Because he was such an extreme perfectionist, none of the productions of Charlie Chaplin's films from The Kid (1923) to City Lights (1931) was without some major complication. They were explained in unapologetic detail in Chaplin's book, My Autobiography. But because it was the product of one of the most difficult periods of his personal life, he barely mentions the film he released to the public in January 1928, The Circus. And he waited until 1967 to do anything about restoring the film and re-releasing it. Always proprietary of his legacy, he finally, grudgingly it seems, struck a pristine new print from his own negative and re-released The Circus with a new musical score he composed (with some assistance - Chaplin couldn't read music) and he also wrote a song that he sings as the film opens. "Swing, Little Girl" isn't up to the level of "Smile" - the beautiful song he wrote for Modern Times. Merna Kennedy swings on rings suspended from high above under the circus tent. Chaplin sings the song in a noticeably old voice, much older than the man in the film, who was almost 40.
The Circus is uncomfortably lodged between Chaplin's two monuments, The Gold Rush (1925) and City Lights (1931). It's consistently funnier than either of them, but it comes up short on "pathos" - it gives you more than enough laughs, but no tears. Tears? Ever since The Tramp in 1915, when Chaplin added a new dimension to his usual knockabout comedy, an emotional undercurrent of sadness based on the inescapable fact that he's a tramp and not a suitable love interest for the girls (played by Edna Purviance until 1923) he irresistibly falls for. No other film comedian could make an audience cry. And we cry every time we watch little Jackie Coogan thrown into the back of a truck that is to take him away to an orphanage, and he reaches out with his little hands and cries out to Charlie, who, back inside their attic room, is being throttled by the social worker and a cop. But Charlie hears the boy's cries for help and finds the strength to fight off his attackers and rescue him. We cry when Charlie, who had fallen asleep waiting for Georgia and her friends to come to his cabin like they promised, awakes to the noise coming from the saloon in town. It's midnight, and the girls forgot their promise. Charlie leaves the cabin, walks over to the saloon and peers through the window at the revels inside. And we cry every time Charlie smiles that shattering smile at Virginia Cherrill, the blind girl who "can see now" because she remembers the feel of his hand.
But there are no tears in The Circus, even when Charlie learns that the circus owner's mistreated step-daughter loves Rex, the tightrope walker, instead of him. Yet Charlie defends her against her step-father's abuse and gets himself fired. She runs away and asks Charlie if he can take her with him. He knows that she can't possibly live the homeless life he leads, so he arranges for Rex to marry her, and he convinces the circus owner to take them back into his troupe. Knowing it's time for him to leave, he watches as the wagons depart and he is alone at the film's close. Because of this attenuated romance, The Circus is Chaplin's shortest feature film, at just shy of 72 minutes long. But the comic invention in The Circus is sustained and intricately timed, from the opening sketch with the pickpocket to becoming trapped in the lion's cage to Charlie's uproarious tightrope walk while being attacked by monkeys. The pacing and sheer poise of these scenes is peerless in silent comedy. In one perfect scene, Charlie tries out as a circus clown. The circus owner and the other clowns, in makeup and costume, gather around to watch. But, amazingly, Charlie cannot be funny. The essence of his clown is just that - his essence. Charlie is funny. He cannot seem funny. The clown is his being, his true face, not his mask.
The most beautiful scene is saved for last. The circus strikes its tent and the wagons trundle away, leaving Charlie alone in the deserted space. As Theodore Huff puts it, "The last scene was deliberately photographed in the harsh, early morning light to bring out the careworn lines of his face."(1) He looks down and notices a scrap of paper at his feet. It is a piece of the paper star through which the girl he loved had jumped from her horse. Heaving a sigh, he crushes the paper star into a ball, drops it and kicks it away, walking jauntily as ever into the middle distance. Remember that painful note - painful for him to write, but (with its poor grammar and spelling) so painful to read - that he left for Edna when he departed from her house in The Tramp? We see him walking slowly, sadly away from the camera. Then he squares his shoulders, shakes off his sadness, twirls his cane and kicks up his shoes as he walks farther down the road. Charlie's exit in The Circus is a lovely reprise of that classic moment.
In his book, The Movies Come from America, Gilbert Seldes, one of Chaplin's early champions, wrote: "I can foresee a bitter attack on Chaplin. He represents the dispossessed, the little man who has never had his share of the good things of the world. Sometimes the victim, as I have said, of cruel chance, sometimes the innocent bystander who suffers from the violence of others, often the direct victim of economic injustice. And yet this little man isnever angry; he brings a flower to mollify an angry boss in a factory; he raises his hat to his eternal enemy, the policeman. There are people who find in this method of Chaplin's a kind of economic defeatism. They are not satisfied with the accidental demolition of the policeman's pride, just as they are not satisfied with the comedy of the man who is trapped in the wheels of the big machine so that a blueprint has to be consulted before he can beextricated. They want the little man of the Chaplin pictures to wreck the machine. They are furious over that characteristic ending of the Chaplin films in which the little man escapes from all the complications and torments of civilized life by walking away along the road that leads to no definite end. I think that they are suspicious of Chaplin because by making people laugh even at their misfortunes he makes life tolerable for them. It happens not to be Chaplin's temperament to make life seem intolerable. He has never shown the rich and the powerful as noble figures. Indeed, the most attractive of his rich men was only human and generous when he was drunk and turned heartless when he was sober. The truth is that Chaplin is like many others, an individualist in his criticism of society, apparently unwilling to join one tyranny in order to destroy another."(2)
Seldes published these words in 1937, and their irony must've seemed more than a little bitter when Chaplin, who had antagonized J. Edgar Hoover and aroused suspicion about his political sympathies when he took part in war bond drives during WW2 supporting the "second front," the Soviet Union, which was, after all, our ally in the war against the Nazis, left the U.S. for a vacation in Europe in September 1952, only to have his return visa revoked. He was duly informed that if he tried to re-enter the U.S. he would be arrested. Chaplin wouldn't return to America for twenty years. An honorary Oscar in 1972 was a ridiculous form of apology. He was never a member of any party, but his allegiances, I think, were pretty clear. "I've known humiliation," he once said, "and humiliation is a thing you never forget. Poverty—the degradation and helplessness of it! I can't feel myself any different, at heart, from the unhappy and defeated men, the failures."
(1) Charlie Chaplin (New York: Henry Schuman, 1951).
(2) The Movies Come from America (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937).
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