Flesh and the Devil

I have always loved silent films, but I don't think I know why. I have some theories, but maybe it's nothing but the magic artificiality of the medium. People talk in silent movies. Some people think Charlie Chaplin never spoke, but he speaks in all of his films. We just can't hear his voice. Early on in my life as a cinephile I was lucky enough to see and fall in love with several great silent films, like Douglas Fairbanks’s The Thief of Baghdad and Rudolph Valentino’s The Son of the Sheik. Such films communicated in a language that is mostly forgotten today: a completely non-verbal language that you had to apprehend with your eyes alone. Although they used intertitles if there was something important being said by an actor and the films were accompanied by music scores sometimes written especially for them, the overpowering impression that a silent film left one with was that they were representations of an imaginary world. That was probably what attracted me to the silent films I saw in my teens – they were products of the imagination.

Among the silent films I saw in my teens were a few starring Greta Garbo, including A Woman of Affairs and Flesh and the Devil. I found them mesmerizing, so much so that my memories of them have remained vivid even after 45 years. I had a chance to watch Flesh and the Devil, made in 1926, again on Monday when it was screened by Turner Classic Movies, and, almost from the very start, my pleasant memory of it was shattered. What I found so intricately alluring then had now become intricately fake. William H. Daniels, who was Garbo’s favorite cinematographer, shot the film. The visuals are flawless, down to the costumes and the settings (although I found a few of the glass shots a tad obvious). As wonderful as the art direction, costume design and cinematography are, the overall effect is of an emphasis on the accuracy of physical details that completely overwhelm the falsity of the characters and their behavior toward one another.

Based on a novel by Hermann Sudermann, the film tries to stake out the same territory well-known to fans of Erich von Stroheim: turn-of-the-century Teutonic Europe, with its handsome military officers in riding boots and beautiful young ladies all married to wealthy old men who meet at balls and fall passionately in love. There are duels in Flesh and the Devil, the first dispatching the old husband. I was reminded of John Gilbert’s appeal as the hero, Leo von Harden (all the leading characters have a “von” in their names), but I was shocked to find Greta Garbo suddenly so uninteresting as Felicitas von Rhaden, the crux of the movie’s love triangle. The central relationship of the story is, unexpectedly, the love of Leo for his boyhood friend Ulrich von Eltz (the names alone are hilarious). After the usual turgid twists in the dime novel romance, the film closes with poor Garbo falling through the ice of an insufficiently frozen lake while Leo and Ulrich throw down their duelling pistols and embrace. A few air bubbles rising to the surface are all that’s left of Felicitas.

Garbo’s performance as Felicitas was beautiful in the incipient love scenes. She is certainly the aggressor, not the least for being more experienced than Leo. But then the film labors to attach the unfaithful wife tag to her, which became so tiresome for Garbo herself that she quit the business in 1940. She doesn’t handle her later scenes well precisely because they weren’t conceived as anything more than romantic clichés. At least half of Garbo’s allure in her films was manufactured beforehand by publicity. Now that the publicity is long forgotten, only the film itself is left for us to judge her by. I’d like to confess that, all these years later, Flesh and the Devil has perhaps something more going for it than Garbo. But it really isn’t very much.

Kevin Brownlow and David Gill did a splendid job, though, dusting off this old relic. Carl Davis’s music is once again memorable. But seeing it again taught me how a memory, especially from one’s youth, should be left right where it is, lodged in the past, untouched by corrosive experience.

Mr. Hulot's Holiday

    For some inexplicable reason, I decided yesterday to watch the 1953 debut of Jacques Tati's screen character Monsieur Hulot, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, known to English-speaking audiences as Mr. Hulot's Holiday.(1) I haven't seen it since I wrote about it ten years ago on this blog in a post I called "A Brief Vacation." But I remember the experience of watching it for the first time in a theater almost forty years ago. I felt then that it was charming - sufficiently delightful to justify its reputation. It is a bonafide classic - which means that most people accept it unquestioningly as an untouchable masterpiece, to place proudly alongside Chaplin's City Lights or Keaton's Sherlock, Jr. But what, then, is a "classic"? In his 1975 piece, "Jan Troell: A Portrait," Vernon Young makes an oh-so-necessary point: "If the word classic has any value left (after being attributed to movies which are merely old and, if truth be said, often inhumanly tedious), Here Is Your Life and the brace of Emigrant films are classics; they define with unique richness the material of which they are composed."(1)

In his 2004 essay for Criterion, David Ehrenstein called Mr. Hulot's Holiday, "One of the most original—and hilarious—comedies ever made."(2) Really? Even Roger Ebert had reservations. "The first time I saw Jacques Tati's 'Mr. Hulot's Holiday,'" Ebert wrote in 1996, "I didn't laugh as much as I thought I was supposed to. But I didn't forget the film, and I saw it again in a film class, and then bought the laserdisc and saw it a third and fourth time, and by then it had become part of my treasure. But I still didn't laugh as much as I thought I was supposed to, and now I think I understand why. It is not a comedy of hilarity but a comedy of memory, nostalgia, fondness and good cheer. There are some real laughs in it, but 'Mr. Hulot's Holiday' gives us something rarer, an amused affection for human nature--so odd, so valuable, so particular."(3)

In my experience of Tati's film, the trajectory was reversed: the film has shrunk with each subsequent viewing. I get Ebert's point about the film's evocation of "memory, nostalgia, fondness and good cheer." The film is dripping with the mood of summer vacations - even of the strange compulsion to have them once a year, along with everyone else in the Western world. The crazy rush to the train station, the panic and congestion and the long journey off the been track to arrive - at last - at the beach. I am there completely. And the wistfulness of the end - it hurts a little every time I see it.

