All language subtitles for Charlie.The.Life.and.Art.of.Charles.Chaplin.1of2.XviD.mp3.AEN

It's hard to believe, but once there was
a world without Charlie Chaplin.

Then one day in 1914, a strange new
face and form emerged from the crowd.

Kid Auto Races at Venice,
an iconography was born.

Chaplin's persona is so rich
and such a weave of so many things.

But he also just has this desperate need
to be in front of the camera.

That's the gag, him enjoying
being in front of the camera.

They push him aside so they can see the
auto races they're ostensibly filming.

He keeps coming back,
and he wants to be there.

That desire to be in front of a machine...

...that gets you in front of people that
he harnessed, partly out of wisdom.

Maybe he never knew
what he was doing.

He just harnessed that desire
to be seen, to be the center.

He was 24. He'd been on-stage...

...mostly in English music halls,
since he was 10.

Mack Sennett hired him for the movies
out of Fred Karno's company...

... then touring America,
for $ 150 a week.

This was his third film,
the second to be released...

...but the first in which he appeared
in his immortal Tramp costume.

Chaplin always said he improvised it
on the spot...

...using clothing he found
lying around the studio.

In the next three years, Chaplin
would make 62 short films...

... writing and directing
the last 26 himself.

By 1917, he was becoming, thanks
to this new, universal medium...

... the greatest comic icon
the world had ever known.

The films were fast, funny,
seemingly casual...

... yet ever more complex
in construction.

But the icon was still in search
of the iconographic sequences...

... that would define his genius.

They would come to him
in the years ahead slowly...

...often enough painfully.

Amid the distractions of being
the most famous man in the world...

...he always felt the pressure
to do more.

He would feel the need to speak
to the yearning human heart.

He would feel the need to speak
from his own heart...

...about the dehumanization of labor
in Modern Times...

...or about the looming threat of
fascism, personified by a monster...

... who bore an uncanny resemblance,
which everyone noticed...

... to his own beloved Tramp.

Yet always there was the terrible need
to be as funny as ever...

... to command the audience's laughter,
its affectionate delight...

...and, yes, its most basic sentiments
as well.

The pressures were relentless,
all-consuming...

...and to the still youthful Chaplin
of The Kid, not yet fully imaginable.

Thirty-one years after The Kid,
Chaplin made Limelight.

It was set in 1914,
the year he made his first movie...

...and the year World War I
blew away the Edwardian world...

...in which he was raised
and knew his first success.

It's about a famous comedian
whose once simple, perfect rapport...

... with his audience has been lost.

Phyllis, Henry!

Phyllis, Henry, stop that!
What do you think you're doing?

You ought to be ashamed of yourselves,
fighting like that.

All right, Phyllis, you stay in the box.
Henry, hurry up!

One night after dinner,
we were seated rather late...

...and Charlie and I were there.
He was going through a book...

...of comedians.

And he came across a picture
of his father...

...who was standing very much
as Chaplin stood...

...with the cane and the hand
on the hip.

And he said, "You know, he lost
the ability to make people laugh.

And there have been comics
who have this terrible dream...

...that they're performing,
and they do something...

...that should get a laugh. And they
look out to this black, cavernous space.

And there's not a sound, not a laugh. "

Then he paused. He said,
"I have this dream, recurring dream. "

Like his Calvero, Chaplin himself
had lost his audience.

The fine, careless rapture
of their beginnings...

...soured by political
and moral criticism of him.

Limelight is, emotionally speaking,
his most autobiographical film...

...for no star ever more desperately
needed his audience.

It's this hunger for the crowd
and this fear of the crowd...

... that drove this life.

You can draw a caricature of Chaplin
with just a couple of brushstrokes...

...and you know who you're alluding to.

The graphic of his body
was just so arresting.

And he was a smart guy. He had
dark hair. He darkened his eyebrows.

Put that mustache on there.
That hat framed things.

Choosing of big shoes pointing outward.

The body was always a shape
that you could identify.

In the Bronx, when I was very much
into the break-dance scene...

...you'd meet a young kid who might not
be able to describe Chaplin to you...

...but he had a step
they called the Charlie.

And it was-- You know, it was
obviously taken from Chaplin.

So he's in our cultural heritage
whether we're conscious of him or not.

Limelight was not Chaplin 's first
filmed evocation of his music-hall past.

In 1915, he re-created his great Karno
success, Mumming Birds, on film.

For the movie, he invented
a second character for himself to play...

...a tipsy, touchy citizen
of the balcony...

...quick to register his displeasure
with the performance.

If he feared the audience's indifference,
he equally feared its volatility...

... which this figure personified.

The music-hall audience
was a tough one.

This movie only slightly exaggerates
the disdain it could instantly mobilize.

For Karno, Chaplin had played
the equally tipsy swell in the box...

... whose need to dominate the stage
matched Chaplin's.

The thing I remember
from his autobiography...

...is the extraordinary account.
He's like 5 or 6, I think.

And he goes on, really, when his mother
cracks up, breaks down, on-stage.

And his mother had been
a performer of some reputation.

And the way he describes it...

...it isn't simply that he goes on
to rescue his mother...

...although I think that was part of it.

