Changing Film History With a Smile--and Perhaps, a Tear: Charlie Chaplin's The Kid

 

Film has this weird thing called “emotionality” that sees itself at the center of a lot of haranguing in the critical discourse. There is a sort of classism in dialogue that privileges film as a purely cerebral space, detached from all things base and emotional, and if your concerns in film tend to err on the side of sentiment or emotions, you have probably been on the receiving end of patronizing glances from those who consider themselves more discerning because their favorite movie is 2001: A Space Odyssey. Tyler Sage, another freelance film critic I follow, said it best when he described emotionality’s close cousin, “sentimentality" and the way it is generally discussed in the public sphere:

The Godfather (1972)

“These days, if you are one of these types who likes to opine knowingly in the public sphere – say, a highfalutin film critic – it's one of the most powerful aspersions there is. ‘I just found it so sentimental,’ … [and] you can be certain no one will contradict you, because to defend sentiment is akin to admitting that you're lowbrow, a sappy plebeian, not a thinker at all … 

“It was once used to denote someone, or something, in whom or which the capacity for feeling itself was highly developed; at its furthest reaches, the word indicated a capacity for feeling something that was actually inaccessible to other people. It's now more frequently used to derogate, because we live in a world in which (most evidence to the contrary) we'd like to believe rationality has triumphed over emotion."

    This dichotomy is of course total nonsense, rooted more in a self-imposed peacock contest than any actual desire to explore the nuances of the human experience. The human psyche is equal parts intellect and sentiment, and the sentiment part needs to be nurtured and cultivated as much as the other part.

The Jungle Book (1967)

    As a twenty-something film school graduate who’s way too into Disney movies, one who entered into this field of cinema primarily owing to its appeal as an emotional medium (I even named my blog “Films and Feelings,” what are the odds?), I give this topic a lot of thought. More than once, I have had to go the extra mile to prove my credentials as someone who goes to the movies because he just likes to feel things.

Film is a fluid medium, capable of opening one’s eyes to a full spectrum of human experiences: emotional, intellectual, and every shade in between. To that, film is one the best, if not the absolute best, places to study this thing called “emotionality.” And I’m going to prove this theorem by diving into one of the most important films ever made by one of the most important filmmakers to ever touch a camera: Charlie Chaplin’s 1921 masterwork, The Kid.

Charlie Chaplin made his mark as a master of the silver screen back when it had only barely begun to define itself. Chaplin had a very recognizable setup and style, and his influence on popular storytelling is felt across the entire range of modern filmmaking. I spotlight Chaplin in this conversation because unlike your other "filmmaking 101" players like Hitchcock whose films tended to favor philosophical questions about the nature of human failing, Chaplin's films were sentimental, and deeply so, and this had a profound effect on the development of film as storytelling. It's not just that his films were really good, but they sort of opened the doors for film as a medium to become this deeply emotional place for the masses, which is more or less where film is today.

    Homages to his work, subtle and overt, are kind of everywhere. (Chaplin is, for example, the only movie star I can think of who has his own Pokemon.) Something like twenty dozen prominent filmmakers have singled him out as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, with a few even daring to call him the absolute greatest. Does he deserve such grand accolades from basically every filmmaker past and present? Yes. Very much yes.

Like a lot of the earliest filmmakers, Chaplin did a lot to scout out the intricacies of visual storytelling and how to impart meaning to the audience, and all before the advent of sound cinema. But the impact Charlie had on cinema extends just beyond the semantics of the medium itself. Chaplin was, in the words of film critic, Ty Burr, "... the first figure to in American popular culture to successfully unite high and low culture; with his arrival, great writers and thinkers began to talk about the movies as if they mattered."

What exactly film owes to Chaplin … is hard to articulate. We take for granted a lot of what Chaplin helped pioneer, but Chaplin’s storytelling ethos was and is unusual in the context of storytelling across history. To really do it justice, we’d have to do a deep dive into heroes and heroism across the centuries, but I’m going to do my best to keep this discussion mostly fixed on one storyteller and one film–Chaplin’s best film, The Kid.

This wasn’t my first Chaplin film (I believe that was The Gold Rush), but it was the film that made me fall in love with Chaplin as an artist. The premise was very simple, and its tension very straightforward: can a love so pure survive in a world that is not kind to pure things? And this simple premise yields tremendously satisfying results, and within such a short runtime (just over or under an hour depending on which version you’re viewing). 