But after seeing it again on home video in the '80s, then on laserdisc, and DVD (every new medium gives us an excuse to watch all these old films again), it got smaller, thinner, less substantial each time. The word "charming" continues to rise to my fingertips. But I feel less obliged than ever to call the film great. Sixty-six years after it was made, if the word classic still has a meaning, Mr. Hulot's Holiday is not one.


(1) But why the Anglicism "Holiday" when Vacation is closer to "Vacance"?
(1) Vernon Young, "Jan Troell: A Portrait," reprinted by permission from Jan Troell, edited by Lars-Olof Lothwall (Stockholm: The Swedish Film Institute, 1975).
(2) "Mr. Hulot's Holiday," David Ehrenstein
(3) "Great Movie: Mr. Hulot's Holiday," November 6, 1996.

The Circus

"There is a part of everything which is unexplored because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown." Gustave Flaubert

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).

A Decent Factory

Finding myself reading, once again, the film criticism of Stanley Kauffman from the year 2005, and coming across a review of a documentary called A Decent Factory, about a Nokia cellphone assembly factory in China, I paused at a passage in which Kauffmann poses a challenge to one of Karl Marx's better-known observations on Labor. Kauffmann mentions the working conditions in the factory:

"As far as the workers' comments are concerned, the only complaint we hear is about the food, which they find poor. They often slip out at night to buy food. And one woman reports a fight that another of the women had with a rough-tongued female supervisor. The one true grievance we do not hear from any of the women: we learn it from one of the bosses in a matter-of-fact way. The average pay is only about half the legal minimum wage. The factory had been built in China because labor is cheap, and it is being further cheapened. When the inspectors later report this fact back in Finland, management promises to do something about it.

"As the film progresses, expectation of exposé dwindles. Half salary is hardly a trifling matter, but the factory seems well enough run and is apparently a haven for some of the young women whose homes are a lot less attractive. Why, then, is the picture chilling? Because it is a calm reminder of an inevitability. The sight of long lines of young women doing tiny bits of attachment work or packing hour after hour, day after day, is saddening. The fact that the factory conditions are decent, as the title says wryly, makes it even sadder. Marx said that the alienation of labor--the gap between the worker and his work--is an evil of capitalism, but this is too limited: factories like this one flourish everywhere under every system. Marx's percept is not a charge against a system but a condition of modernity. Thousands of factories around the world where the attaching and packing go on and on--it's like Chaplin's Modern Times without Charlie."(1)

I'm not certain whether or not Kauffmann is being disingenuous here. He knew enough about Marx's idea of alienation to recognize it in the Nokia factory, but he must've known that China is only nominally a Marxist society. Finland (or, for that matter, the USA) is closer to being a Marxist society that communist China. Besides, China has embraced market capitalism on an unprecedented scale in order to expand its economy. This has created, as Marx predicted, enormous inequalities in China that didn't exist before - inequalities between people who want nothing more than a decent life and people who want impossibly more than they will never need.

Marx put it succinctly: a worker in a capitalist society "does not fulfil himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery rather than well-being, does not develop freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted and mentally debased. The worker, therefore, feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless. His work is not voluntary but imposed, forced labour. It is not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying other needs."

Marx knew that as long as the nature of work, which reduces the worker himself to a commodity, remains the same, work will forever be reduced to an utterly depersonalized and soul-destroying repetition of manual tasks. Almost seven years ago, I wrote about Oscar Wilde's brilliant pamphlet, which is utterly forgotten today, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism":

Wilde's vision of Socialism is unorthodox and often unrealistic. At times, when he discusses work and the freedom from work that he believes Socialism promises, he sounds like Eric Hoffer's remark about the modern "worldwide revulsion for work. To the new generation, 'la dolce vita' is not a life of plenty but a life of as little effort as possible."

Wilde believed that some time in the future all menial labor will be performed by machines, and men and women would be completely free from toil, suffering, and pain. He seems to think that work itself, and not just the motive behind it, will be eradicated under Socialism. I don't think that any socialist thinks this way. Work, which is mostly mindless toil, even for the middle class, will attain its true purpose once the motive behind it (making a living) is changed. Work, I think, is essential to living when it places the individual in the position of realizing that he is not simply an individual, but a part of a huge organism that is more than the sum of its parts. Soldiers find this out, whether they serve in combat or not. And its why they are willing to lay down their lives. They recognize probably more directly than anyone else the meaning of human brotherhood.

Marx elaborates: "Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have, in two ways, affirmed himself, and the other person. In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and, therefore, enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also, when looking at the object, I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses, and, hence, a power beyond all doubt. In your enjoyment, or use, of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man's essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man's essential nature ... Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature."

Wilde concludes his essay in quite uncharted territory:

"It will, of course, be said that such a scheme as is set forth here is quite unpractical, and goes against human nature. This is perfectly true. It is unpractical, and it goes against human nature. This is why it is worth carrying out, and that is why one proposes it. For what is a practical scheme? A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under existing conditions. But it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to; and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The conditions will be done away with, and human nature will change. The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development."

Wilde even defends his "scheme" against the charge of Utopianism:

"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias."


(1) Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic, July 4, 2005. It is well known that Chaplin had "communist sympathies." In Modern Times, there is a scene in which a truck carrying a load of lumber passes him and the red flag hanging off the end of the load falls on the ground in front of Charlie. He picks it up and, waving it, chases after the truck. Just then a large group of communists waving their red flags rounds the corner and marches right behind Charlie. The police arrive and Charlie is arrested.
(2) "A Brotherhood of One" May 10, 2012.

Leap Year

Lord Chief Justice. Your means are very slender, and your waste is
great.
Falstaff. I would it were otherwise; I would my means were greater
and my waist slenderer.

Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I


Mack Sennett, the father of American film comedy, had an eye for talent. He made millions of dollars with his one-reelers that were shown everywhere that films could reach. But he could never hang on to his talented performers because he refused to pay them more than he was making. One by one, his most successful comics, including Charlie Chaplin, Harry Langdon, and Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, left Sennett for more lucrative contracts with other movie studios.

In his groundbreaking essay, "Comedy's Greatest Era" (1949), James Agee concentrated on the Big Four - the four most dominant silent film comics, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Harry Langdon. Walter Kerr's book The Silent Clowns (1976) does the same, while granting additional space to the silent films of Laurel and Hardy, as well as a forgotten clown named Raymond Griffith, whose reputation failed to benefit from Kerr's attempt at rehabilitation. One silent clown, however, has been in desperate need of rediscovery since he suffered a catastrophic fall from stardom in 1921. The standard texts on the subject of silent film comedy mention the name Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle only in connection with Chaplin, who worked with him in a handful of Mack Sennett one-reelers in 1914, and Buster Keaton, who first appeared in Arbuckle's films from 1917. For a short time, once he escaped from Sennett, Arbuckle was as popular as Chaplin, writing and directing several films a year. His physical size was matched by his value to producers when Paramount enticed him away from Sennett in 1914 with a $1,000 a day contract and 25% of the profits from his films. He was teamed with Mabel Normand for a string of comedies of which he had total creative control. In 1916 he formed his own company, Comique, and his fame continued to soar. In his two-reeler The Butcher Boy (1917), Arbuckle introduced to the world a Vaudeville performer named Buster Keaton, and when, in 1918, Paramount offered Arbuckle a $3M contract for three feature films, he gave Keaton controlling interest in Comique.

Arbuckle was one of an old tradition of rotund comic figures. Shakespeare's Falstaff is one of the oldest examples, and John Belushi, John Candy, and Chris Farley are a few of the newer ones. Arbuckle was certainly aware that his size had something to do with his fame, but he bristled at being called "Fatty", insisting that "I have a name." But his size would become a part of the undoing of his career, when a false accusation and three outrageous trials, accompanied by a torrent of unsubstantiated gossip, ruined his reputation and convinced the powers in Hollywood to never allow him to work again in front of the camera. A young woman named Virginia Rappe turned up at a party that Arbuckle threw in San Francisco over the Labor Day weekend in 1921, and she died three days later. Evidence from her autopsy suggest that she must've died of peritonitis brought on by a botched abortion. But none of this evidence emerged until much later. Within days of her death, a friend of Rappe went to the police with a manufactured story accusing Arbuckle of raping Rappe. Tabloid news took this slander against Arbuckle and ran with it, and before long they were printing the story that it was Arbuckle's heavy girth that had crushed Rappe, causing the peritonitis by rupturing her internal organs. None of it was true.

Charged with manslaughter, Arbuckle's first two trials ended with hung juries. The third, however, ended with a unanimous verdict of acquittal and an apology from the jury foreman. But the tabloid circus had already done its damage. An enormous moral backlash was sweeping America since the passage in 1920 of the notorious Volstead Act, which brought about the Prohibition era. The intolerable rumors about Arbuckle's wild party, as well as other high profile Hollywood scandals, caused such concern among movie moguls that it led to the formation of the Hays Office, headed by former congressman Will H. Hays, a self-censorship organ that cracked down on sexually explicit and even suggestive content in movies. Despite Arbuckle's vindication, six days later Hays ordered that he be permanently banned from working in the American film industry, and that his previous films should be suppressed. This led to the wholesale destruction of every print of an Arbuckle film that every company and distributor had in their possession. Virtually broke, Arbuckle had already sold his house and automobiles to pay for his legal defense. To help support him, Buster Keaton, who stood by Arbuckle at the risk of own career, signed over 35% of all profits from his own production company. In December 1922, the ban was lifted, but Arbuckle worked thereafter under an assumed name (William Goodrich) and only as a director.

Fortunately for all of us, the effects of the scandal didn't reach Europe, where Arbuckle was still considered the equal of the Big Four and his films were preserved. In Leap Year, completed just prior to that fateful Labor Day weekend in 1921, Arbuckle plays Stanley Piper, nephew of tightwad millionaire Jeremiah Piper, who is in love with the old man's nurse, Phyllis Brown, who has a "sanitary hair-cut" that predates Louise Brooks's by a few years. Jeremiah fires the nurse and sends Stanley to Catalina Island to get him away from women. Of course, Catalina is crawling with women and Stanley, who still wants to marry Phyllis, finds that he has to fight them off.

As played by Arbuckle, Stanley isn't at all like the useless rich guy played by Buster Keaton in The Navigator, who can't even shave himself. Stanley's weaknesses are a stammer that can only be relieved by a drink of water, and women, most of whom find they can't resist him - when they know what he stands to inherit. When three women on Catalina, to whom he turns for love advice, mistake his confidences for marriage proposals, his response is the same: he jumps up and down like he's standing on hot coals and he runs away like Seabiscuit. The film varies his avenues of escape. The first time, he's on a golf course with a tiny black kid as his caddy. When the girl tries to embrace him, he grabs the kid by the hand and makes a mad dash across the green, with the kid hanging on to the golf bag. Mercifully, in mid-course, Stanley stops, grabs the kid, deposits him in the golf bag and drags it the rest of the way to the hotel. On the second occasion, he runs away from another girl straight into the ocean. When he swims past a yacht anchored offshore (his straw hat still affixed to his head), a third girl invites him aboard. When he confesses his love for nurse Phyllis and the girl thinks it's a proposal to her, Stanley dives overboard and swims back toward shore.