There's almost the rivalry
with the mother.

And there's almost that feeling
that performance...

...is the emotional core of the man.

In theaters, Chaplin won admirers...

...a few hundred at a time
over many months.

The movies offered him audiences
in their millions over just a few weeks.

But the demand for fresh material
was relentless and cruel.

What Chaplin did for Keystone,
you can see just fleetingly in moments.

There's no aggregate transformation
to great Chaplin.

Little bits of business
like in Dough and Dynamite...

...where he makes doughnuts by flinging
dough around his wrists.

These are moments that no one else was
doing, that endeared him to the public.

It's his early Sennett ones.

In those things, you felt
he was...

...feeling his way. He hadn't reached
that point of domination.

That was one of the most valuable
things Chaplin did.

He came in to work
with the Keystone Kops.

He showed them how to not be breaking
their tailbones every third week.

They had never learned how to fall.
It was like jump school.

What's fascinating at Keystone,
if you look carefully at the films...

...once he started to direct them,
he's gone to school.

There's one lovely film,
not very important...

...but he discovered you could cut.
You could actually...

...throw somebody out of the screen
in one shot...

...and then have them come in,
in the next shot.

The studio sought him out after Tillie's
Punctured Romance, a huge hit...

...the first feature-length comedy. lt had
a huge stage star, Marie Dressler...

...and had incredible distribution.

Tillie's Punctured Romance
isn't a Chaplin film.

It was directed by Sennett,
and Chaplin didn't think much of it.

But he enjoyed working
with Marie Dressler.

And it really established him
on a really grand scale...

...so that after 35 films
he could announce to Mack Sennett:

"All I need to make a comedy is a park,
a policeman and a pretty girl. "

The public had begun to notice
Chaplin even before Tillie.

He was on his way...

...first to George Spoor and "Broncho
Billy" Anderson 's Essanay Company...

... 1 250 a week
and a $ 10,000 bonus.

Tramps were everywhere in show
business at the turn of the last century.

There were tramp comics,
jugglers, singers...

...mildly discomfiting outsiders
to the middle class audience.

But none had Chaplin's delicacy
or winsomeness...

...or his ability to convey slightly
subversive thought through pantomime.

His costume and makeup made him at
once an abstract and a universal figure.

The gags might still be as crude
as this bop on the head...

...but only Chaplin would think
of planting on his victim 's forehead...

...a sweet little good-night kiss.

He had a unique gift for turning
a simple object into something else.

This palm-frond toothbrush
is an early example.

The great thing that happened
for Charlie Chaplin at Essanay...

...was that he began to be able
to experiment with his own creativity...

...in a way that was going
to make him an artist.

All the things that
he's going to develop...

...and become as an artist...

...he gets the chance to play with
and try in 1915.

Chaplin goes over to Essanay to do
his first film, His New Job...

...which is a kind of slap at Keystone.

The fictional studio
was called Lockstone.

Its director, played
by Charles Inslee...

...bears a suspicious resemblance
to Mack Sennett.

Chaplin wasn't always the Tramp.

A Woman was not the first time
he played, quite fetchingly, in drag.

We're gonna have the cutting in
to medium when something is needed.

And in The Bank we're gonna have
the "give the rose to the leading lady"...

...have the little sad moment.

We're gonna have the superimpositions
of imagined things.

We're gonna have
the "it was all a dream. "

And in Work, there's
this astonishing image...

...of him pulling a big cart
with one big man riding in it...

...up a lonely, bleak hill.
And you look at this, and you think:

"Where are we here?
Are we in an lngmar Bergman movie?"

In A Night Out, you see
these two playing drunks...

...absolute perfection.
The whole thing is, "We're drunk.

We must not fall down, however. "

He's working with Ben Turpin as a unit.

The two of them, physically,
are paired impeccably.

So here's Chaplin able to come over,
get a new job at a new place...

...define himself comically
and use another chosen comic actor...

...who perfectly suits
what he wants to do.

I love the Essanays...

...because they're so completely
and utterly street comedies.

In By the Sea, he and his adversary
are busy on the beach...

...socking one another, falling down.

In the long shot, in the distance...

...a lone swimmer goes down
to test the water.

I mean, he's oblivious
that a movie's being shot.

You're looking at people
out in the frame, over there...

...living their lives
and doing what they do.

Discovering the range of film 's possibility
at Essanay studio in Niles, California...

... Chaplin made a discovery
of another kind: Edna Purviance.

A former secretary, she always seemed
on-screen a real girl, not a glamour girl.

Chaplin was enchanted. Edna would
make 35 films with him.

She became the first
of the three great loves...

...of his maturity.

Edna Purviance, who really wasn't
much of a professional actress...

...comes into these films and completely
holds down her corner of it.

Whatever is asked of her, she can do.

But she's obviously someone
he respected...

...and treated more as an equal.

In The Tramp, the film opens.
There he is in the Tramp outfit.

He's on a lonely road. He's doing
his little waddle down the road.

You see the prototypical
Charlie Chaplin.

This is recognizably who we accept
as the Chaplin image.

He has a little whiskbroom that he takes
out and cleans the dust off himself...

...when a car goes by,
but the camera needs to serve him.

