Chaplin: Silent Movie Mondays

Media: silent film with live musical accompaniment
Title: The Floorwalker, The Fireman, The Vagabond (all 1916)
Director: Charlie Chaplin

The first of 4 fantastic weeks of Silent Movie Mondays began at the Paramount this past week. We will see Charlie Chaplin’s silent masterpieces from 1916 and 1917 produced by the Mutual Film Company. The Paramount is presenting these 12 films in chronological order.

The first two films, The Floorwalker and The Fireman, are more Mack Sennett (whom Chaplin worked for at Keystone) than Charlie Chaplin. Basically a situation is set up, Charlie works in a fire station for example, and the film explores every slap-stick situation Charlie can get into in a fire house. It is all hilarious frenzy.

Then by film three, The Vagabond, something happens and you get Chaplin’s full genius, perhaps for the first time. Actually it is even more interesting than that, the true Chaplin genius kicks in half way into the film after an initial Sennett-like chaotic chase through a neighborhood with city toughs in pursuit of Charlie. The genius that will mark Chaplin’s best films arrives with Charlie in the country where he has fled. Added to the surface slap-stick is a deep inner core of real emotion, often manifest in the form of that little tramp Charlie, loving a woman who is his social better. In The Vagabond, as in other Chaplin films, it is made clear the love is mutual and would persists if the two were able to remain alone in the world, but crumbles when exposed to society’s eyes. A superior woman cannot be allowed to love a little tramp.

There is a perfect scene in The Vagabond. Charlie who has rescued a young woman from a violent relationship washes the country grime from the woman’s face. On the surface it is pure hilarity as he sticks the washcloth in the pliant woman’s ears and nose to get the wretch clean. Simultaneously it is beautiful, lovely and filled with genuine care, like a mother washing a child. It is as scene as sweet and moving as it is crude and hilarious, and it is that combination of a hilarious surface mixed with deep genuine feeling which will remain Chaplin’s greatest gift for many years to come.