he’d have them believe) he’s now Dressler’s husband. Later in the sequence, as Dressler begins to show suspicion, he swings his cane, turns from her, and hides his face in his hands in fake outrage and hurt. What he later employs as signs of loveability, are in this movie signs of hypocrisy, greed, and cunning. See also the fight he has later, with the odd customer at the society party. Chaplin punches him in the face and kicks him in the stomach as to the manner born, so that it comes as no surprise when, on bidding farewell to Dressler (whose uncle’s not dead after all), he kicks her in the stomach too. The film ends with Chaplin expelled, and Dressler and Normand pals for life without him. In this respect it’s uncharacteristic, for in all his other films we must understand him to be cuddly. In The Champion (written and directed by Chaplin, 1915), our sense that the Chaplin persona is a front for twisted and duplicitous behaviour is reinforced. Now the starving Tramp, he applies for a job as a sparring-partner, hides a horseshoe in his left boxing glove, and knocks everyone out with it at the first blow. A crooked promoter offers him $500 to throw a fight. Chaplin (bare-knuckled), knocks him out and takes the money anyway. Lastly he wins his championship fight when his dog enters the 2 ring and bites his opponent in the bum. It all apparently deserves a reward, and he ends up in the arms of Edna Purviance. In the Park (1915) shows his behaviour as truly anti-social and weird. Again as the Tramp, he sits down on a bench next to a courting couple and makes himself obnoxious. Fancying a nursemaid (Purviance) with a pram – which he knocks over – he gains a kiss by giving her a purse which he’s just stolen from a pickpocket. His prior approach had been to put his feet up on Purviance’s lap. Later we see him tapping out the ashes from his cigar into the open mouth of a man whom he’s just knocked out with a brick. The film is a minor masterpiece of pre-Beckett surrealism, its conventions being, firstly that if you see someone on a park bench, you always sit on it next to them as close as possible; and secondly that the only way to greet someone standing is to kick them up the arse. The male half of the courting couple, being rejected, wants to drown himself in the lake, and asks Chaplin to help him with a neat kick: Chaplin, after setting the kick up, smoothing the seat of the man’s trousers and aiming with care, does so; and by the end of the film has kicked half the remainder of the cast into the lake as well. More shoulder-shrugging and simpering happens in A Jitney Elopement (1915) in which Chaplin poses as the man Purviance’s father wants as a son-in-law. It’s here that he introduces the trick of tipping his hat from the rear brim – it looks like a salute, but is in fact an insult, and he does it to everyone, friend or foe. The ancient gag of the hat rolled down the outstretched arm appears, too – it’s a signal of triumph. The way in which the fake moustache goes up into the nose, we realise, as (with skill) Chaplin carves a loaf of bread into a helter-skelter, is supposed to be genteel and ingratiating – it’s designed for an audience which, like the upper-class father here, is easily taken in: the real suitor is a French count. The count’s shirt-tail is sticking through a hole in his trousers, as Chaplin’s own will be at the end of City Lights . The scene shifts to a park, and, as in the previous movie, Chaplin dispenses violence without discrimination. He taps fag-ash into people’s hats, kicks them up the bum, and knocks them off tree- branches. Purviance herself suffers three such falls in a row. The male infant’s need to prove himself the physical superior of everyone, whether they love him or detest him – the need to be the biggest bully on the block – is by now well-established. The fantasy is discarded and resumed at will in Burlesque on Carmen (1915). When the inherited plot dictates that he should play a loser (Don José), he does it with the same professionalism that he shows as the bad guy in Tillie . The bullfighter lifts Carmen (Purviance) on to a table without difficulty – but José can’t lift her half an inch. In frustration, he jumps on the table and dances himself, then, later, in defiance of logic, he picks her up in a fireman’s lift. A recurrent joke is that every time he draws his sword, only six inches of it comes out – the rest stays in the scabbard. It’s a standard statement of phallic inadequacy. But this unChaplinesque approach is discarded in the second section, as though distasteful to both his ego and his fans: he must now be the farcical winner of fencing and wrestling matches. Then, in the final section, deserted by Carmen for the bullfighter, the now sad José starts waddling with feet turned outwards – the Tramp again. Lastly, to our surprise, he seems to stab her, the fixated look of possessive determination as he does so showing, we think, the infantile need for power we’ve seen in all the earlier films. He even kills himself. But it’s a trick knife, and he and Purviance were only kidding. 3 There’s something psychotic going on. The very opening of A Night in the Show (1915) when – not as The Tramp, but as a drunken Toff – he pushes to the front of the ticket-queue and doesn’t seem to understand when he’s told to wait his turn, is a characteristic joke – we’re supposed to find it funny because we identify. That’s what – asserts Chaplin – we’d all like to do. Edna Purviance, finding herself in the same row as Chaplin, who’s been moved back in the stalls because of the way he’s disrupted the front row, finds him amusing and attractive (women are often portrayed as finding the Chaplin Simper sexy). Meanwhile, Chaplin II, still not The Tramp, but sitting in the front circle, pours beer all over Purviance, and over Chaplin the Toff. The Toff climbs on stage and interferes with the act – he’s applauded, and not because the audience think he’s performing. Chaplin II, in the gallery, throws tomatoes and eggs. Both Chaplins ruin the routines. It’s like Hamlet interrupting The Mousetrap because he can’t bear someone else to be the centre of attention – and it seems to me that the kicks up the bottom, blows to the jaw, and pies in face, are real – they hurt. No rivals are tolerated. In His New Job (1915) a real, professional rival, Ben Turpin, arrives for an audition, and sits next to Chaplin: the stares of mutual hatred are not acting. Turpin has to be K.O.’d with a swinging door: then Chaplin strikes a match on his foot, and walks over his prostrate body in leaving.