A Tramp shining

The many-sided character of Charlie Chaplin

by Steve Vineberg

"CHARLIE CHAPLIN," At the Museum of Fine Arts, July 30 through August 9.

There's little doubt that of all the icons created for the screen, Charlie Chaplin's Tramp is the most famous, and the one that been written about in the warmest and most affectionate terms. One of the most eloquent critics to enshrine him was James Agee, who in 1949 cast a wistful backward glance toward the era of the great silent comics. The Tramp, Agee claimed, "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." The influence of this figure has reached far beyond American movies. He shows up as far afield as Federico Fellini's La strada and Nights of Cabiria (where his spirit is infused into Giulietta Masina) and Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

The Tramp stars in six of the 10 features and all seven of the shorts included in the MFA's Chaplin retrospective, which begins this weekend -- the first major Chaplin series in the Boston area in many years. As for the remaining four, Chaplin doesn't appear at all in A Woman of Paris (August 2 at 1:30 p.m.), and though he stars in Monsieur Verdoux (August 7 at 7:45 p.m.), Limelight (August 9 at 3:15 p.m.), and A King in New York (August 8 at 3:30 p.m.), he has, by this time, ceased to play the Tramp. The Great Dictator (August 6 at 7:45 p.m.), in 1940, marks the transition; in it, the Tramp co-stars with a satirical version of Adolf Hitler named Hynkel, and by the final reel even the Tramp (here called the Jewish Barber) has metamorphosed into something quite different: a tremulous speechmaker sounding a trumpet call for the ascendance of humanity.

In a 1947 essay on Monsieur Verdoux, Robert Warshow proposes a brilliant theory about why the Tramp had to die. Before the 1936 Modern Times (July 31 at 8:15 p.m., August 2 at 3:45 p.m., and August 6 at 6 p.m.), as he sees it, the Tramp's relationship with society was fluid and inconsistent; they were roughly set in opposition to each other, but not always, and sometimes they even managed to live off each other. "It was essential to his character," Warshow argues, "that he should take the society as given and make his own life on its margin." But by Modern Times, the shape of the age being what it is, Chaplin can no longer portray the Tramp as a down-at-heels gentleman ambling resolutely, resilient if not always cheerful, down the hurdle-beset highways of the world. For the first time Chaplin employs him to dramatize the struggle of a human cog in an inhumane labor machine -- and by 1940 and The Great Dictator, that strategy too is obsolete, and so is the Tramp. That's why the scenes involving the Barber are so dreadful. "The fact is," Warshow reasons, "that the [movie's] theme was almost the only possible one for Chaplin; it was wrong only for the Tramp."

That is, I'd say, because -- except in Modern Times, in which Chaplin adjusted the vision of René Clair's great 1931 social satire A nous la liberté to fit his own creation -- the Tramp really is redolent of the 19th century. He's a genteel figure whose poetic sensibility and délicatesse, infinitely at odds with his reduced circumstances, are his most sublime running gag, whether he's eating a boiled shoe like poached salmon in The Gold Rush (August 1 at 1:30 p.m.) or, arriving late at a ditch-digging job, proffering a flower to his irate employer in Pay Day. And that anachronistic quality is present in just about every aspect of the pre-Modern Times Chaplins except for the moviemaking technology itself. Even that technology is something that Chaplin, for all his inventiveness as a performer, can hardly be said to have devoted himself to with the fervor of his contemporaries Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. Movies existed for Chaplin mostly as a means of framing the Tramp, perhaps the most original and enchanting idea ever to occur to what was essentially a music-hall mind. The plots of the early Chaplins, even the feature-length ones like The Gold Rush and City Lights (July 30 at 8 p.m., August 1 at 3:30 p.m., and August 7 at 6 p.m.), are uncomplicated (though they're often lovely). In fact, I wouldn't say that the story of the seven-reeler The Circus (August 9 at 1:30 p.m.) is any more involved than that of "The Idle Class," a two-reeler.