It needs to come up close
so he can dust out his pocket.

So, what you see is, he's taken
control of the camera.

The film was prototypical
in another way.

Despite his confident air,
Charlie's Tramp will not get the girl.

Her heart belongs to another.

Chaplin would almost always lose out
to normally handsome...

...normally well-dressed guys.

It was one of his points of reference
with his audience.

The ending of The Tramp, it doesn't
resolve. He does not get the girl.

He turns away and walks away
from the camera on a lonely road...

...heading toward the horizon.

Here is where the Tramp and Chaplin
really do come together.

There was another coming together
in those years...

...a reunion with his beloved
half-brother Sydney.

He's the patron at the bar
in this Sennett comedy.

Chaplin helped him get a contract
with the studio.

A star in the English movie halls,
he was an adept movie comedian.

In one sentence, I'll tell you
about the elder Sydney.

Charlie said about him, "He was
never impressed by anything. "

Not, certainly, by the men in suits
from the Mutual Film Corporation.

Sydney helped Chaplin get a raise
to $ 10,000 a week...

...plus a signing bonus of $ 150,000.

His 12 Mutual films
of 1916 and 1917...

...contain his first truly
immortal gags...

...like the escalator sequence
from the first, The Floorwalker.

We sometimes forget the risks
the silent comedians ran...

...as they courted our laughter.

There are no nets available
to the fireman...

...but this thrill sequence was
only a beginning for Chaplin.

What's truly wonderful
about his Mutual films...

...is the ever increasing length, intricacy
and subtlety of his gag sequences.

This man had skill, unimaginable skill.

He was a superhero.

He was the most endearing superhero...

...you could ever want to watch.

One A.M. , which is a 18-minute--
The whole short...

...with the guy just trying
to get into bed.

If you took a performer and that
was the only thing they ever did...

...that would be enough.

Yet he did it again and again and
innovated and, I mean, you know....

You know, in the '80s,
I was thinking about Chaplin a lot...

...and I talked to a video-store guy.
And he said:

"You can put anything on the monitor
in the window, and people will pass by.

But if you put Chaplin,
people will stop. "

If you're walking along the sidewalk
and see a black-and-white image...

...first of all, the black-and-
white image is so arresting.

And you see this almost flickers
maybe like an abstract of action.

The moment you stop,
you see it as a human being...

...but a wild, like a flailing version
of a human being.

I'm thinking of a
movie like The Rink...

...Chaplin and his great foil,
Eric Campbell, a big guy.

They're on skates. They do this stuff,
and people just stop and look at that...

...because the abandon with which
people are falling backwards...

...falling forward on the skates,
just perfectly still.

There's a rhythm there
between wild abandon...

...and it almost, like, mirrors
social control.

Something wild,
and then there's hell to civilize...

...and then back, of course, to wild.

Chaplin the Tramp,
he tried to keep up appearances.

He never settled that
to be slovenly and tramp-like.

He pretended that he had
social aspirations.

In Easy Street he plays
a paroled convict...

... who will eventually become
an unlikely policeman.

The very title, Easy Street,
suggests East Street...

...which is the street
on which he was born.

That wonderful evocation
of South London.

The police are avoiding Easy Street...

...and it takes a tramp
to clean up the violence.

It takes one of them to clean it up.

As the cop, he tries
to subdue the bully...

...and he uses his truncheon
to hit him on the head.

And he hits him and hits him
and hits him.

No effect. It's like a nightmare.

And then, in a display of strength,
the bully bends down a gas lamppost...

...and that's Charlie's opportunity
to jump on his back and gas him.

This set design, one street crossed
by another to form a T...

... was based on a street
where Chaplin had lived as a boy.

He would use the design
in many pictures.

Memories of London's East End
scored every aspect of his work.

It's as great as it was years ago.

I mean, it's just a wonderful,
wonderful short...

...because it'll always be funny.
It'll be funny 1 000 years from now.

In 1916, the press reported a nationwide
Chaplin impulse or celebrity craze.

It didn't comment on some of the very
odd impulses that moved his character.

There's an exquisite ladylike
daintiness to him very often...

...and I think that women
in one way appealed to him...

...for that way of moving, that rather
hesitant, fluttery way of moving.

He does it a lot. He simpers.

I don't think Chaplin was
a simperer in real life...

...but he was fascinated by, you know,
this sort of little coy shake of the head...

...as a seductive measure.

I'm not even sure women
really act like that.

Certainly, uncomplicated Edna didn't.

She was, just then, very much
a part of his happiness.

Never thereafter would Chaplin's life
be as uncomplicated...

...as it was during his year with Mutual.

They did love each other dearly,
and there was a motherly quality...

...along with her luminous beauty,
that attracted Chaplin to Edna.

I think she was placid
and a calming force...

...as opposed to his rather demanding
and high-energized personality.

The relationship with Edna Purviance
is something very interesting in his life.

Obviously, Edna meant
a great deal to him.

She must have been
an enchanting woman...

...and I think that this satisfied
something in him very much.

They did have a very close
and passionate relationship...

...for two or three years.
Women got jealous of the work...

...because when he was working,
he didn't have time for anybody.

Every woman in his life became
a little bit jealous of the work...