Back at Piper Hall, just when the plot begins to grow tedious, Stanley feigns fits to scare away his three fiancées, and Arbuckle gets to show off his skills at physical comedy - pratfalling and back-flipping like a landed fish. But none of his stunts succeed in scaring the girls away. After a climax involving his rejuvenated uncle, his butler becoming a Lord, multiple magistrates, marriage licences, and a chase in and around Piper Hall, all's well when the film ends, with Stanley and Phyllis shaking hands at their engagement.

Leap Year (a meaningless title) isn't up to Arbuckle's best work, which can be seen in his two-reelers like Love and The Hayseed. The problem wasn't Arbuckle but the script, credited to Sarah Y. Mason and Walter Woods. Arbuckle was formerly cast as a working class character, not as a silly heir to a tightwad millionaire. Despite his size, his performance is tightly controlled. Arbuckle's agility - his strength - was remarkable for a man his size. His movements often have the grace of a dancer, and in Sennett's knockabout comedies he became a virtual acrobat, since knowing how to fall was half the battle. But he simply doesn't look at ease in riding boots or golfing togs. And the business of Stanley's stammer (cured with a glass of water) becomes tedious after its third or fourth appearance.

All this is academic, however, when you consider that Leap Year was never released in the U.S. It finally premiered in 1924 - in FINLAND. Considered lost for decades, a print was found in the 1980s and the film was finally given its first American theatrical release in 1981, 60 years after its completion. In the November 1920 issue of Screenland magazine, Arbuckle wrote of his Paramount "five-reelers": "I am satisfied and hope everybody else is satisfied,and that I am on the right track. And I hope the public is going to devour these new five-reelers as a small boy devours jam. They are clean and wholesome, just as my pictures always were. They are made for the whole family - and that's what is needed in these days of the silent drama."(1) A year later, embroiled in a legal fight for his reputation and his freedom, Arbuckle's words perhaps came back to haunt him.


(1) "FROM SLAPSTICK TO LEGIT: Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle tells how it feels to work in Five Reelers," Screenland Magazine, November 1920.

Von

When I was a boy, I was predisposed to like silent films. I lived in a household where the slightest disturbance could set my mother off into a temper tantrum. A stroke at the age of 40 had left her utterly defenseless against the slightest stress, and trying to make ends meet on a career soldier's salary with four children meant that her tantrums were frequent and unpredictable. This resulted in my being an exceptionally quiet child. I loved libraries because it was a place where quiet was required. And I took to silent films almost instinctively. I even found the term silent film irresistible. I remember watching Chaplin (of course) and the Douglas Fairbanks classic The Thief of Baghdad (1924) I saw every one of Greta Garbo's silent films, especially Flesh and the Devil (1926), with John Gilbert.

But when I grew up, I learned that silence is as much a part of a musical composition or recording as the notes, that silence is so much more than simply the absence of sound, and that only a sound film could use silence creatively. Besides, every silent film I ever saw had some kind of musical accompaniment. One of my cherished memories was watching Chaplin's The Gold Rush in Des Moines with a live chamber orchestra playing Chaplin's own score.

The question may seem impertinent to some (like Kevin Brownlow), but, regarding filmmakers, exactly how many lasting reputations has the silent film yielded? Once you get past the pioneers, the Lumière brothers and Meliès, there are Griffith, Chaplin, Sjöström, Murnau, Keaton, and Eisenstein. Six. Who else? Dreyer made a few sound films that never equalled his last silent masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). Lang was one of the most successful directors of the silent era, whose career in sound films was interrupted by the Nazis. Metropolis (1927) is remarkably ambitious, but I now find Spione (1928) far more interesting. (He, like Murnau, wound up in Hollywood.) The other Russians - Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Vertov - were in Eisenstein's shadow. The French experimentalists - Delluc, Epstein, Feyder - were, well, experimentalists.

Erich Oswald Stroheim was an Austrian immigrant, the son of a Jewish hatmaker, who arrived at Ellis Island in 1909. Adopting the Von in his name, convincing people be was an exiled Austrian aristocrat,(1) he started working in films in 1914 with D. W. Griffith, then worked as a technical adviser and became famous during the First World War playing Huns, caricatures intended to inspire anti-German sentiment, in films that carried the tagline, "The Man You Love to Hate." After the war, he impressed producers enough that they allowed him to direct. Blind Husbands (1919) and the far more subtle Foolish Wives (1922), in both of which he acted, set the tone of his style of filmmaking and his penchant for extravagance in pursuit of realism. The total production costs of Foolish Wives reportedly topped $1 million before Irving Thalberg, whom Carl Laemmle had appointed the head of his Universal studio, shut it down before Stroheim had completed it and cut it from four hours to three.

No less important to the development of Stroheim's filmmaking skills was his relationship with Hollywood's most powerful producers - Carl Laemmle, Jesse Lasky, Samuel Goldwyn, and Irving Thalberg. The fact that producers were prepared to accept extravagance in its productions at the height of the silent era, especially from directors like Stroheim, who were already famous for their European sophistication, however unsophisticated American perception of it was, certainly contributed to Stroheim's extravagance during his subsequent productions. And the Hollywood trade papers, owned by William Randolph Hearst, that thrived on gossip (only recall how they had destroyed Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's career by spreading salacious lies about him during his "rape" trial - one wonders how Arbuckle would fare in the #MeToo era), followed Stroheim's every move.

