Charlie Chaplin

by Peter Ackroyd

  Chaplin would come to the studio in the morning with one or two musical phrases in his head; Raksin would then transcribe them and together they would work upon a score. Chaplin would say “A bit of Gershwin might be nice there” or “What we need here is one of those Puccini melodies.” They still argued, Chaplin more stubborn and combative than ever, and on occasions Raksin would walk out. “I can’t go back,” he told a studio assistant, “I’m going to punch him on the nose.”

  Chaplin also quarrelled with Alfred Newman, the director of music at United Artists. He demanded rewrites and on occasions the orchestra had to play the same part twenty or thirty times. Newman himself worked sixteen-hour days and slept five nights a week at the studio. When Chaplin accused the orchestra of “dogging it,” or playing in a tired and mediocre fashion at a rehearsal, Newman threw down his baton and declared that he would never work with Chaplin again. Raksin took Newman’s side, thus incurring Chaplin’s wrath once more. In his search for perfection, he wore them all down.

  Modern Times opened on 5 February 1936, at the Rivoli theatre in New York; a week later it was first shown at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. It was an immediate success. The critic of the New York Times remarked that Chaplin had been “re-elected as king of the clowns” while a journalist from the New Masses “came away stunned at the thought that such a film had been made and was being distributed.” He called it “an epoch-making event.” Yet the public was not so enthusiastic, and the film was by no means a financial success; it covered its production costs only after it had been released to the rest of the world.

  Upton Sinclair, the American author, wrote that he had just seen Modern Times and that “the part about the factory was very interesting, and charming, but the rest just repeats Charlie’s old material.” By which he meant that the inventive and imaginative opening sequences, in which the Little Tramp suffers a nervous breakdown while working frantically on a production line, are by far the most impressive. Their power may derive from the fact that in the struggles of the “little fellow” with the latest technology Chaplin was adverting to his own problems with the new world of film.

  Yet in a larger sense the factory represents the modern world in which the figure of the Little Tramp is perhaps obsolete; he generally represents a “shabby-genteel” figure from the turn of the century. So he tried to reinvent himself as a worker on the production line. Some of the subsequent scenes, however, are part of Chaplin’s familiar world of slapstick, with scampering gangsters and prisoners, stern policemen and incompetent waiters, escalators and rollerskates. The emphasis in the film upon food, and the process of eating, is a reprise of one of his oldest obsessions. It might be said that faced with the complications of the modern world, he reverted to the world that he knew best.

  Yet there are still some magnificent sequences. In one scene Charlie picks up a red flag that has fallen from the back of a van, waving it to attract the owner’s attention, when he suddenly finds himself leading a demonstration of striking workers. Towards the close of the film Charlie “speaks” or, rather, recites a nonsense song in an invented polyglot language:

  La spinach o la busho

  Cigaretto porto bello.

  That was his response to the challenge of sound.

  Then at the close he reverts to silence, as the Tramp and the gamine make their way upon the long and winding road towards the rising sun. The final words are “Buck up, never say die! We’ll get along.” It was also the last appearance of the “little fellow.” That is perhaps why in Modern Times Chaplin repeated so many familiar scenes from his previous films; it was a way of saying farewell.

  In this last walk into the distance it is clear that Charlie will never have a home and will always be a wanderer. He had once been violent and lascivious; he then became gentler and more ingenious; at a slightly later date he grew into the figure of humankind; at the end he is a romantic, filled with pathos. In whatever incarnation, he was somewhere outside the world and a stranger. Chaplin also knew that Charlie’s days were done.

  After the premieres in New York and Los Angeles Chaplin wanted to escape once more; in February 1936, he sailed away on the SS Coolidge to Honolulu with Paulette Goddard and her mother. They were away for five months, during which period, according to Chaplin, they were married. Goddard also recalled that “we got married and travelled … Bali, Indochina, China, those sorts of places.” Despite the declarations of both parties, no evidence for such a marriage has ever been found. It may simply have been a ruse to guarantee Goddard’s respectability in Hollywood. Their elliptic comments, however, suggest that the vacation was not an overwhelming success.

