Charlie Chaplin's Features, Ranked

I've ranked Chaplin's features before on this blog, but I tweaked that list order and some of my thoughts for a revised piece for Film.com. Check them out.

The Best Charlie Chaplin Short Films

Oh, Chaplin. The director I once thought was too simple compared to Keaton and too maudlin in otherwise great comedies has since emerged as one of my three of four favorite filmmakers, having finally understood his consummate genius in regards to every level of film production. Unlike most silent stars, his features bear that out better than his shorts (itself a suggestion of his higher, more textured artistic capacity), but those shorts nonetheless made him a global superstar and, what's more, show him constantly tinkering with ideas that would serve him well when he moved to more ambitious projects. The 10 films I listed for this piece are all works of an unending evolution, an artist who knew how to please a crowd even while pushing himself as a performer, writer and director, and they are as entertaining as works of riotous comedy as they are glimpses into a master's working process.

Check out my picks at Film.com.

Blu-Ray Review: Monsieur Verdoux (Criterion Collection)

Monsieur Verdoux is firmly ensconced as my favorite of Chaplin's features, an appreciation that only ever deepens with each viewing. What few quibbles I once had, primarily leveled at its direction, now seem merely follies of ignorance, as it is precisely the horror and black comedy coded into every frame of his sparkling bourgeois interiors that gives the film so much of its bite. Criterion's new Blu-Ray cannot fully overcome some irreparable elements of the extant print, but it nevertheless looks better than ever and bears out the genius still at work in Chaplin's visual and aural design. Some intriguing extras round out of vital addition to the Collection.

My full review is up now at Movie Mezzanine.

Charles Chaplin's 11 Features

[The following is an entry in the monthly Favorite Directors Blogathon. A master list of my choices for all 12 filmmakers (with links updated as they are posted) can be found here.]

It is all to easy to undervalue Charles Chaplin, something that can be seen even in some early reviews for this site. His camera style, primitive even by the standards of the silent era, offers few thrills for the aesthetically minded. His infamous sentimentality becomes the focal point of critical distrust and a convenient excuse to attack a sacred cow. And as a comic, he lacks the technical dazzle of Keaton, the epic audacity of Lloyd, often suffering when placed in (meaningless) competition with his peers.

And yet, the Tramp endures. Chaplin may not be, as Shaw once said, the only genius to come out of the movies, but he was certainly the first, and still the greatest. Repeated viewing reveals his basic camerawork as a means of prioritizing his perfectionist set design, which often lends itself both to gags and insights into those who move within it. More importantly, Chaplin cedes attention to the acting which, in contrast to Chaplin's reputation as a shameless manipulator, is among the earliest examples of carefully composed naturalism in cinema. And unlike the other silent clowns (save Laurel and Hardy, whose use of slapstick as a form of silent dialogue somewhat future-proofed them), Chaplin weathered the transition to talkies superbly, however reluctantly and belatedly he made the switch. His sound features also double as clarifications and critiques of his silent Tramp figure, the more forthright political and autobiographical content not an intrusion but merely a more visible display of what was always there. Because of this sustained level of quality, all 11 of Chaplin's features rate a mention, and most of them a place in any canon. As for which are all-time masterpieces and which must settle for the faint praise of "merely" masterful, read on:

The Gold Rush (Charles Chaplin, 1925)

I adored Chaplin's The Gold Rush the first time I saw it, taking to its deft comic staging and its occasional, well-judged sentimentality. Rewatching it, however, I was struck by its depth of vision, with every gag, no matter how seemingly disconnected, perfectly entwined with the narrative and, more importantly, the psychological development. This is the richest depiction of the Tramp ever filmed, one that encapsulates his buried cynicism, innocent material and romantic desire, and often-thwarted but ultimately fulfilled hope. It's also absolutely hysterical. One of the best films of the silent era, or any era, comic or otherwise.

My full piece is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Capsule Reviews: While the City Sleeps, Cracking Up, The Kid, Rock of Ages

While the City Sleeps (Fritz Lang, 1956)

Fritz Lang's underseen noir blends the yellowest of journalism with King Lear in a prescient, savage view of media feeding a public frenzy. A news empire is offered to three successors, with the new kingdom to be ruled by the one who can beat the cops to solving the identity of a serial killer infamous only from the organization's own salacious coverage. Lang's framing is more stripped down than some other efforts but no less immaculate: the newsroom of transparent but isolating glass and roaring presses speak to the capacity of journalism to reveal and obscure, and how a giant conglomerate can drown out the truth instead of exposing it. As much as the actual string of murders, the tension operates on simple office politics, in which the promise of a raise and a title change to move up the modern social ladder can bring out the basest, most primitive behavior. The characterization of the sexually confused killer is oh-so-standard, but Lang's ability to make high style out of even the most basic movements and mise-en-scène combines with the otherwise fantastic story for a great anti-journo noir. Grade: A-

Film Club: Limelight

I greatly enjoyed my first film club chat with Allison of Nerdvampire and was ecstatic when she picked a real blind spot in my movie watching with Charlie Chaplin's Limelight, the last of his American productions before Hoover effectively exiled him. I think I liked this conversation even more than the first, and it was a pleasure not only to see a Chaplin film I hadn't previously viewed but to discuss its charms fully with someone else. So without further ado, I present out discussion below.