His work on Merry-Go-Round (1923), set in pre-war Vienna, was interrupted by Irving Thalberg, who fired Stroheim and replaced him with Rupert Julian. It was the first time that a producer had challenged the authority of a director, and it set an unfortunate precedent in Hollywood. Stroheim then managed to persuade Samuel Goldwyn to let him direct an adaptation of Frank Norris's novel McTeague, the shooting of which took nine months. He showed Greed, Stroheim's name for the film, to a select group of people his cut of the material, which is variously said to have been eight or nine hours long. Even Stroheim knew that its length was unacceptable. He proposed that it could be reduced to six hours, to be screened in two parts on successive nights. With Rex Ingram, he edited it still further to four hours. But then disaster struck. A theater chain magnate named Marcus Loew, who owned Metro Pictures, bought out Goldwyn Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Pictures to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with Irving Thalberg once again the head of production. Thalberg took Greed away from Stroheim and ordered it cut to a manageable length. The trimmed footage was gathered up by a janitor and thrown out with the morning garbage. At two hours and fifteen minutes, Greed was released to unanimously hostile reviews, attacking it for being disjointed, badly structured, and ultimately meaningless - none of which was Stroheim's fault. For the rest of his life, he called the mutilated film "the skeleton of my dead child."

In 1999, a four-hour version of the film was aired on Turner Classic Movies that used Stroheim's shooting script and production still photographs to reconstruct scenes from the truncated film, if only to give viewers a better idea of the film that Stroheim had intended us to see.(2) All that it really accomplished, I think, was to emphasize the enormity of Stroheim's vision and the loss to world film. The fact that what is left of the film looks so unlike every other film Stroheim made is an indication of the originality his vision. Stories of the incredible lengths to which Stroheim went in the name of realism abound. For Greed, he took his cast and crew to Death Valley for the shooting of the film's climax. The conditions, the heat and the below sea level pressure, caused health problems among the crew and even the death of a camera operator. For the early scene of McTeague as a miner, Stroheim took actors and crew down an actual mine, rather than simply recreating the scene on a studio set. He clearly wanted his actors to respond to the adverse conditions in ways that would make their performances more convincing.

Unbelievably, the reputation of Greed, even in its mutilated state, grew greater with the passing years. In 1952, a poll of critics sponsored by the British Film Institute ranked Greed 7th among the "Greatest Films of All Time". A second poll conducted ten years later ranked it 4th. It's comparable to the discovery of a fragment, one quarter, of a lost play by Shakespeare that is so tantalizing that its very incompleteness makes it seem more valuable than Hamlet or King Lear. No one living has seen the film that Stroheim made, so how can anyone make such extravagant claims about its greatness? The same can be said of RKO's edit of Orson Welles's second film, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). It, too, was altered from the finished version that Welles intended, simply because the studio head only wanted films short enough to be part of a "double feature" bill that were popular during the war. What RKO trimmed from Ambersons was reportedly dumped into the Pacific Ocean. Despite this, it has been ranked impossibly high on the BFI critics polls. What do the critics see that I don't - that I can't - see? 

After the failure of Greed, Stroheim returned to the studio and the familiar world of Viennese high society for The Merry Widow (1925) and The Wedding March (1928), the latter intended to be Stroheim's tribute to a vanished antebellum Vienna. Joseph Kennedy, who had made a fortune from bootlegging during Prohibition, got into movies by proďucing Queen Kelly (1929), with a young starlet named Gloria Swanson (who was Kennedy's lover). Stroheim was hired to direct. When Kennedy got wind of some of the "indecent" things that Stroheim was putting into Queen Kelly, he shut the production down and fired Stroheim. An alternate ending, directed by Richard Boleslawski, was eventually shot and Swanson released the film in Europe in 1932. It was never shown in America until it was aired on television. With heavy irony, Billy Wilder accepted Stroheim's suggestion that some of the footage from Queen Kelly be used in Sunset Boulevard (1950) in which Stroheim played Norma Desmond's (Swanson's) trusted butler, to establish her as a former silent movie star.

Stroheim tried to direct a few more times, but no one would give him free rein again. He returned to acting and, again with impeccable irony, played a hun once more, Rauffenstein, in Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1937). In 1939, he was ready to direct a film in France, with all the arrangements made, when the outbreak of World War Two cancelled them and he had to return to America for his safety. He returned to France after the war, where reverence for him as a great artist allowed him to live opulently. Just before his death in 1957, he was awarded the Legion d'honneur. "In Hollywood, you're only as good as your last picture. If you've had nothing in production for the past three months, you're forgotten. In France, if you write one good book, paint one good picture, or make one good movie, fifty years can go by and you're still regarded as an artist. They never forget you."

Based on the films that are more or less intact, Foolish Wives and The Wedding March are perhaps Stroheim's most substantial achievements. All we have of them is what Stroheim chose to place in front of his cameras, and based on that alone, they are impressive. They require patience and concentration - attributes lacking in contemporary filmgoers. I didn't see my first Stroheim film until I was in my 20s. By then, my preference for silent films had waned. I continue to watch the silent comedies of Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Langdon, Charley Chase, and Laurel and Hardy. The last silent film drama I watched in its entirety was Eisenstein's October a year ago. The greatest silent films, like The Passion of Joan of Arc and Buñuel's Andalusian Dog and L'Age d'Or, are fascinating. Mindful of the cruelties inflicted on him by his producers, Stroheim's films have an added aura of sadness. As Stanley Kauffmann wrote when the 4-hour Greed was aired in 1999, "the directing career he might have had, the work he might have given us, is only one more sharp poignancy in the 'what if' history of the arts."(3)


(1) Billy Wilder commented that Stroheim spoke German with a noticeably lower-class Austrian accent. In La Grande Illusion, Stroheim spoke his German dialogue with a strong American accent. Everyone who knew Stroheim called him "Von."
(2) This version of Greed has been available on iTunes, but has not yet been released on DVD or Blu-Ray.
(3) The New Republic, December 13, 1999.