  He had busied himself with other projects while travelling. He had written the story for a film concerning a poor Russian countess who stows away on an ocean-going liner where she falls in love with an American millionaire; the plot would surface thirty years later in A Countess from Hong Kong. He was also once more contemplating a film about Napoleon, played by himself. He had already bought the film rights to a period novel entitled Regency, perhaps in the belief that Goddard might play the spirited heroine of early nineteenth-century London society. The projects came to nothing.

  Goddard said that “when we came back he was going to write another picture for me. But you know Charlie, it can take him forever!” She was too ambitious, and too impatient, to wait indefinitely for his inspiration. She was now seriously in contention for the part of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, even though Chaplin disapproved. After an unsatisfactory screen test, in the autumn of 1937, she was not chosen for the role. He was still looking for the right vehicle for her and wrote three different scripts which were for various reasons not right. She was still waiting.

  They seem now to have been seriously at odds. A contemporary recalled that Chaplin had become a virtual “recluse,” while another described him as “on edge and bitter.” After a period of acrimony he decided to go with a new friend and tennis partner, Tim Durant, to the coastal resort of Pebble Beach in California; Durant later became his personal representative at United Artists. Chaplin stayed there for the early months of 1938, and tried at first to remain aloof from the somewhat louche and bizarre inhabitants.

  Yet soon enough he became engaged with the local, and very wealthy, society. Durant recalled one evening when he was reluctant to dine with some neighbours. Yet “we walked in and everybody congregated around him, you know. And he was a hero. He had an audience and he couldn’t leave—wanted to stay until three o’clock in the morning. After that he wanted to go out every night, because they accepted him as a great artist and a wonderful person.” It was in Pebble Beach, too, that he began seriously to consider what would be the most ambitious and grandiose role of his life.

  16

  The German Tramp

  Chaplin had previously been sent a newspaper clipping in which it was reported that Adolf Hitler had banned his films in Germany on the grounds that the actor looked so much like him. “Just think,” Chaplin told his oldest son, “he’s the madman, I’m the comic. But it could have been the other way round.” The immediate military situation may also have helped to concentrate Chaplin’s mind. In the early spring of 1938 the German army invaded Austria. In this period, then, he began to consider the possibility of playing the part of a comic dictator.

  The resemblances between Chaplin and Hitler were indeed startling. They had been born within four days of each other in April 1889. They both had drunken fathers, and grew up to worship their mothers; they possessed a similar familial inheritance of madness and illegitimacy. They sported a similar moustache, Chaplin in film and Hitler in life. It was even said that Hitler had imitated the appearance of Chaplin’s “little fellow” as a way of inspiring love and loyalty; he may also have realised instinctively that the small moustache gave a central focus to the face. In fact Chaplin’s first impression of Hitler was as “a bad impersonation of me.” They both purported to represent the “little man” struggling again
st the forces of modern society, and they also shared an uncanny gift of appealing to millions of people with an almost mesmeric magic.

  Both men were superb actors, inspired by their feelings of inadequacy and self-pity. They were both immensely photogenic. Where Chaplin only played the Tramp, however, Hitler had for a while literally become one in Vienna at the age of twenty. They both worshipped, and identified with, the figures of Napoleon and of Christ. They both loved music and believed that they could write it. Hitler had told a friend that “I shall compose the music and you will write it down”; this was exactly Chaplin’s method.