...and probably Edna did.
And she had a flirtation...

...and this was too much for Charlie.

Things went wrong after that.

Things were still going right
for them...

... when Chaplin made The Immigrant
in 1917.

It was often broadly funny, yet also
one of his most complex films to date.

It would sympathetically take up an issue
that had troubled America for years...

... the tidal wave of lower class
European immigration.

What other film at the time
do you have...

...where half the film is set
on an immigrant boat?

And certainly, it's a comic view of it,
but it is about immigration.

It was, as well,
an innocently romantic film.

The line was, "We don't like
this going after the girl...

...and mooning after women.
We don't like that Chaplin.

We like the Chaplin
of the earlier shorts. "

They say the same thing
about Woody Allen.

The thing that lingers in your mind with
the character the Tramp, Little Tramp...

...is the sweetness, you know...

...that innocence, that purity.
But at the same time...

...there is that other side,
that rascal.

I remember watching The Immigrant
again recently...

...and for a second being really stunned.

Chaplin is playing cards.

He loans a guy money, and the guy
gives him his pistol as collateral.

And when Chaplin wins,
the guy gets violent.

And I was stunned when Chaplin
pulls the gun on him...

...and gives him this look, like, "Hey! "
You know, just for that second.

And then he immediately goes back
to this pure being, this innocent thing.

He was ever willing to kick
authority in the pants...

... though genteel America muttered
disapproval of his anarchic side.

I think we've definitely
lost comic patience.

Everything needs to be now,
and what those guys did--

I mean, what Chaplin was
able to do was milk a gag...

...and really stretch it out
and really draw it out.

Even if you knew what the result
was gonna be, it was still hilarious.

It's the starving Tramp walking outside
a restaurant looking at the door...

...you know, thinking, "God, I'd love
to go in and have a meal there. "

He picks up the coin on the ground,
dumps it in his pocket...

...heads towards the restaurant.
Ding! lt hits the ground.

He goes inside, has his meal.

Some guy walks in holding
the coin that he dropped.

That gag lasts for, I don't know,
seven, eight minutes, and you're there.

You can't take your eyes off him.

You need more than comedy, more
than laughs, to make a feature film.

A feature film has to have some kind
of an emotional string to it.

Chaplin called it his favorite two-reeler.

In fact, in one of his later books...

...he said The Immigrant touched him
more than any film he made.

He liked the ending in particular,
that these two young immigrants...

...getting married on a rainy day.
He thought it was very poetic.

I, frankly, prefer the longer,
more ambitious Chaplin films...

...even to the funniest
of the early films.

Comedy transposition,
the idea of one thing suggests another...

...was not unique to Chaplin,
but it was one of his great gifts.

The Pawnshop is a great example of that
where, as a pawnbroker's assistant...

...he's asked to look at an alarm clock.
And of course, in his hands...

...he becomes the doctor
and the clock becomes his patient.

Late, middle, early Chaplin, his gift for
transforming one object into another...

...remained central to his comic genius.

These transformations...

...deliberate manipulations
of our perceptions of the real...

... were also central to modernity...

... with its fluid, ever-changing
definitions of what constitutes reality.

This idea of transformation
goes back right to the start.

I can't quite think where it comes from.
Everything he looked at...

...suggested the possibility
of something else.

My favorite one is where he has to move
a whole heap of bentwood chairs...

...and so he puts them all on his back.
He becomes a hedgehog.

I just think that's wonderful.

He could certainly
bring things to life...

...bring something inanimate
and static and give it life...

...give it some kind of movement
and life.

And that was certainly
a great gift that he had.

Old-fashioned man that he was, Chaplin
would have denied being a surrealist.

But unconsciously, that's what he was.

Who else would have thought of turning
a massage into a wrestling match?

Or a fire engine
into a cappuccino machine?

"All that is solid melts into air, "
Karl Marx said.

In Chaplin, all that seems solid
melts into something else.

Of his many gifts, this one is among
his most enduring and endearing...

...sophisticated visions converted
into playful, childlike action.

Skeptical Sydney was one
of Charlie's perfect comic foils.

But he remained even better at business.

His year at Mutual ending, Chaplin
received an attractive overture...

...from First National.

This time, the Chaplins had
a very firm ideal in mind.

They asked him to come to New York
to negotiate a deal...

...and so he got on the train
with Sydney...

...who was going to do
the negotiating for him.

And he said to Sydney "All right,
Sydney, you go in, and you negotiate.

And you know I want a million dollars. "

Sydney said "All right, now as for you,
if you're going to play your violin...

...you gotta stay in the bathroom
and play because it's terrible. "

So Charlie went in the bathroom,
stood in the tub, empty of water...

...and played his violin to soothe himself
while Sydney went down the corridor.

He came back, and he said
"Charlie, they're offering $500,000. "

Charlie said, "We're not gonna
even talk to them about that.

You gotta go back. "
He went back, 600,000.

"You gotta go back. " He went back.

And finally he came back, and he said:

"Charlie, they've come up to $ 750,000
and not a nickel more. "

And Charlie, bowing away, said,
"Tell them I am an artist.