Sight Unsound

In 1962 , Dwight Macdonald - political radical and cultural conservative - was asked to contribute to a poll being conducted by Sight & Sound for, to use their own words, the ten "best films of all time." Macdonald duly submitted his list (1) with the following comment, "What no Chaplin, no Stroheim, no Dovchenko, no Pudovkin, no Clair, no Pabst, no Murnau, no De Sica, no Rossellini, no Visconti, no Fellini, no Ford, no Wellman, no Flaherty? Well, it's your idea." He then wrote a piece for Esquire about the poll, comparing the previous list from 1952 to the results of the 1962 poll (2).

Since I like exercise for its own sake, and since there have been four more Sight & Sound Critics' Polls since Macdonald compared the first two, I will try to bring Macdonald, who has been dead - and sorely missed - since 1982, up to date by examining the polls, their consistencies and inconsistencies. I have expressed my own opinion of such polls elsewhere (3), but there is a mania for them among critics and filmgoers, which is a direct reflection of the absense of serious thinking and discussion about films.

The point of conducting the critics' poll only every ten years is, I suppose, meant to bestow on it some sense of historicality. But by waiting so long between polls, during which time a new generation of critics has appeared with their own pet peeves and axes to grind, not to mention a new generation of filmmakers that has its own ideas about what a film should be, the very notion of consensus is challenged. I am, for one, rather glad that there were no pollsters in the 1940s, '30s and '20s to remind us what a wilderness the film world was before De Sica and Kurosawa, Renoir and Carné, or even before sound was added to sight. Trying to imagine what a 1932 Critics' Poll would have looked like (4), with its purists hanging on tenaciously to the lost art of the silent film, while newcomers dismissed them as prehistoric, is proof of how far film has come in a relatively brief period of time. But even such attempts at comprehensiveness have not prevented the poll from being topical.

In the 1972 poll only five titles survived from the '62 poll: Citizen Kane (#1), Ugetsu (#10), La Regle du Jeu [why the pretense of titles in French but not in Russian or Swedish or Italian?] (#2), Battleship Potemkin (#3) and L'avventura (#5). The rising and falling fortunes of old artists was more to blame than the introduction of new talent. The rest of the list shows the extent to which the reputations of two filmmakers dominated critical thinking then: Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons (in the shattered edit, tied for #8) and Ingmar Bergman's Persona (tied for #5) and Wild Strawberries (tied for #10). The dropouts were Greed, Bicycle Thieves, Ivan the Terrible, La terra trema and L'Atalante. (5)

The disappearance of Greed from the poll was encouraging. Stroheim's star would never rise again, not even after the 1999 "restored" version was released to some acclaim. Nor would Visconti's, whose La terra trema was a rather unsettling combination of neo-realism and homoeroticism (Visconti had a predilection for casting catamites in all his films). Ivan the Terrible seems almost sclerotic today. L'Atalante is utterly charming and would reappear in the 1992 poll at #5. Periodically, certain films are re-discovered when restored prints are made available, as with L'Atalante, The Rules of the Game, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vertigo, Sunrise, etc.

Of the new additions in the '72 poll, the most pleasant surprise is Keaton's The General (tied for #8). the realization of Keaton's superiority to Chaplin, even if it does not lessen Chaplin's genius, was one of the most heartening mutations in cinematic taste of the past fifty years. What puzzles me is the rather back-handed tribute paid Ingmar Bergman, whose Wild Strawberries and Persona are considerably overrated. The biggest movement on the '72 poll was the appearance, at #4, of Fellini's 8 1/2.

Not surprisingly, then, by the time the '82 poll appeared, both Bergman films had dropped out, along with Mizoguchi's Ugetsu and Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc, although it would reappear in '92 tied for #10. Welles still clung to the cat-bird's seat with his Kane and Ambersons. Between '72 and '82 an unprecedented seven films clung to a place in the polls: Kane (#1), Rules (#2), 8 1/2 (#5), Potemkin (#6), L'avventura and Ambersons (tied for #7) and The General (tied for #10). Three new titles on the '82 poll show the direct impact of the auteur theory: Singin' in the Rain (tied for #3), Vertigo (tied for #7) and The Searchers (tied for #10). That all three are American genre films did not seem to faze the critics who voted for them. The happiest addition was Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (tied, unbelievably, with Singin' in the Rain). None of the films on the list happened to have been made during the intervening ten years, which is a trend that continued through the present 2002 poll.

Five titles survived the next decade for the '92 poll: Kane (#1), Rules (#2), Vertigo (#4), The Searchers (#5) and Potemkin (in a four-way tie for #6). Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc reappeared in the tie for #6, along with L'Atalante, which makes me wonder if the critics were beginning to keep tabs on the old polls. Kurosawa, #3 in '82, is replaced by Ozu's Tokyo Story. Though magnificent, it seems to be the token Japanese title of the decade. The victims of the interim decade were Singin' in the Rain, 8 1/2, L'avventura, Ambersons, and The General. Two new titles to the poll were Ray's Pather Panchali (#6) and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (#10). The Kubrick film that belongs on the poll is, of course, Dr. Strangelove. But the pseudo-intellectuality of 2001 made the critics seem smarter than they are. The Ray film is obvious lip service, since he died in April of that year.

Having lived with the choices for the latest poll, published in 2002, for seven years, I am as astonished at the persisting critical reason represented by Kane (#1, as usual), Rules (#3), Tokyo Story (#5), Potemkin (tied for #7), and 8 1/2 (tied for #9) as I am at the growing critical aneurism that put Vertigo at #2, The Godfather(s) at #4, 2001 at # 6, and Singin' in the Rain at #9. But where discrimination is most needed, and most to be expected, as when a person involved in the life of international film who has some knowledge of its history and the ability to distinguish between the films that conform to his subjective tastes (gustibus) and those that take powerful exception to them, is called on to submit his list of the Top Ten Films, it is sorely lacking in at least half of those critics consulted by the British Film Institute. But like all the other arts, the talent necessary to make a great film, and to a lesser extent the faculty needed to recognize it, is a matter of only a few. The size of an audience for, say, The Passion of Joan of Arc is miniscule compared to the number of viewers who flock (which best describes it) to see the latest X-Men or Tarantinto film. In fact, to adapt the Matthew Arnold maxim, you can clear a crowd faster with the word "Ozu" than with a firehose. But many critics like to pretend that there is a middle ground on which a popular film can also be deemed art, and that this extremely narrow ground is as broad as the Susquehanna River Valley.