But what I really respect about this film, and Chaplin in general, is that he understood the application of emotion on film. Not in the way that most modern studio heads do as a device to lure the masses to the ticket booth, but as a means of refining one’s capacity to experience and understand emotion. So, if film is first and foremost an emotional outlet for you, fear not, you are in the company of masters, and this is clearer perhaps nowhere than with Charlie Chaplin and The Kid.

 Birth of a Tramp

Lambeth Workhouse, where Charlie was sent to work in 1896

    Charles Spencer Chaplin was born April 16, 1889 in South London where he lived with his mother, Hannah, and older brother, Sydney. Hannah worked as a stage entertainer, leaving Charlie in prime position to discover his love for performing. But perhaps even more relevant to the development of Chaplin's character is the fact that his family did not live in wealth or comfort, this in part owing to Hannah’s battles with mental health, and just the unforgiving nature of the underclass. But it was still a house of love. In his autobiography, Charlie recalled his mother telling him and his brother the stories of Jesus and the cross he carried. In his words,

   "Mother had so carried me away that I wanted to die that very night and meet Jesus. But Mother was not so enthusiastic. 'Jesus wants you to live first and fulfill your destiny here,' she said. In that dark room in the basement at Oakley Street, Mother illuminated to me the kindliest light this world has ever known, which has endowed literature and the theater with their greatest and richest themes: love, pity, and humanity."

When Charlie immigrated to America in 1908, he found work as a touring stage performer before accepting an invitation at Keystone to try his hand at this new medium called “moving pictures.” After only his second appearance in front of the camera, Chaplin had crafted what would become his defining character, “The Tramp.” In his words,

Modern Times (1936)

"I wanted everything a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large. I was undecided whether to look old or young, but remembering Sennett had expected him to be a much older man, I added a small mustache, which, I reasoned, would add age without hiding my expression.

“I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed the clothes and the make-up made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked onto the stage he was fully born.”

The Tramp was a recurring character across almost all of Chaplin’s work, both shorts and feature films. The individual adventures of these films varied from work to work, but they all centered around the goodhearted but hapless Tramp just trying to keep his head above water, hijinks would ensue, and a few laughs later The Tramp wanders down the road twirling his cane. The Tramp was a huge sensation and became perhaps the defining face of silent cinema.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001)

    Something we really need to hit on is that the type of hero embodied by The Tramp was not necessarily the default for storytelling. These days we kind of take it for granted that of course the hero is going to be some underdog with a heart of gold, or else an awkward misfit who possesses some underappreciated wisdom or skillset. Even from our more action-figure heroes, there is an expectation for them to also look out for the small people. But larger history hasn’t necessarily prioritized those as traits that signified heroism or someone worthy of our attention.

You saw these themes surface in literature in works like Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables with the merciful Jean Valjean, and even some of the earliest tellings of the King Arthur story have him start out as this humble farm boy. But Heracles and Odysseus of Greek mythology, for example, were not champions of the vulnerable and oppressed, they were just really good at their jobs or had a unique reserve of strength that made them really cool, and that was the thing that made their story worth telling.

    Heroes like these overcame insurmountable odds, yes, but the tools by which they surpassed their obstacles were more in the vein of incredible strength or divine birthright. Down the road, Shakespeare’s protagonists were defined by their deep philosophical musings more than their kind heart. And, like Heracles and Odysseus, Shakespeare’s heroes represented the cultural height of their society: royalty, nobility, warlords, and so on. They were not “underdogs” as we’d define them today.

The literary figures perhaps most analogous to The Tramp were more along the lines of Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, mischievous little troublemakers who kept things entertaining for the audiences with their sharp observations and low-key anarchism. They were generally endearing, yes, and occasionally insightful, but they were functionally background players to the true heroes. The characters revered in the halls of theater or fine literature were characters who were defined by their greatness, not necessarily their goodness. This makes The Tramp’s persona as this underdog hero maybe not unprecedented, but at least novel.