I know nothing about money.
All I know is, I want a million dollars. "

And Sydney went back,
and he came running back in. He said:

"Charlie, throw away your violin.
Get yourself a bull fiddle.

You got a million dollars. "

He began building a studio
in the groves of La Brea Avenue.

Chaplin created this time-lapse
sequence for a promotional short.

His dream studio took the form of
a poor English lad's dream of luxury...

...suburban London fa�ades.

Think of it. In a matter
of three years...

... Charles Spencer Chaplin, age 28,
had become a millionaire...

...and one of the world's
most famous people.

Most important to him,
his First National deal granted him...

...absolute control over his films
and his own destiny.

In all of movie history, no rise
was ever more meteoric than his.

He had to give them the performance
because he knew better than anyone...

...what he wanted and what he
needed from the actor...

...and the best way to do it
was to show.

And this isn't very much different...

...from what an actor/manager
did in the English music halls.

This is standard practice of what Chaplin
knew. The actor was also the director.

Chaplin was not necessarily
a terribly articulate man.

He was just a Cockney lad.

And I think he had trouble with words,
particularly in his early days.

The easiest way to tell someone how to
do something was just to show them...

...because no one was more articulate
than Chaplin, physically.

He has his own studio, his own team.

He can take as much time as he likes,
which is really what he wanted.

Chaplin didn't just use the first shot.

He would take a shot not twice
or three times...

...but he would take a shot
20 times if he was to get it right.

This was something completely new.

So was this. In Spring, 1918...

... with America now a combatant
in World War I...

... Chaplin and the movies '
other greatest stars...

...Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks...

...embarked on a personal appearance
tour selling Liberty Bonds.

It was the first major demonstration of
movie stardom 's unprecedented power.

Everywhere they went, the crowds
were vast and impassioned.

They sold millions of dollars'
worth of bonds.

The tour was especially important
for Chaplin.

He had come under the first
personal criticism of his life...

...for not enlisting in the English army.

Mostly this came from the press,
trying to create a scandal.

Chaplin professed his willingness
to serve...

...but the British government knew
he was infinitely more valuable...

...raising money for the war effort.
The Liberty Loan adventure proved that.

But this was the first
mild controversy...

...of a life that would eventually
be plagued...

...occasionally dominated by them.

Later that year, he made this short,
promoting another Liberty Loan drive.

Syd Chaplin played the hapless Kaiser.

His most lasting wartime work was
Shoulder Arms. The Tramp in uniform.

He'd always been a brave little guy...

...but he'd never been tested on
such a huge and tragic field.

The spirit was willing,
maybe a little too much so.

Chaplin began production
of Shoulder Arms...

...while the First World War
was being fought.

And many in the Hollywood community
were persuading him not to do it.

But Chaplin went on with it,
trusting his own artistic instincts.

But he had doubts.
He was unsure of the result.

But when the film was
released, it was a huge hit.

It was one of the most popular films
of the entire First World War period.

The picture was released just
weeks before the armistice...

...so it didn't do much for morale.

But the movie proved especially
popular with returning doughboys.

They thought it caught, humorously,
something of the horror...

...and absurdity of trench warfare.

Capturing a large enemy group, the
Tramp becomes an unlikely hero.

But his treatment of the aristocratic
officer aligns him...

... with the common people
of both sides.

Not that the Tramp was allowed
to capitalize on his heroism.

That would have been out of character.

But he was allowed time for a little
cross-cultural wooing with Edna.

In real life, their romance
was coming to an end.

Though, typically, Edna was
a good sport about it.

He loved young girls. The younger
the better, and he really did.

He only saw pureness and innocence
and youth and beauty.

He was a romantic.

In principal, it might have been okay
to marry these girls of 16 or 17.

The big problem was this:
That they looked great...

...but having got them home,
they were not very rewarding partners.

Chaplin met Mildred Harris, a young
actress, then 16 years old...

... while working on Shoulder Arms.

Seen here in Cecil B. DeMille's...

...Fool's Paradise,
she convinced him, falsely...

... that she was pregnant. And he married
her three days after his film's release.

They were never happy together,
and a portion of the public...

... was not happy thinking of Chaplin
with a child bride.

In the summer of 1919, however,
she delivered a baby...

... who died three days later.

Chaplin 's personal anguish was reflected
in his blocked creative life at the time.

It's remarkable that Chaplin always
made what he wanted...

...and put his own money behind it...

...and would do it and do it and
do it until he got it right.

I mean, he was Kubrick before Kubrick,
and Kubrick didn't use his own money.

That megalomaniac sense of
"I've got a vision.

Although, maybe I'm not seeing it yet,
but I'll see it when it's there.

I'll know it when I see it.
And let's shoot for a year. "

Which really is not an exaggeration
in some cases. "Until we get it. "

That's crazy.

Perhaps justifiable
craziness in this case.

Starting, stopping and starting again
on major productions...

... Chaplin cobbled together this film,
A Day's Pleasure...

...from old footage and some new
material, trying to satisfy First National...

... which was desperately pressing him
for releasable product.

I've never been clear about who chose
when to use a title card.

And Chaplin uses them as brilliantly
as anybody in some movies...

...and then other movies-- There's one
where the family is driving a Model T...

...and they're resurfacing the road.