No music critic who is worth reading would argue that Beyoncé is a good singer. No decent food critic would state that pizza is good food. No theater critic worth a damn would claim that Spamalot is a good play. And yet film critics routinely hand out praise for trash like Inglorious Basterds (or is it Basturds?) and The Dark Knight.

While I understand that such things as the Sight & Sound Critics' Poll is compiled from extremely divergent sources, and that de gustibus non est disputandum, I believe there is good reason to question the sanity of a critic who thinks that Touch of Evil and L'Avventura can be mentioned in the same breath. Placing a film like Vertigo or The Searchers alongside The Rules of the Game and Tokyo Story is tantamount to saying that Patricia Highsmith is the equal of William Faulkner or a Japanese manga is comparable to Kawabata.

Singin' in the Rain is a good musical, but it belongs to a genre and is subject to a specialized set of standards that Citizen Kane, obviously, is not. No one would think of judging Seven Samurai according to the quality of its songs or its choreography. And no one would argue, who has any reason at all to argue, that Silk Stockings is a poor musical because its characters and its situations are unbelievable.

So when Sight & Sound persists, as it has for the past sixty years, in proudly publishing the results of its Critics' Poll, with films like 8 1/2 and The Passion of Joan of Arc sticking out between recognizable rubbish like The Godfather(s) and 2001: A Space Odyssey, the significance of the poll is seriously compromised, if not nullified.



(1) Macdonald's list: 1. The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith) 2. Intolerance (D.W. Griffith) 3. October (Sergei Eisenstein) 4. Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton) 5. The Gorky Trilogy (Mark Donskoy) 6. The Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir) 7. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles) 8. Les Enfants du paradis (Marcel Carné) 9. Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais) 10. L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni. (see http://jdcopp.blogspot.com/2007/12/sight-and-sound-ten-best-films-in.html)
(2) The polls can be viewed here: http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/topten/.
(3) See http://tangodelviudo.blogspot.com/2008/12/critical-cretinisms-top-tens.html.
(4) If I had been around in '32, and lived in Paris, my list would look like this (in no order): The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer), M (Lang), I Was Born, But... (Ozu), The Gold Rush (Chaplin), Potemkin (Eisenstein), L'Age d'Or (Buñuel), Sherlock Jr. (Keaton), The Blue Angel (Sternberg), Le Million (Clair), The Phantom Carriage (Sjöström).
(5) A conspicuous lacuna: from 1952 to 2002, there has never been a film from the French New Wave anywhere near the top ten.

A Dog's Life

On Good Friday - Biyernes Santo - last year a 6 year old girl in my barangay was bitten in the face by a dog. It caused something of a stir, and since I knew the little girl, I fetched my machete, which is a standard tool in these parts, and went over to where a crowd had gathered, expecting to participate in the dog's destruction. The crowd had gathered merely to hear what was to be done about the rabies shots that the little girl would have to get, since the dog had not. The decision was made that the shots would be paid for by the dog's owner and that the dog was to be "watched" for fourteen days in case it showed any symptoms of rabies. Only then, I was told, would the dog be destroyed. I tried to explain to whomever would listen that it didn't matter if the dog was rabid or not, that it had bitten a child in the face and could no longer be trusted around people - let alone children - and should, therefore, be destroyed.(1) Even if anyone understood my tirade in broken Taglish, they could not see the sense in destroying a perfectly good dog, provided it didn't have rabies. I took my astonishment home with me along with my unused machete.

The experience taught me a curious lesson about the relative value placed on human and animal lives in the Philippines. It wasn't as if anyone had placed the welfare of the dog above the welfare of the little girl. The people who live on the barangay level "adopt" dogs in roughly the same way that the dogs themselves "adopt" fleas. Their purpose has always seemed undefined to me. They make noise at night - that is the only function I have seen them perform. Since they are allowed to roam freely, which is a blessing since they would certainly be killed by other dogs if they were restrained, whatever property protection they might provide is eliminated. There is never an avowed intention that the dog is to be cared for in any decent manner, i.e., fed regularly, sheltered against foul weather, and given rudimentary veterinary attention.

While it is true, as animal rights groups always claim, that you can tell a lot about a people by how they treat their animals, what it tells you is far more political than ethical. If even the minimum standards for the humane treatment of animals were enforced in the Philippines, at least half of all dog and cat owners would be cited for animal cruelty. But there is simply no way that the same standards for the treatment of animals being enforced in prosperous countries can sensibly be applied in countries whose economic status is classified as emerging."(2) Organizations like PETA or PAWS, the Philippine Animal Welfare Society, are looking at the problem through the wrong end of the telescope. Countries with spotty human rights records cannot be held accountable for the rights of animals.

One of Charlie Chaplin's short films, A Dog's Life (1918) features a man (Charlie) and a dog leading virtually identical lives. Charlie obviously feels sympathy for "Scraps," who eats out of garbage cans and sleeps wherever she isn't chased out, because he recognizes himself in the dog. Rilke once wrote about dogs that we "help them up into a soul for which there is no heaven," but Chaplin isn't so much worried about souls when lives are in peril. Chaplin's message in A Dog's Life is clear: when the world is unfit for a dog to live in, how can it be fit for man?