This is especially noteworthy given that film was still an emerging player in the game of popular art. It’s not insignificant that one of its earliest authors of film turned the cinema into a space where the lonely and forgotten members of society had their space. This made sense when you consider how film emerged as sort of the entertainment for the little people. Where the rich and powerful had their stages and opera houses, film in its earliest form was available for the masses for the price of a nickel. Players like DW Griffith and Erich von Stroheim would spend much of film's early life making bids for legitimacy from the highbrows, usually by adapting a famous novel into a four-hour silent epic, but it took film a little while to secure its footing as "high art." But really early on, the small folk retreated into the cinema for comfort and reprieve, and The Tramp was there to greet them.

    A large part of what made Chaplin such a legend was his instincts for comedy. By that I mean both his ability to stage elaborate visual gags and his sense of how it played on cultural power dynamics. Comedy has always been a fitting parcel in which to hide social commentary or critique. Biting observations about the contradictions in society are easily couched in laughter, and Chaplin understood this very early on. One of his earliest silent films, The Immigrant, has The Tramp coming to America for the first time and falling prey to all sorts of tedium and nonsensery just to keep his head up. This short famously had The Tramp kick an immigration officer in the rear end, setting an early precedent for The Tramp as a sort of thorn for bullies on and offscreen. 

    Many of Chaplin’s contemporaries, like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, also scouted out the field as comedic underdogs who sidestepped their way to a happy ending, but Chaplin’s Tramp wasn’t just awkward, he stood for members of society that were often overlooked or even oppressed (e.g. the impoverished or immigrants). One of the main ways Chaplin critiqued society was by showing how it failed marginalized people, people that he gave voice to through his works. This could manifest in the way he highlighted specific disadvantaged groups, but really The Tramp was a stand-in for anyone who was down on their luck or didn’t fit the archetypal construct of success or heroism. When Chaplin wanted to, he could be a real boat rocker with his films. The powers in place at the time eventually came to see Chaplin as a genuine threat to authority, and Chaplin would face real consequences for his pot stirring. We will get to that … 

    Another thing that distinguished Chaplin's work was the way his films trafficked heavily in pathos. Chaplin didn’t just use the underclass for comedy, he made you feel for them. The Kid actually opens with an intertitle describing this film as “a picture with a smile – and perhaps, a tear.” And this is really where you start to see where the practical use of something like sentimentality in film: storytelling can be a breeding ground for empathy, helping you understand what it’s like to live another person’s experiences--it can humanize a person or a people who are not normally granted attention by the powers in place. Sentimentality can be a very powerful things.

This balancing of comedy, critique, and empathy marked Chaplin’s style across his time as a movie star, and he found great success for it. The Kid in 1921 marked Chaplin’s first major foray into feature-filmmaking, setting the ground for his most famous works like City Lights and Modern Times. But while his later works tend to surface more in your Film History 101 courses, The Kid continues to stand out to me as not only his crowning achievement, but also the film that most embodies his ethos.

 

“A Smile—And Perhaps, a Tear”

         The film starts with a woman being forced out of a shelter with a child she’d had out of wedlock. Facing a bleak future, The Mother (played by Edna Purviance) tries to leave her infant son in the care of a wealthy family with the written instruction to “please love and care for this orphan child.” But in a twist of events, the child lands in the dumps of the city instead. But it is in the slums where the baby is of course found by The Tramp. He initially tries to pass the child off to anyone else, but upon finding The Mother’s note, he feels compelled to care for the child himself. 

    Cut to five years later, and The Tramp and The Kid (played by Jackie Coogan) have built a pretty reliable system for themselves as a team of window repairmen who manage to keep one step ahead of the grumpy policeman who’s always trying to catch them in their technically illegal business. (Most of the middle thirty minutes of the film are just the two of them getting into crazy antics together.) The Mother, meanwhile, has risen to great prominence as a stage star, but still mourns the child she gave up. In her spare time, she extends charity to the poor of the city. More than once, she encounters her young son, neither of them aware of their connection.

All is fine and dandy until The Kid suddenly comes down with sickness and requires a doctor’s care. It is during this doctor’s visit that the authorities learn that The Tramp is not The Kid’s biological parent, and they return with some CPS-adjacent agency to extract the child from him and plant him in a workhouse. The government tries to take the child away in a truck, but The Tramp chases him down and the two of them are reunited, and they move on down the road to find somewhere to start over. It is right after this that The Mother discovers the note she left with her child years ago and realizes that this child is the same she lost years ago. 