And quite clearly, a dump truck dumps
a lot of tar onto the road...

...but somebody decided they had to put
a title that said, "Tar. " So one word:

Then you come back and see
people with their feet stuck.

The old "shoes nailed to
the stage" gag...

...which Chaplin uses great because
his feet are stuck in the tar.

His major preoccupation was The Kid.

He'd seen the remarkable Jackie
Coogan in vaudeville, signed him...

... then appeared with him before this
assemblage of visiting exhibitors...

...promoting his unfinished dream.

Laughter is very unpredictable.
You cannot sit down and write out:

"We will do this, this, this
and this. That is the gag. "

And then do it and hope
it will be funny.

It's quite true that weeks and
sometimes months would go by...

...when he didn't have the inspiration,
and everybody sat around the studio...

...and he would or wouldn't come in,
but nothing would happen.

That happened very badly before
he started on The Kid, for instance.

Mildred Harris sued Chaplin
for divorce in 1920.

Her attorneys threatened
to attach his negative.

Chaplin fled to Salt Lake City
to finish editing The Kid.

He ate women up, and they came and
they went in extraordinary numbers.

If you're leading a life like that, you're
gonna have trouble sooner or later.

You're gonna get involved with women
who are too young...

...women who've got dangerous
mothers or dangerous lawyers.

It was a year and a half before he
finally turned the negative of The Kid...

...over to his distributors.

It was worth the wait.

A masterpiece and a huge
step forward for Chaplin.

Early in the film, Chaplin keeps trying
to abandon the abandoned baby.

He injected within something,
such as The Kid...

...a truth, a poignancy,
which was just magical.

He's been landed with this baby.
He doesn't know what to do with it.

There's one brutal moment when
he's sitting on the pavement...

...holding this baby, and there's a drain
there. He just lifts up the drain cover.

Oh, why did he do that? ls he going
to drop the baby down the drain?

They're passing thoughts
that flit through his head...

...but he gets them over to the audience.

It was a very daring film in many ways.
The idea of mixing slapstick comedy...

...with dramatic scenes had not been
done. And many intelligent people...

...told Chaplin it could not be done...

...that one of the story elements
was bound to fail.

And the performance that
he created with Jackie...

...a miraculous piece of cinema
acting and relationship.

Jackie Coogan was his greatest costar.
The reason being...

...that Coogan was so malleable.
I mean he was the perfect Chaplin actor.

He could just repeat and do exactly
what Chaplin would show him to do.

Including stealing quarters
from the gas meter.

The Kid was Chaplin's most directly
autobiographical film.

He had been a waif on London 's streets.
He had yearned for a father.

His own had abandoned him.
He had been, until she went mad...

...lovingly tended by his
impoverished mother.

He had known all the emotions
The Kid played upon.

In the autobiography, he talks about that
he was not very healthy as a little boy.

And his mother would sit at the window
when he was in bed, sick...

...and she would just describe everything
that went on outside and imitate it...

...and say, "And now there's this man. "
And she would imitate the man.

"And there's this little boy,
and there's this woman. "

And she would tell stories about
what was going on outside.

He knew how every part
should be played.

More than anything, he'd have
liked to play every part.

Every boy, every girl, every old man,
everything in the film.

Of course, he couldn't. He had
to use, unwillingly use, other actors.

What he really wanted to do
was to tell them...

...and show them exactly how
he would do it.

He wanted them to be him
playing the part.

This was absolutely fine when you had
a brilliant little mimic like Jackie Coogan.

Charlie just did something and Jackie
could do the exact imitation of it.

By a strange chance, I saw
The Kid last night...

...and I am once again convinced
it is his best work.

That intensity when there's the threat
that the Kid is going to be...

...taken to an institution, I think that
has to come out of his own childhood...

...his own feelings, his own memories
of being taken off...

...separated from his mother and his
brother and incarcerated in an institution.

And I think that that is what gives
The Kid its peculiar intensity.

The scene where he becomes a madman
in his effort to rescue the child.

Is there a more tragic moment in pictures
than the Kid begging to go with him?

It's one of the greatest things
I have ever seen...

...that kid pleading to be taken to him.

In The Kid, the big emotions
are in the boy.

The little boy that's being taken
away from where he should be...

...from love and affection,
by the state, to do good...

...to do good because this
will be better for him.

In The Kid, they're taking this little
kid to a horrible orphanage.

He was taken away from his mother...

...and put in the Lambeth Workhouse
at the age of 7.

He was taken away from his mother.
It's so terrible.

He and Sydney, and they were
in the workhouse.

He knows what it is, that wrenching,
being pulled away. Why?

Because the mother was in no fit mental
state, and the father had disappeared.

And they were destitute.

Charles Chaplin Sr. had been a
headliner, until he succumbed to drink.

All his life, his son abhorred alcohol.

When they really hit rock bottom,
then the only recourse...

...was to go to the workhouse,
which was the place for the destitute...

...of this parish.

Not much of it remains.

And what there is of it is blackened over
by a hundred years of London soot.

After becoming a star, Chaplin supported
his mother in a London asylum...

...and eventually brought her to America.

But he largely avoided her.

Both his parents had lost control
of their lives...