Plot synopsis: A washed-up vaudevillian, Calvero (Charlie Chaplin), saves a young dancer (Claire Bloom) from committing suicide and resolves to nurse her back to health. But as Thereza recovers, Calvero only slips further into obscurity. Also features Sydney Chaplin as the charming, young, American composer Neville and Buster Keaton in a show-stopping climax with Chaplin. More somber than Chaplin's classic silents, Limelight nevertheless stands as the best transplant of the auteur's trademark sentimentality into the talkies.

Monsieur Verdoux

In 1940, Charlie Chaplin finally joined the sound era with The Great Dictator, a sort-of farewell to his beloved Tramp wrapped in a scathing indictment of the Nazi menace. It came out before America joined the war and before anyone knew the extremes to which Hitler had taken his anti-Semitism. Though its final scene abandoned all narrative in favor of a preachy (though certainly heartfelt and inspiring) speech condemning Nazi policies, it remains one of the comic master's finest films.

Yet that same scene ignited a firestorm of controversy. America, still rooted in its isolationist policy, heckled the flowering speech (the term "comrades" get thrown about a bit, which wasn't the best of moves), and the Senate itself denounced the film. The increased scrutiny, aided by numerous scandals involving the filmmaker, forced Chaplin into hiding, of sorts. Finally, in 1947, he released his follow up to The Great Dictator and the first film to feature not even a resemblance to the Tramp, Monsieur Verdoux.

The result is perhaps the most ahead-of-its-time film in Chaplin's oeuvre, above even The Great Dictator. A comedy so black it often hits too hard to be funny, Monsieur Verdoux is a bleak look into a society that seems to care nothing about crime. Oh sure, we read the newspapers in horror and say "where did it all go wrong?" but we don't do anything about it, nor can we turn away from violence. Chaplin mercilessly attacks this mentality by setting the story in 1930s Europe, but he injects dramatic irony into the equation by dropping clues about what the future will hold for the continent over the next decade and a half.

Chaplin plays the titular Verdoux, a banker fired after 30 years due to the Depression. To support his invalid wife and child, he hatches a scheme: he'll marry rich, bourgeois women, murder them, then collect the insurance money. And I thought Arsenic and Old Lace was dark before its time.

Verdoux cuts a swath through self-absorbed aristocrats, who blush at his flattery and prattle on and on about their empty musings. He does so not out of sadism--though he is certainly evil, and though he certainly hates the vanity of those he kills--he does so because, in his mind, society has left him with no other choice. These early moments play out with a cold horror that supersedes laughter; the emotionless way Chaplin presents this man's calm madness is unsettling.

The character is so startling that he keeps the film from being funny for most of the first hour. Then Verdoux actually begins killing people, and Chaplin suddenly opens the floodgates and the film becomes hilarious. Consider his numerous attempts to kill the apparently invulnerable Madame Bonheur. He poisons her drink and waits for her to drop, only for her to continue speaking and accidentally swap glasses with her beau. Then Verdoux takes her fishing and, after listening to her ridiculous chatter (when he offers to bait her hook, she shouts "you don't expect me to eat a fish that's been eating worms, do you?!"), he makes to strangle her before he hears a nearby yodeller and ceases his efforts. Another fantastic scene is Verdoux's wedding to one woman, only for Mme Bonheur to show up as a guest.

Despite all this beyond-black comedy, Chaplin finds a few places to display his trademark sentimentality. When he picks up a woman fresh out of jail, he serves her a glass of poisoned wine, but when she tearfully speaks of her invalid husband, Verdoux realizes he's about to kill this innocent, sweet woman for no reason and swaps out her glass.

Unfortunately, the film also contains the director's total lack of subtlety when he's got something on his mind. When police finally capture Verdoux and sentence him to death, he gives one final speech to explain his actions. In it, he compares his crimes to the horrors of war and ends with "As a mass killer, I am an amateur by comparison." It's not as long and not nearly as disconnecting as his final speech in The Great Dictator, and actually it's quite insightful, but it still fails to properly explain Verdoux's actions even within the context of the exaggerations of satire.