What you can see in many of the narratives is a sensibility drawn from the popular art forms of the Victorian age, the time and place into which Chaplin was born. The Kid (July 31 at 6:30 p.m.), one of the sweetest of his films, is as Dickensian as any movie you'd care to name: in it the Tramp raises a foundling in a slum while his mother, now a stage star, longs to be reunited with the child she abandoned. That 19th-century sentimentality is a constant in Chaplin's work. It can stick to your teeth, especially when it's paired with the self-sacrificing nobility he was so fond of: in The Circus, for example, when the Tramp plays matchmaker for the woman he adores and the man she's fallen in love with. (This is the only blight on an otherwise charming little picture that not many people know.) But it's the legacy of the world Chaplin emerged from. So are the fairy tales he loved, which pop up in the fantasy sequence in The Kid and the plot of City Lights, in which the Tramp and the Blind Girl are a pair of Cinderellas, only one of whom can be transformed at the end of the story. So are the melodramas that were still on the stage when he began to make movies. A Woman of Paris, in which a young woman enters the Paris social whirl after eviction by her stepfather and a cancelled marriage soil her reputation, could have been written by Sardou or Dumas fils, the great drawing-room dramatists of premodern France.

Chaplin's passage into the modern age was a long and obstinate one. The talkie revolution occurred between 1926 and 1929, but he uses the soundtrack in City Lights (1931) and Modern Times only for music and gags that turn language into nonsense. Modern Times is socially and politically of its time, but though the Tramp has been brought into line with the '30s, the absence of dialogue keeps pulling the movie back into a dead zone. The film may be a masterwork, but it's the oddest masterwork I can think of. What couldn't have been predicted was the talkiness of the movies that followed Modern Times: The Great Dictator, Monsieur Verdoux, Limelight, and A King in New York all contain windy philosophical diatribes. (The MFA series omits his final film, 1967's A Countess from Hong Kong, which starred Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren. No loss.)

It's easy to see both Chaplin's refusal to stop making silent movies and his refusal to shut up once he began to talk on screen as extensions of a quite remarkable ego that is, to my mind, his most insufferable characteristic. Warshow, an absolute admirer, offers in the opening of his 1952 essay "A Feeling of Sad Dignity" the most lucid analysis of how that ego operates in City Lights; Pauline Kael is much harsher in her first published piece, which was occasioned, like Warshow's, by the release of Limelight. And Limelight, where Chaplin, as the faded clown Calvero, upstages the young ballerina whose life he's saved by dying off stage as she dances her heart out to a packed crowd, is certainly the most infuriating of his movies, though A King in New York is even worse -- it's grotesquely, incomprehensibly bad -- and the Jewish-ghetto scenes in The Great Dictator can make you scream with impatience. (If Jack Oakie weren't around to lend his vaudevillean spirit to The Great Dictator -- he plays a burlesque of Mussolini -- I'm not sure it would be watchable.)

Besides Modern Times, Chaplin made only one resonant film about his own age: Monsieur Verdoux, a one-of-a-kind picture that was unavailable in this country for many years and has never found its audience. (Certainly it wouldn't have been likely to on its release in 1947, when the unlucky combination of the national mood and Chaplin's political naïveté had begun to turn him into a highly controversial figure.) It's an ironic comedy about a discarded Paris bank clerk (superbly played by Chaplin) who becomes a Bluebeard to support his family. Murder, he argues when he's finally caught and sentenced, is merely a business practice, born out of the necessity for ruthlessness if we're to survive in a cold world. To call it villainy is hypocritical since, multiplied in war, it's newly christened as heroism.

The movie occasionally recalls Balzac (especially the depiction of the family of one of Verdoux's victims) and Shaw (the tone), but it's a different animal from either. Neither of those writers could have conceived Henri Verdoux, perhaps the most fascinating by-product imaginable of Chaplin's chilly, misanthropic personality. Verdoux professes to love his crippled wife and flaxen-haired son, but he confines them to a cottage with a garden and a whitewashed fence that feel like a mausoleum, and he seems tense and old in their company. He can hardly wait to get back to work -- rushing about France, plotting his larcenies, detailing his murder schemes, improvising wittily when he meets an unexpected obstacle. That's when he seems most vibrant. He picks up a girl, lately out of prison, to try out a new poison on, slipping the fateful glass of wine out of her grasp when he discovers that, contrary to his initial perceptions, she isn't world-weary and in fact, like him, has loved and nursed an invalid. But he finds her optimism somehow threatening: in the movie's most haunting moment, she approaches him in the street to renew their acquaintance, without ulterior motives, and he dismisses her coldly with some bills and a warning to "go on about your business."

Verdoux is Chaplin's most unusual creation -- so distant in every way from the Tramp that you can see exactly why Chaplin's audiences have never known how to respond to him. He's hardly the representative of humanity Agee saw in the Tramp (though Agee was one of the few critics to champion Monsieur Verdoux on its release). But he's at least as many-sided and mysterious.