... to the irrational forces
he deeply feared.

Meantime, while still fulfilling his
First National contract, Chaplin...

... with D. W. Griffith, Mary Pickford
and Douglas Fairbanks...

...created United Artists.

They would now have full
ownership of their films.

The plan had been hatched
on the Liberty Loan Tour.

Ever the performer, Chaplin
donned costume and makeup...

...for the newsreel cameramen.

Despite these affectionate poses,
Chaplin and Pickford...

... were often at odds within
the company.

But her husband, famously athletic Doug
Fairbanks, was Chaplin's closest...

...and, obviously, most supportive friend.

Doug and Mary saw Chaplin off
for London in 1921.

It was his first trip home since leaving
on the Karno American Tour in 1912.

As he set sail, Chaplin had no idea...

...of what was awaiting him
in his native country.

As the SS Olympic sailed eastward,
a relaxed Chaplin supervised...

...a shipboard contest aimed
at discovering his best imitator.

Hundreds of such contests were going
on all over America at the time.

One of their winners was a
6-year-old Milton Berle.

The Olympic docked at Southampton
on September 9th.

The mobs greeting him were
without precedent.

It was a repeat of the Liberty Loan Tour,
but now raised to flash point.

Until these mobs emerged to meet
Chaplin, no one had quite imagined...

...how movie stardom had upped
the stakes in the celebrity game.

So how did that affect him? I think he
always fought to keep his integrity...

...and part of his fighting things, too,
was fighting himself, fighting to keep--

To keep his humanity in the face
of this enormous fame he had.

Keeping your humanity.
It's celebrity's most basic issue.

For the rest of his life, even when
he was an old man in exile...

... Chaplin would have to contend
with mass adoration...

... whenever he went out in public.
It does something to a man.

Chaplin sneaked away from his hotel
to visit the scenes of his childhood...

...as he always would whenever
he returned to London.

A friend, the writer Thomas Burke,
once said of Chaplin that:

"He needed London
as an actor needs a script. "

This pub had once been owned
by his uncle.

It was here that he observed an aged
retainer, Rummy Banks, a horse-holder...

...doing the toes-out walk that Chaplin
would make the most famous aspect...

...of his Tramp character.

He returned, too, to the humble flats
he'd once shared...

... with his mother and brother.

This was once a pickle factory...

... the stench of which he never
got out of his nostrils.

The Chaplins lived hard by it
in this little street.

On this trip, Chaplin was also
tumultuously welcomed...

...in Paris and Berlin,
where he experienced...

...something of their decadent,
aristocratic life.

He returned to America determined
to put it on-screen.

Chaplin also wanted to give
Edna a great role...

...one that would help her build a
career independent of him.

When A Woman of Paris came out,
it had the biggest critical reception...

...practically of any silent film.
The critics said it was absolutely great.

The audience just stayed away.

It was Chaplin's first failure, and this
was because he wasn't in it.

It was a terrible miscalculation to have
a Chaplin film without Chaplin.

I think there are probably
two reasons for this.

One was certainly that he was
determined to try to help Edna...

...to give her a new career
as a dramatic actress.

And, obviously, she was going to look
much better if he held back...

...and was not there to--

If Charlie Chaplin was in the film, nobody
would see anybody but Charlie Chaplin.

I think it was also just he wanted
to try himself, to see if he could...

...make a dramatic film and not be
a part of it in performance.

He does this tiny little piece.
He's unbilled...

...and he's a porter.
He carries a trunk.

There are actually reviews from the time
where people hadn't known...

...it was Chaplin, but they picked out
this little comic moment.

Probably the film would have
done immensely better...

...if Chaplin had taken his name off it.

You do feel it when certain aspects
are just rejected and say:

"You are only meant to do
this sort of thing. That's it. "

"We'll only see your film
if you're in it.

We don't care how beautifully
you composed the frame.

We don't care about
the sumptuousness of the d�cor. "

It's detail, and then to go from
that detail out.

And that is what you see in A Woman of
Paris is the detail. And they always say:

"It's in the details. "
That's a clich�, but it's true.

The kitchen scene at the beginning
has to do with the smell of the game.

Why is this elaborate thing going on?

But you get a sense of how
the people lived because of that.

Look at her bedroom, alone, or the party
scenes or the woman being unraveled.

You know, it really is extraordinary.
He cuts to the guy.

The cloth is being unraveled from
the left of the frame to the right.

The sense of decadence, the sense of
eroticism in the film is very strong.

It's purely modern. lt really is modern.

It's advanced for its time. And the thing
about it is, it doesn't have the words.

They didn't have the technology
for the words.

But they're like really up there.
They're behaving.

Look at the moment.
I get chills when I think of it.

It's a beautiful scene when
the painter comes in to the party.

Balloons are flying around,
and girls are dancing.

And Adolphe Menjou invites him in,
and his elegance, just his form--

Has him sit down, and he lights
the cigarette for the artist.

Just watch that again in terms of acting.
Now, that's everything, the subtlety.

Once you concentrate on a moment
like that, it's quite something.

And it's very modern. It's very
natural. lt isn't overdone.

This is the film 's basic triangle:

Jean, the provincial painter
who abandoned Marie...