The mother then places a reward in the paper for anyone who can bring her child to her, which is exactly what happens when someone recognizes the child at the shelter where The Tramp and The Kid hide. The Kid is taken in the middle of the night, and when The Tramp awakens to find the child gone, he returns distraught to their old place. He falls asleep on their doorstep and has a dream about him and The Kid keeping living as angels in Heaven, only for their paradise to be spoiled when a group of demons infiltrate the place. The Tramp awakens to find the police officer shaking him awake. It looks as though the officer is going to take him to jail, but then he pulls up to the mansion of The Mother, where he is reunited with The Kid who welcomes him into the house.

Even given Chaplin’s popularity, the success of the film was hardly a given. Chaplin described detailing the story to fellow storyteller Gouverneur Morris, saying, 

“… when I told [Morris] about The Kid and the form it was taking, keying slapstick with sentiment, he said: ‘It won’t work. The form must be pure, either slapstick or drama; you cannot mix them, otherwise one element of your story will fail.’

“We had quite a dialectical discussion about it. I said that the transition from slapstick to sentiment was a matter of feeling and discretion in arranging sequences. I argued that form happened after one had created it, that if the artist thought of a world and sincerely believed in it, no matter what the admixture was it would be convincing. Of course, I had no grounds for this theory other than intuition. There had been satire, farce, realism, naturalism, melodrama and fantasy, but raw slapstick and sentiment, the premise of The Kid, was something of an innovation.”

Before working on this film, Chaplin had lost a child with his first wife, Mildred Harris, who had lived only three days, and many have interpreted this film as Chaplin’s way of processing this loss. This could also be read as Chaplin filling the hole left by his own impoverished childhood, one which was led by a mother with grave mental illness and a mostly absent father. There's obviously a whole matrix of reasons why an artist makes an art, but I bring these connections up because they highlight a pretty consistent pattern across Chaplin’s work: the way he used personal pain to make something beautiful, and hopeful.

    You see the relevance and insight of what Chaplin was doing in how the nucleus of The Kid has echoed across other high-profile films and shows throughout the decades. Stories like Leon: The Professional, Aliens, The Creator, Monsters Inc, A Perfect World, El and Hopper’s storyline in Stranger Things, Pedro Pascal’s various television adventures carrying overpowered orphans across the wasteland, these all follow a pattern set by Chaplin’s The Kid: Stories about healing one’s own pain by taking care of something young and defenseless. 

The genius of Chaplin’s storytelling is evident in how authentic this relationship feels. The premise lends itself to saccharinity, but the dynamic at the heart of the characters doesn’t feel forced or tropey because the movie doesn’t rely on shortcuts, and it showcases the parts of parenthood that aren’t necessarily fun or even amusing. Chaplin spends nearly a whole minute showing The Tramp just washing the face of The Kid without a gag or gimmick to break up the process. 

    Credit is also due to the performers. Coogan is adorable in the role, absolutely, but he doesn’t indulge much in what we think of as “cuteness,” neither is he particularly helpless until the episode where he comes down with a sickness. Meanwhile, Chaplin doesn’t patronize this kid, not in front of the camera or behind it. The Tramp treats the child not as a ward or obligation, but as fellow small player in this world of giants, one that he happens to be in a position to watch out for. This almost total absence of any power dynamic between them is part of what makes this relationship so endearing. It also speaks to a proximity Chaplin felt to the small and helpless things of the world. Not just children, but anyone left without a voice in society. 

  The Tramp’s persona here has special meaning as well because in many ways the same qualities that make him a poor houseguest or factory worker would make him a poor father. This is part of what makes so many of the story’s running gags feel so engaging. But as an underdog in a world built for the strong and powerful, his social station also leaves him and The Kid vulnerable. And that's the question up in the air throughout this whole film: can these two possibly keep hold of each other?

 

Happy Ending?

  I want to talk specifically for a moment about the film’s dream sequence that drops right before the film’s ending because it creates a weird disruption in the narrative’s flow that honestly left me confused for years, and it also has some understated implications for the film's final landing place.

    The film takes us through this airtight emotional rollercoaster, and then at the last second Chaplin drops this little episode where the Tramp imagines that he and his kid are angels. We see them living in a post-mortal sphere where they should be free from the afflictions that have threatened to drive them apart. But even in this celestial sanctum, earthly evil, personified as these goons dressed in demonic garb, sneak in and shoot down the Tramp, and the sequence ends with The Kid crying over The Tramp’s lifeless body. And then The Tramp wakes up two minutes before the film ends and is immediately taken to his kid. The End.