But the only real flaw of the film is Chaplin's adherence to old-school style directing. Using simple pans and the occasional tracking shot, he ends up making the film seem like little more than a filmed play, and the strange floating camera movement calls attention to itself, and not in a good way.

Nevertheless, Monsieur Verdoux remains perhaps Chaplin's most interesting film, as much for its context as its content. As a comment on a wayward society and its oblivious bourgeois, it plays like an over-the-top version of Rules of the Game, yet it makes a sadly timeless commentary on violence in all societies and the fact that a man like Verdoux seems plausible even outside the desperate times of the Depression. Even if Chaplin refuses to show us what he means and chooses to tell us in disconnected speechifying, you have to respect the man. He was already on thin ice; The Great Dictator suffered a terrible backlash, then he endured all those scandals blown out of proportion by a reactionary media. For him to not only move completely beyond the Tramp but craft a character who could not be less like his iconic figure took some serious gall. However, set aside all the fluff that surrounds the film and you're still left with a misunderstood masterpiece that is possibly more relevant today than ever before.

City Lights

Buster Keaton may be the greatest of the silent clowns, but Charlie Chaplin is the most enduringly popular, and for good reason. No one, before or since, has displayed such a knack for mixing high comedy and pathos. While his messages may sometimes overtake the actual story (see: the eloquent yet out place final speech in The Great Dictator), he nevertheless manages to work his didacticism into the gags, letting us learn while we laugh. Of his films, City Lights marks the high point of his career, the perfect blend of his humor and sentimentality in open defiance of the advent of sound.

Inarguably the finest romantic comedy ever produced, City Lights more or less invented the genre as it placed itself firmly at the top of its heap for all time. The story, as with all of Chaplin's work, is rather simple: a beautiful blind girl mistakes the Tramp for a millionaire. The Tramp falls in love with her and attempts to raise money for her eye operation. Meanwhile, he prevents an actual millionaire from committing suicide, who drunkenly fawns over his savior yet can never seem to remember him in the morning.

These two stories intersect with one another as the Tramp uses the gifts the millionaire bestows upon him to continue fooling the girl into thinking he too is rich. He does so not out of cruelty to the poor blind woman but because of his own fear of his real social status. He finally found someone who might love him, but what if she finds out he's a bum?

Had anyone but Chaplin been in charge of the gags involving the flower girl's blindness, this could have been a much different film. But the director makes these scenes sweet because no matter how many times the blind girl accidentally throws water in his face or continues to face in a direction after the Tramp moves, Chaplin covers it up with moving exchanges between the two.

But the best gags of the movie come from the interactions between the Tramp and the millionaire. Harry Myers, in possibly the best supporting performance in one of Chaplin's films, is almost as funny as the leading man himself. The millionaire leaps from drunken ecstasy to suicidal despair and back again the moment the Tramp stops him. Myers will brawl anyone over the slightest provocation, throw opulent parties and treat the Tramp like his only friend in the world...until the next morning when he can't remember a thing.

Eventually the Tramp manages to get his friend to give him the money to pay for the girl's rent and operation, but must run from the cops when the millionaire sobers up and accuses him of theft. In one of the most subtle yet memorable moments of any Chaplin film I've seen, the Tramp gets the money to the girl, who kisses his hand in gratitude, at which point he without hesitation takes out one last bill he was saving for himself and gives it to her.

The final scene is hands down the greatest film ending ever. The Tramp, out of jail for his "theft," stops in front of a store that the flower girl now owns. She spends her days selling flowers and holding her breath for every rich man who enters in case its her hero. Then the Tramp shows up, and she recognizes him when she touches his hand. "You?" she asks. "You can see now?" responds the Tramp, terrified of what might happen. Then the girl smiles and the film fades to black amidst swelling music.

Words do the scene no justice. This is a silent film after all, made after The Jazz Singer heralded the end of an era. Chaplin subverts this demand with his sparing use of sound effects. When a politician unveils a statue at the start of the film, his pompous speech is replaced with blasts of a kazoo, highlighting the twittering nothingness of politicians. Later, the Tramp accidentally swallows a whistle and toots every time a conductor strikes up the band, a possible allusion to talkies ruining the actual fun of the picture (which they did for years until the technology progressed to allow the camera to move again).

All this combines into the finest comedy of the silent era, and probably ever. I've seen the film twice now, but I've watched the ending over and over. Even now it brings tears to my eyes. Chaplin's Tramp always wanted love, but usually the audience's. Here, he finally finds someone who truly loves him and sees the gentle soul beneath, and it made audiences love him even more. If you want to know just how influential this film remains, just pop in your copy of Wall•E.