Last night (March 20) Turner Classic Movies’ “31 Days of Oscar” did a night about silent films that won or were nominated for Academy Awards – of which there aren’t many because the Academy awards started in 1928, at the tail end of the silent era, and in fact The Jazz Singer won a special Academy Award the first year for its pioneering use of synchronized sound. That first year there were actually two Best Picture winners: William Wellman’s Wings won for “Best Production,” while F. W. Munau’s Sunrise won for “Most Artistic Quality of Production” – a demarcation I think the Academy should return to: that way they could give the Best Productoin award to a big commercial blockbuster that would get people to tune in to the show on TV, while they could give the Artistic Quality award to the kinds of independent movies the Academy has favored in recent years. (I think some people at the Academy agree with me, because they briefly floated adding a category called “Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film” until a lot of people ridiculed the whole idea.) Of the five silent films TCM showed last night,my husband Charles and I watched two: Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus and King Vidor’s The Crowd, both released in 1928 but with more tangled production histories than that.
The Circus was Chaplin’s immediate follow-up to The Gold Rush (1925) and it was made at a particualrly troubled time in Chaplin’s career. Chaplin’s second wife, Lita Grey, was suing him for divorce and putting out a lot of salacious details about his alleged perverted sexual practices with her. Apparently the campaign was masterminded by Lita Grey’s mother, since Lita was only 17 when they married (so mom had had to give permission, which she had done reluctantly because she thought marrying Chaplon would help boost Lita’s own career as an actress). In fact, all Chaplin’s wives were teenagers when he married them, and like Woody Allen (whose career is strikingly similar to Chaplin’s in his relative artistic freedom, his ability to create films that mixed comedy and drama, and his penchant for much younger sex partners) Chapin was frequently damned as a pedophile. As part of a last-ditch attempt to save their marriage, Lita insisted that Chaplin cast Merna Kennedy, her good friend, as the female lead in The Circus because Lita trusted Kennedy not to have an affair with Chaplin – though, at least according to some sources, Chaplin successfully seduced her anyway.
The Circus was also a troubled production in various other ways, including a fire that destroyed the principal circus set (which had to be rebuilt identically so pre-fire and pos-fire sce3nes would match) and a flaw in the film during the climactic tightrope scene (in which Chaplin doubles for Rex, the circus’s professional tightrope walker and, of course, his rival for Merna’s affections), which necessitated doing the entire scene over again. (Chaplin had taught himself to walk a tightrope for the scene.) What resulted, as I told Charles the first time we watched The Circus together, was one of the most underrated films in Chaplin’s entire canon, a heartfelt masterpiece in which Chaplin plays a man who can make others laugh only when he doesn’t intend to; when he tries to be funny, he fails dismally. Chaplin ends up in the circus by accident when a pickpocket frames him by planting a stolen wallet on him just as a cop comes by. He finds himself being chased not only by the cop but also by the wallet’s rightful owner, and as part of the chase he runs into the circus during a performance. The audience laughs uproariously at his antics and demands to see more of “the funny man.”
The circus is run by a villainous ringmaster (Allan Garcia) who’s so evil that if Charles Dickens had been around to read Chaplin’s script, he’d probably have told Chaplin, “You’re way overdoing it.” As punishment for Merna missing a jump in her horseback-riding act, he decrees that Merna must not eat until he relents and allows her to – and when Chaplin and some of the stagehands surreptitiously try to slip her food, he literally rips it out of her nands just before she can actually eat it. (This reminded me of how MGM treated Judy Garland an decade or so later; they were so determined to keep her weight down they would assign her minders to steal food from her hands before she could out it in her mouth.) When Rex doesn’t show up for work one day, Chaplin takes his place on the high wire, apparently thinking this will impress Merna and lead her to transfer her affections back to him. One of the stagehands outfits Chaplin with a special appliance that will literally catch him if he falls, but midway through his performance the appliance slips out and Chaplin, unaware of this, continues a literally death-defying performance.
I fell in love with The Circus the first time I saw it, and still think it’s one of Chaplin’s best films. It and the 1952 film Limelight, Chaplin’s last film produced in the United States (even though it was set in Chaplin’s native England) are the only feature films in Chaplin’s career about making comedy, and Limelight was also produced during a particularly troubled timein Chaplin’s career, when he was under ivnestigationby the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the State Department was threatening to deport him – which they eventually did by revoking his return visa as he and his last wife, Oona O’Neill Chaplin, were vacationing in Europe. (He stayed in Europe, ultimately settled in Switzerland and made two more films there until his triumphant return to the U.S. to accept a special Academy Award in 1972. HIs wife, a native-born U.S. citizen, had to come to the U.S. to collect all Chaplin’s money and take it back with her.)