...Pierre, the Paris decadent
who is now keeping her.

Another scene in that film, which
is fascinating, is when the artist...

...is telling his mother it was just
a moment of weakness.

And she comes in, and she
hears them say that.

It's a shot on her back, and you can see
the reaction it has on her, her body.

She doesn't move. The camera doesn't
cut to a tighter shot of her or anything.

But you feel all of that, and it holds
for a very long time before she turns.

Another director would not have done
it that way. There's no doubt.

And it's very powerful.

Then, of course, he's telling
the story with pictures.

You have that moment in the picture...

...where the artist is standing
under the lamppost.

Their love has been rekindled,
but the painter is weak-willed...

...dominated by a disapproving mother.

And there's a slow fade-out on him,
and you know what's going to begin.

It's going to take it now to a tragic turn.

He doesn't stop there, though.
It's a slow fade-out on his face...

...and he's just left glowing a little bit.
And then it cuts to a series of shots...

...that are irises. Edna in bed,
that's an iris. The mother.

And you just know that now
everything's in place...

...and we're ready to go because
the final scene is coming.

There's a calmness about it
that is terrifying...

...because you know it's
going to go badly.

And it's all very objective.

Putting everybody in place until
you have that great moment...

...where the mother takes
the gun, and she's like...

...something out of mythology
in this black veil...

...and the dress and the flowing
in the wind.

Jean has killed himself.
His mother wants to avenge him.

But discovering Marie weeping
over him makes her relent.

First you think she's going
to shoot her, and she doesn't.

There's no close-up,
but it's very moving.

A Woman of Paris on a big screen must
have been powerful, very powerful.

The film 's great concluding irony.

Pierre is untouched by the tragedy,
perhaps unknowing of it.

She and Jean 's mother devote
themselves to an orphanage.

She and Pierre pass
one another unseeing.

Another of Chaplin 's open-road endings,
but without the cheerful Tramp.

Since 1915, the public had been
encouraged toward total adoration...

...of Chaplin's image. You could
see him in animated cartoons.

Or in the comic strips.

Or you could buy a Chaplin toy or game.

The Tramp was ubiquitous
and inescapable.

Everywhere you turned, there he was:

The sweet, slightly befuddled
little fellow.

It was the first great multimedia
merchandising barrage.

Chaplin, in those days, loved his fame
in quite an uncomplicated way.

Everyone who was anyone visited
Chaplin at his studio...

... when they visited Los Angeles.

He was always on.
The camera was always present.

If he loved playing the Tramp...

...he loved at least as much his role
as a world-class celebrity.

Thomas Burke again, "He lives only
in a role, and he is lost without it. "

But he was also the great god Pan,
a famous or notorious womanizer.

I think falling in love for Chaplin
probably was a great, great moment.

There are moments in his films where he
sees the girl, and he sort of swoons.

I think he did it in real life,
which is wonderful and romantic...

...and attractive and pretty,
except that he probably does it...

...three or four times a day,
and that requires an endless supply.

In his Show People cameo
for King Vidor, the joke is...

... the world's most famous man
is unrecognized in real life.

The unimpressed girl is Marion Davies,
William Randolph Hearst's mistress...

...and one of Chaplin 's lovers as well.

She swooned.
They all swooned.

Often to Chaplin's ultimate sorrow.

He had met Lita Grey when she was 12.

She'd played an angel, of sorts,
for him in The Kid.

She reappeared in his life, age 15,
when he was casting The Gold Rush.

The Kid's dream sequence
is uncannily symbolic.

She presented herself at the studio,
and Chaplin made a screen test of her...

...and then she was hired as
the leading lady in The Gold Rush.

Lita had hero-worship for Chaplin...

...and Chaplin had an interest
in young women.

He liked to see the young girl awaken.

As Lita would say,
"He had a fetish for virgins. "

They married in November, 1924.
She was pregnant with their first child...

... when Chaplin took his company
on location to Truckee, California.

By then, he knew the pregnant
Lita would have to be replaced.

Their baby was born in May, 1925.

Chaplin knew what he has
to show the audience.

When he's making films in the
environment which is known to us...

...from everyday life, you know,
he doesn't need to show you much.

But then in The Gold Rush, you know,
who ever traveled to Alaska...

...and the Klondike and saw all this
and like that?

So he knew, "I have to show it. "

In Truckee, Chaplin made the most
spectacular sequence of his career.

It involved 600 extras.

Curiously, the man famous
for his obsessive retakes...

...did the entire piece in a single day.

But Truckee was a brutal and
uncontrollable location.

Chaplin would have to match his location
footage to studio-made footage.

Mostly, The Gold Rush would be adored
by critics and public.

But some reviewers struck a note that
would resound more loudly in the future.

They said that Chaplin
was old-fashioned...

...not keeping up with
advances in film technique.

But the Tramp was unchanged,
ever the optimist...

...ever the seeker after good fortune...

...and ever oblivious, at least at first...

... to whatever dangers
might be stalking him.

It was the same with Chaplin,
a devoted cinematic purist.

That's how you know he's a legend
already by The Gold Rush...

...because, of course,
the Little Tramp can be...

...on the side of an
icy mountain with no coat.