         It’s taken as storytelling gospel that you want to sustain the tension until you’re ready to resolve the conflict—shortly before the film’s ending unless you want a very antsy audience—yet the film cashes in on its most intense sequence with nearly twenty minutes remaining. The story then drops this little Neverland sequence that is entirely self-contained. This dream doesn’t even offer any kind of revelation that helps him figure out where The Kid is once he wakes up, and it honestly feels like you could drop this sequence and nothing about the plot would change. How could Chaplin, whose storytelling instincts were so ahead of his time, fall for such a banal mix-up? It’s only upon recent viewings that I have really come across a satisfying answer.

  I think it helps to look at the film’s running tension: is the Tramp’s surrogate fathership with The Kid sustainable? Is there a place on heaven or earth for this relationship? And I think the film’s answer to that is a lot more complicated than it seems at a glance. 

After all, the only reason these two get to stay together is because the kid’s biological mother has allowed it. The audience feels secure in this ending because The Kid has now entered into a setup that more properly resembles the nuclear family structure: a mom and a dad. There’s nothing explicitly suggesting that The Tramp and The Woman are romantically linked (other than the brief off-screen romance between Chaplin and Purviance), but the conclusion still rests on the reassurance that The Kid is more secure now that he has a mother and a father. 

Something else worth remarking upon is that two prints of this film currently exist. The slightly longer one is the version Chaplin released first, but after its initial run, Chaplin cut out some ten minutes of what he considered extraneous screen time, most of which did not even include Chaplin or the child. I bring this up here because in seeing what Chaplin decided to cut, you get a clearer sense of what Chaplin actually wants the focus of the story to be.

    Most of what gets dropped from the extended cut has all to do with The Woman. What you lose are mostly short scenes with The Woman wandering around the city regretting her decision to give up her kid. From an audience perspective, what this offers is more build-up for The Woman to reunite with her kid, putting that relationship between The Kid and his long lost mother almost on par with his relationship with The Tramp. Seeing the shorter cut, you kind of get the idea that Chaplin deliberately wanted the focus to be on the relationship between The Tramp and The Kid, which would explain why he truncates the scenes with The Woman to the bare necessities.

    It’s almost like the more that is invested into the relationship with the mother, the more gets taken away from The Tramp, and it's almost like Chaplin knew that the easiest way to get the audience to believe that these two might make it was to downplay the presence of the mother. He still plays her sympathetically, he lets her reunion with her son be a happy one for the audience, but Chaplin still skirts around certain realities presented by this dynamic. After all, the mother is the one with the power to disrupt this paradise. As the birth mother who never legally gave her child to The Tramp, she has protections and rights that The Tramp does not, including the ability to keep this dude from the slums away from her child if she suddenly decides it's in the child's best interest.

Moreover, what would happen if the biological father reentered the picture? Would there even be room for The Tramp if The Kid already had two parents–even two parents who had done nothing to raise him? You get the idea that any happy ending for The Tramp is kind of conditional and perhaps doesn’t translate into the world off-screen. Hence, Chaplin offers this onscreen confession in the form of The Tramp's heavenly dream, suggesting that maybe the only place where the two of them can be happy, in this world or the next, is the world onscreen.

The Sound of Music (1965)

    This also further reveals why there is such a distrust for sentiment in the critical establishment of film. Emotionality feeds off of things like hope and idealism and the human propensity to believe in the promise of a better tomorrow for the true in heart. Popular storytelling--say, a crowd pleasing movie--can use these to deliver the sensory feeling of happiness without actually changing the circumstances of one's life or the systems that they occupy. And that has been the most common case against popular film for a while, that it is essentially selling the audience on a pleasant falsehood. And what discerning mind would ever fall for such a treacly notion?