  They were both capable of furious and irrational rages as well as of abrupt changes in mood; they both suffered from bouts of paranoia. A young acquaintance of Chaplin, Dan James, wrote that “of course he had in himself some of the qualities that Hitler had. He dominated his world. He created his world. And Chaplin’s world was not a democracy either. Charlie was the dictator of all these things.” Innumerable reports suggest that he was a despot in his studio. David Raksin recalled that “Chaplin demanded unquestioning obedience from his associates.” Hitler resembled Chaplin in his distortions of his personal history, in his sudden lethargy no less than in his frantic bouts of work. To his contemporaries Hitler always seemed to be playing a part. We might be inclined to say, therefore, that Chaplin was uniquely placed to take on the part of the Führer.

  He began serious work on the project in the autumn of 1938. He played newsreels of Hitler over and over again, noticing every mannerism and every gesture. “That guy’s a great actor,” he said, “why, he’s the greatest actor of us all.” One of his assistants on the film recalled Chaplin shouting at the screen images of Hitler, “Oh, you bastard, you son of a bitch, you swine. I know what’s in your mind!” He would play the role as Adenoid Hynkel, the dictator of Tomainia.

  A provisional script was copyrighted in November under the title of The Dictator; it was summarised as “a story of a little fish in a shark-infested ocean,” a clear reference to the role of the Jewish barber also to be played by Chaplin. When Paramount objected to this title, which they had already used, he changed it to The Great Dictator. The finished script was ready by September 1939, at a length of 300 pages; it was the first film for which Chaplin had prepared so carefully. He started filming at once. He was already nervous about the impact of the subject on public opinion and he imposed strict conditions of secrecy on the production of what was known only as “Project 6.” He had already decided that Rollie Totheroh, his cameraman of long standing, would not be capable of mastering a sound picture; so he was relegated in status as assistant cameraman to Karl Struss. Struss recalled that Chaplin “had no knowledge of camera direction, his films were completely ‘theatre.’ It was very routine work with him; you’d just set up the camera and let it go, and he and the other actors would play in front of it.”

  Chaplin was disconcerted by the silence on the set necessary for a sound film. He was accustomed to the faint whine, and regular clicks, of the old equipment, to the rhythm of which he timed his performance. He missed the laughter of the stagehands. He was also discomfited by the number of people on the set. “Who are these people?” he would ask. He was told that the studio was now required by law to hire them. “But we don’t need them! What’s a make-up man? I’ve been putting this on my face long before he was born!” A scheduler for the day’s filming noted that “this schedule is subject to revision at any time due to C.C.’s possible dissatisfaction with what has been shot. Or, as a matter of fact, for any other reason.”

  It was noticed that when he first appeared on set in his military uniform, as the dictator, he was noticeably more curt and abrupt than usual; by putting on the costume, he had become the character. He improvised Hynkel’s speeches by creating an inspired gibberish that sounded exactly like German but was in fact nonsense. “Just keep the cameras rolling,” he would say as he launched into an invective of raucous gutturals. It had been an old party trick of his to recreate the sound and cadence of various languages without making any sense.

  Chaplin as Adenoid Hynkel of Tomainia in

  The Great Dictator, 1940.

  One of his assistants recalled that “the temperatures were over one hundred, but he would go on interminably, it seemed, and then in between he amused the extras by doing scenes from Sherlock Holmes or demonstrating pratfalls. At the end of the day he would be deadly gray, sweating, exhausted, with a towel wrapped around his neck.” In the autumn of 1939 he filmed the scenes in the Jewish ghetto, although at one point a large door slammed shut and crushed his middle finger; when he and Paulette Goddard rushed to Hollywood Hospital they were studiously ignored. “When I saw you both coming in in make-up,” the doctor eventually explained, “I thought it was a couple of Hollywood jokers having a little fun at our expense.”

  Yet the events of the world kept on breaking through. The New York Times reported, after the Germans had invaded Poland at the beginning of September 1939, that “there are indications that he will postpone The Great Dictator until the future can be appraised with more assuredness.” It was unlikely, however, that Chaplin would willingly forgo the completion of the project. In the winter of the year, and in the early months of 1940, he shot the scenes set in the dictator’s palace as well as the outdoor battle sequences. It was all coming together.