(1) By "destroyed" I do not mean "euthanized." I mean killed with a sharp or a blunt instrument. There is no money provided for any kind of "humane" destruction of animals in this country, such as gassing or lethal injection, except in the higher reaches of wealth and privilege. And since human birth control is not sanctioned, except the ridiculous "natural" kind, by the Philippine government, animal birth control is not supported either.
(2) Many of those standards are long overdue for reassessment even in countries like the U.S., in which more than half a million dogs and cats have to be euthanized every year because too many pet owners will not spay or neuter their pets.

The Gold Rush

On recently laying hands on a collection of Charlie Chaplin films, including all of his films for Essanay, I thought I would resurrect this article from 2002 on what I still consider his greatest film. 

A little man, known simply as The Lone Prospector, has invited a girl named Georgia and a few of her friends who work in the local saloon to a New Year's Eve party in his cabin. He is 'cabin-sitting' for the cabin's owner, who has left town to do business elsewhere. It is Klondike, Alaska, at the time of the gold rush. The little man – the poorest of the poor, but adventurous, always hopeful – has come to the Klondike, along with thousands of others, to try his luck. He has raised a little money shoveling snow from local storefronts, just enough for a roast chicken and trifles for the girls. He has carefully decorated the cabin and set a small table for the party. It is still very early, so the little man sits down at the table and irresistibly falls asleep. He dreams that his party is in full swing. They are all there, Georgia and her friends, and he is delighting them with little gifts and jokes. As a finale, he takes two forks, jabs them into dinner rolls, and performs an impromptu dance – the lighting and framing creating the wondrous illusion of the rolls becoming his tiny feet on the table, doing ballet moves, soft-shoe and sideshow dances. The girls cheer the little man when he is done and he pretends to swoon . . . only to awake at the same table, unoccupied, alone in his cabin. It is nearing midnight and his guests have forgotten his party. Hearing noises of revelry from the town, the little man, his aloneness complete, walks the short distance from his cabin, halts outside the brightly lit windows of the saloon and gazes within just as the crowd of townspeople – mountain men, miners and bar girls – all join hands at the stroke of midnight, maudlinly singing “Auld Lang Syne.” When the song is done, shots are fired into the air, and the celebration is renewed. The little man turns toward us, casts a shatteringly sad look at the frozen night and then wanders off. 

The scene, the little man's dream and sad awakening, is the centerpiece of Chaplin's The Gold Rush and evokes, in only a few short minutes, the breadth of his genius – the inimitable quality of laughter in the face of pain, the whole bittersweet invention of how and why this peerless film artist could have made a pathetic tramp into a figure of fun. Chaplin admitted in his autobiography (which he titled, with – for once – unintentional humor, My Autobiography) that no matter how famous or prosperous he had become, he could never forget the poverty, the want and the humiliation, of his childhood. 

At first impish, often violent in the knockabout style of his Mack Sennett two-reelers, Chaplin's Little Tramp matured as he gradually acquired total control over his work. Once he had fulfilled the terms of his contract with First National, he was free to explore the character more deeply, giving him a romantic, even tragic, side. Until, in the final scene from City Lights (1931), the comic mask is shockingly lowered: Chaplin becomes an actual tramp – broken and shambling, but still oddly (beautifully) capable of dignity. But The Gold Rush presents us with this unique mixture of heartbreaking comedy in its most perfect balance. 

The shoot became legendary, with Chaplin taking full cast and crew by train to Truckee, California in the Sierra Nevada mountains (where one of the first inspirations for the film – the 'Donner Party' episode – took place) with the intention of filming entirely on location. His young wife, Lita Grey, was cast as his leading lady and the shoot went smoothly (except for Chaplin's usual long pauses for inspiration) until Grey became visibly pregnant. Chaplin removed her from the picture and cast one of Grey's friends, Georgia Hale, in the part. He then took everyone back to Los Angeles to re-take most of the scenes on back-lot sets. Very little of Chaplin's location shooting remains in the finished film.  

In 1942, Chaplin re-released the film with all the title cards removed and music, sound effects and narration (all by Chaplin, of course) added. Chaplin did this in order to regain copyright of The Gold Rush, which had fallen to the public domain, for his own production company. When it was released, in the middle of World War II, audiences and critics were delighted, most of them agreeing that Chaplin had improved his masterpiece. 

But there are subtle differences in the re-release version. Chaplin often used two cameras during shooting, and some of the scenes are framed differently, suggesting he used some of the footage from the second camera. And one significant cut takes place at the very end of the film. In the original cut, The Lone Prospector (Charlie) and Georgia are having their picture taken by some reporters and Charlie gives Georgia a prolonged kiss. In the re-release the scene is gone, the film ending with Charlie and Georgia simply disappearing up some stairs, with Chaplin comically alluding in his narration to their future together. Perhaps Chaplin felt that the kiss was a too-happy ending for the Tramp. Since the appearance of the re-release version, a preference for the original has developed among Chaplin purists. Many still find Chaplin's narration, though often discreet, to be too unsubtle for the film, sometimes belittling the action. For instance, Chaplin playfully mocks the (obviously intentional) overacting of Mack Swain – which is unnecessary editorializing. It was as if Chaplin were making excuses for a new audience unaccustomed to silent film. But the original film, untampered with and unimproved, still resonates with audiences whenever or wherever it is shown. 

Chaplin's Little Tramp was so entirely a creature of the silent film that he never allowed him to speak – except the gibberish song he sings in Modern Times (1936). Chaplin is one of the very few film artists who, having made silence his métier, so prolonged the life of silent film that its persistence was guaranteed by his genius. The silent film lives through Chaplin. 

 [This article can be found at http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/02/22/gold_rush.html]