It would seem that Chaplin's eternal station as perpetual outsider extends even into his place in film academia. Even as he is celebrated in film circles, critics still don't quite know what to do with him. Both Chaplin’s brand of optimism and his vision of utopia can feel too good to be true, and that's part of why even his most avid admirers within the film critic community can’t help but recontextualize his work in such a way that makes this optimism more palatable. Usually what that means is rephrasing Chaplin's vision to be one of wish-fulfilment rather than an honest reflection of reality, basically turning into a Santa Claus. Theater critic Walter Kerr wrote of Chaplin in The Silent Clowns,

The Pilgrim (1923)

“For the man who can, with the flick of a finger or the blink of an eyelash, instantly transform himself into absolutely anyone is a man who must, in his heart, remain no one ... So Chaplin, impersonating everyone, can have no person … Infinitely adaptable but universally a fraud, Chaplin now has no one identity to embrace, to enter wholeheartedly, to feel secure about, to find rest in. He can only come out of nowhere, open is bag of tricks on demand, pretend to be what is asked of him for a moment or so, and go away again.

 

“Perhaps that is why he is so eager to be with us. As we come into the theater we put our roles behind us—we are no longer separately teachers or bankers or janitors or wives—to accept the anonymity of the mass. Temporarily we nobodies too, unengaged in the artifices we are watching. He belongs beside us, looking on. Of course, when the artifice is over, he can’t go home with us. So he goes down the road.”

Modern Times (1936)

Part of the human condition is the desire for a better life, and Chaplin plays to that experience so earnestly, but it’s not necessarily a given that the act of wanting for a better life precedes attaining a better life, even for the most benevolent among us. And so this poses some questions not just about Chaplin but about the usefulness of cinema as a whole, especially its relationship to this thing called sentimentality. It’s obviously a delicious thing to experience in the safety of cinema, but what good is it in the world offscreen?

Remember what I said about Chaplin confronting authority and sticking up for the little people, and making a lot of big people mad in the process? Let’s return to that real quick.

 

“Down the Road”

The 1940s saw the world drifting further and further away from Chaplin. This was in small part owing to Hollywood fully embracing sound cinema, a domain he felt The Tramp could never belong in. This was also in part a result of Chaplin growing louder in his activism. In 1940, he released The Great Dictator, a movie in which Chaplin plays dual roles as both a tyrannical dictator of a fictional country–an obvious Hitler-insert–and a Jewish Barber with whom he switches places. The film culminates with the Jewish Barber taking the center stage in place of the dictator and calling for the powers of the world to stand against the growing threat of fascism. When The Tramp finally broke his silence, this is what he had to say. Reception to The Great Dictator at the time was mixed, with many critics taking exception to such an overt call to action.

There was also a scandal in which Chaplin found himself under the fire of a paternity case filed by stage actress Joan Barry, with whom Chaplin had once had a brief romantic tryst. A blood test had proved that Chaplin was not the father of her child, but it was deemed inadmissible as evidence. Chaplin was forced to pay child support until the child came of age, but that was nothing compared to the toll this scandal wrought upon him in the eye of the public.

    As this was all going down, he had just married Oona O’Neill--when she was 18 and he was 54. Chaplin had been previously married three times, and all his wives tended to err on the younger side, and high profile figures gossip columnist Hedda Hopper were happy to weaponize this part of Chaplin’s life against him, painting him as a sexual predator. Important to note: history has not revealed any evidence to substantiate this slander, and it’s commonly accepted today that all this hoopla was used to turn the public against him as there was an ongoing campaign to out him as a communist. People were just tired of him and felt entitled to use whatever battering ram they could to get him to shut up. (But don’t worry! In this day of social media and clickbait reporting, the public is way nicer to its celebrities …)

Chaplin never identified himself as a communist, at least not publicly, but he did show a lot of sympathy for a class of people who were targeted by the government, which drew the ire of many prominent individuals, most notably FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover. In 1952, after attending the London premiere of his newest film, Limelight, the U.S. government barred Chaplin from reentering the country unless he subjected to interrogation over his political and moral beliefs.  Chaplin flat-out refused to play their game, and basically asked Oona to grab his stuff and bring it over to Europe, where he stayed for the rest of his life.

    Chaplin had retired the Tramp by this point, and in his absence Chaplin’s later films were a little more prone to just wallow in their cynicism. The America Chaplin presents in 1957’s A King in New York, a thinly veiled rebuttal against the hysteria over communism that got him ousted, is presented as being both shallower and meaner. Chaplin said in his autobiography,

“Whether I re-entered that unhappy country or not was of little consequence to me. I would like to have told them that the sooner I was rid of that hate-beleaguered atmosphere the better, that I was fed up of America's insults and moral pomposity.” 