  From April to June he shot the final and climactic speech, more or less delivered by Chaplin himself in the guise of the barber, in the very period when the Germans conquered Belgium and invaded France. It was reported that several executives at United Artists predicted that, in these unhappy circumstances, the film would be a disaster. Yet Chaplin persevered and issued a statement that “the report I have now withdrawn the film is entirely without foundation. I am cutting it now and as soon as it can be synchronised, it will be released. More than ever now the world needs to laugh.” Yet still he was not happy with the completed project. In September 1940, just a month before the premiere, he ordered that the sets of the ghetto be reconstructed and the actors rehired. He could do better. He had wanted to write the music for the film but, at the close, he was too exhausted to attempt it. The production had lasted for 559 days and cost over $2 million, the largest amount Chaplin ever spent on a picture.

  In his role as the unnamed Jewish barber he is much more subdued and gentle than Charlie had ever been, all of his wild energy going into the part of the dictator Hynkel; it might even be said that Hynkel represents the anarchic and demonic side of the Little Tramp. He chose an American comic actor, Jack Oakie, to play Benito Mussolini, or Benzino Napaloni as he is called in the film. “Look,” Oakie said, “I’m a Scotch-Irish boy. What you want to look for is an Italian actor.”

  “What’s funny about an Italian playing Mussolini?”

  And of course his heroine was Paulette Goddard, just as he had promised her. Her role was once more that of a gamine, a bold and adventurous girl of the ghetto who puts up her own resistance to the German soldiery. He asked Goddard to arrive on the set at 8:30 each morning, so that he could style her hair. He liked cutting the hair of his wives and of other women.

  Goddard herself was not happy with Chaplin’s method of direction, which amounted to bullying and humiliation on the set. His lectures to her on the art of acting were a direct affront to her pride. On one occasion Chaplin told his oldest son that “your stepmother worked very hard today and I had to tell her a few things about acting.” She lay down on the sofa and cried.

  The film’s premiere took place in New York on 15 October 1940. The reviewer of the New York Times noted that “no event in the history of the screen has ever been anticipated with more hopeful excitement than the premiere of this film, no picture ever made has promised more momentous consequences.” In the press-book for the film it was announced that “here is the picture that has never before been equaled in advance interest and entertainment importance. Here is the picture that is actually a national event.”

  All this was in par
t hyperbole but at the time it was unprecedented and astonishing that the most loved comedian in the world was ready to parody the most hated of its leaders. In the event it was a greater success with the public than with the critics, with particular acclaim coming from England even then suffering from the first experience of the Blitz. The film earned more money than any previous Chaplin film. Bernard Shaw wrote of it that “Chaplin is more than a genius. He is an institution, the idol of millions of all races and creeds, the champion of the pathetic and oppressed. At a time when the world is sore and sick at heart, the little man with the funny moustache is something of a saviour.” Thomas Mann was less enthusiastic. He told a friend that “we have seen Chaplin’s somewhat weak, but in parts still very funny, travesty on dictators.”

  In this first full sound and dialogue film he ever made, Chaplin was in a sense already old-fashioned. He reverts to slapstick at crucial moments of the film, a style critically at odds with its content. The German storm troopers, for example, appear as latter-day Keystone Cops. The full truth of German policy was of course not known to him, and he said once that “had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps I could not have made The Great Dictator.”

  Yet the old comedy still does not fit the new situation. It teeters between the brilliant and the silly, with some rather poor farce. At times it verges upon the facetious and the verbal jokes are often lame. Nevertheless Chaplin’s visual humour is as sharp as ever. The most arresting scenes in the film are performed entirely without words. Hynkel accomplishes a wonderful dance with a floating globe to the music of the prelude to the first act of Wagner’s Lohengrin; this balletic triumph is followed by a scene in which the little barber shaves a customer to Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 5. Both sequences are a tribute to Chaplin’s true cinematic genius that survives his specious and somewhat sentimental return to farce.