         Chaplin was probably at his cynical peak with his 1947 dark comedy Monsieur Verdoux, a film in which Chaplin plays a serial killer who romances and then kills wealthy widows in order to pay for the treatment of his ailing wife. Even here, the Chaplin uses his character to illuminate how even the ills of murder pale in comparison to the wickedness wrought both by war and a capitalist society that crushes the underprivileged and disadvantaged. 

But what’s most interesting to me is that even when Chaplin’s movies became more “cynical,” they never really lost their reverence for the person who holds onto their values whatever the outcome. The characters in both "New York" and "Verdoux" both gracefully accept their fates (exile and death penalty, respectively) while refusing to back down from what they knew to be true. The takeaway many of these films landed on was that the system would always default to the bullies, and yet the most noble thing a person could do was to hold on to one’s principles anyways. And this brings us back to the question of the viability of emotionality on film.

Apocalypse Now (1979)

    Again, film serves a wide span of human needs and interests, including the appetite to stimulate the intellect. But film criticism, fancying itself an institution for the refined, tends to deflect to stoicism as the higher art, the art capable of illuminating genuine insight, while the other kind is just here as a pleasant distraction--something that maybe passes the time, but never worthy of the same study or admiration as "realer" cinema.

But what films like The Kid really show is that it's this fragility that makes hope and decency such precious things, admirable things, even powerful things. With those films for which emotion is refined and perfected, the experience of watching can be overwhelming and all encompassing. In what universe does it make sense to not want to pull out the reading glasses and explore why? Those necessary films that ruminate on the darker side of the human experience, they will take care of themselves. We don't need reminders that life is unfair or unforgiving. But we do sometimes need a boost to get back on our feet and choose goodness, kindness, or even just dignity when the world is offering so many easier alternatives. And that's where people like Chaplin come in.

The Final Reel

  Time passed. Society changed. People started watching Chaplin’s movies again. Eventually Hollywood and America at large realized that they really did Charlie dirty. He was invited back to America to attend the 1972 Academy Awards (nearly ten years after he declared in his autobiography that he never cared whether he saw America again) where he would accept an honorary award for “the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century.” (This ceremony is also where Chaplin saw The Kid co-star, Jackie Coogan, for the last time.) Once the applause subsided, Chaplin responded, "Thank you so much. This is an emotional moment for me and words seem so futile, so feeble. I can only say thank you for the honor of inviting me here."

        For reference, this was the same ceremony that crowned The French Connection, a darkly cynical neo-noir about the futility of the law enforcement in the face of America’s deep-seeded evil, as Hollywood’s defining movie for that year. This was the Hollywood that also had such glowing portraits of the human condition as Chinatown and Taxi Driver just on the horizon. Here was a landscape that had completely embraced angst and nihilism as the highest form of artistic expression, where intellect started to position itself as the superior to sentiment. While Chaplin was a bit of a rebel in the days of classic Hollywood, in the age of New Hollywood he was basically a space alien. And yet this is the Hollywood that welcomed him back into the fold. And so I can’t help but feel that a part of their embrace was a sort of nostalgia for the kind of idealism he was so equipped for.

        And here’s the thing, Chaplin did not come to these conclusions because he was spared from the frustrations, disappointments, or tribulations of life. From his impoverished childhood to an entire country turning its back on him, his life was not an easy one. Chaplin’s signature idealism did not come from a place of dissociation or naivete. Neither was it him just peddling out crowd-pleasing mish-mash because he thought it might get him an early retirement: by all measures, it was an honest reflection of his worldviews and life experiences.

       And yet for all his troubles, Chaplin did arrive at a place that brought him not only renewed acclaim and appreciation, but also peace and satisfaction. People were watching his movies again. He finally had a happy home life. The government stopped harassing him. By all means, it did appear that The Tramp got the happy ending he was chasing all his life, onscreen and off. It came to him as it comes to all heroes, after a lifetime of perseverance and of choosing to approach his life’s challenges with goodness and dignity. Chaplin's commitment to optimism and goodness paid off for him, and he was gracious enough to share some of that wisdom in his life's work.

         So, for turning the cinema into a space where audiences were made to feel with the overlooked and underappreciated, for always choosing to face the hardships of the world with a smile, and for showing us what a grand thing it can be to bring our hearts with us to the screen, a simple thanks to Charles Spencer Chaplin is not nearly enough. But let it suffice for the moment. 

                    --The Professor