Shoulder Arms (Charles Chaplin Productions, First National Pictures, 1918)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Turner Classic Movies showed The Red Badge of Courage on Day 2 of their Memorial Day weekend marathon of war films, it was time for Jacqueline Stewart’s “Silent Sunday Showcase” feature. Instead of making the obvious choice and showing King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925), the second highest-grossing silent film of all time (after another war movie, D. W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation from 1915), Stewart chose two war comedies, Charlie Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms (1918) and Harold Lloyd’s A Sailor-Made Man (1921). Charles and I had seen A Sailor-Made Man in 2024 and I’d posted about it to moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/07/a-sailor-made-man-hal-roach-productions.html. I have little to add about it now except that it was a lot more fun to watch it on the big screen of our 50-inch TV than the comparatively small computer monitor. It had been a lot longer since I’d seen Shoulder Arms: in a storefront revival theatre in Berkeley in the mid-1970’s. The version TCM showed was outfitted with a not well recorded musical score that according to the imdb.com page on the film was added in 1957 but the sound quality seems more like the 1930’s to me. Like The Red Badge of Courage, Shoulder Arms was planned as a considerably longer film (five reels) than the one we have (three reels). According to pioneering Chaplin biographer Theodore Huff, the missing sequences occurred at both the beginning and the end: Chaplin’s character was introduced as a family man, he was shown getting drafted, and after the big scene in which he captures the Kaiser (played by Chaplin’s older brother Sydney) and ends the war (only this turns out to be just a dream), there would have been scenes in which he was fêted by King George V and French president Raymond Poincaré. Huff didn’t regret the deletions; he wrote, “Cut down to three reels, the film’s pace and impact were magnified.”

Chaplin’s friend Douglas Fairbanks and fellow directors D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille warned him against making a comedy about the “Great War” (as World War I was usually called before there was a World War II), but Shoulder Arms turned out to be the highest grossing Chaplin film to date (a title it retained until 1925’s The Gold Rush). It had such Ur-clichés of service comedies as the hapless private who can’t stay in step with the rest of his regiment and gets lost and marches off alone until he realizes what he’s done and hurriedly tries to catch up with them. It also has a great scene in which the trench the soldiers of Chaplin’s company have been living in gets flooded, and Chaplin and his buddy sleep floating on the water regardless. (Chaplin breathes under water by grabbing the detachable horn of a wind-up phonograph and using it as a snorkel.) It has a quite remarkable special-effects scene in which Chaplin flashes back to his former urban life and we see a New York (at least I’m guessing it was New York) cityscape, complete with skyscrapers, on the left side of the screen while the right side still shows the trench in the middle of the battle. Later on there’s an equally astonishing scene in which Chaplin’s character fantasizes that a bar has opened up in his trench and a bartender serves him a drink. In 1918 those scenes could only have been shot by masking off part of the image, rewinding the film in the camera without exposing it, and shooting the additional scene on the previously masked-out portion of the film. And to play the commander of the German forces seen in the film, Chaplin found a really short (we’re talking close to little-person status here) named Loyal Underwood – though in the first scene we see of him I thought it might be Chaplin doubling both roles and it was only a later scene in which both he and Chaplin appear that I realized they were two separate actors. (Ironically, Chaplin himself was safe from being drafted because, at only 5’4”, he didn’t meet either the British or American army’s height requirement.)

About the only scene that seems to take away from the film’s high spirits was the one in which we meet Chaplin’s usual leading lady at the time, Edna Purviance, playing a French farm girl who’s trying to hold onto a house that’s been literally blasted to smithereens. When he arrives, Chaplin politely opens the door to be let in even though a good chunk of the wall next to it is missing and he could have just walked through where the wall used to be. This scene has a great payoff in which what’s left of the house collapses just as the Germans have tried to commandeer it, but Purviance’s whole role seems to have been inserted just because Chaplin felt that for commercial reasons there had to be a woman in the cast somewhere. There is a great scene in which Chaplin and Purviance have disguised themselves in German uniforms and, to add to the verismilitude of her FTM drag, he paints an artificial moustache on her upper lip. (This was actually the second time Purviance had gone FTM in a Chaplin movie; her first time was in Behind the Screen, made at Mutual in 1916, in which she dons man’s overalls and hides her long hair under a cap to get a job as a prop person in a movie studio. She’s “outed” when her cap falls off.) One odd thing about Shoulder Arms is it’s not altogether clear just when the story reality ends and the dream sequence begins. Bits of surrealism like Chaplin capturing 13 German soldiers and telling his commander (via intertitle) “I surrounded them,” or the scene in which he infiltrates behind the German lines by disguising himself as a tree (and convincing one of the German soldiers enough that the German tries to chop him down with an ax, only he saves himself by bopping the enemy with one of his branches) add to the dreamlike quality of the entire movie. It’s also interesting that A Sailor-Made Man also contains a dream sequence (Harold Lloyd dreams that he’s an officer instead of just a common seaman), and that later service comedies like Abbott and Costello’s Buck Privates and In the Navy also feature dreams in which the leads get to be officers.

Chaplin’s eight films for First National from 1918 to 1922 – including his actual first feature, The Kid (1920) – were for years the hardest films of his to see because of his Fafner-like determination to keep them from the public, and even when he reissued a number of his silents in the 1970’s just before his death, he gave The Kid a ruinous set of cuts in the process. If you want to see this masterpiece at full strength, look for a public-domain DVD of the original version. But it’s nice to see Shoulder Arms readily available and get to watch what tickled the funnybones of audiences while the war it depicts was still going on. It was also historically fascinating to see the beginnings of trench warfare in The Red Badge of Courage’s historical re-creation of the Civil War (Ulysses S. Grant actually invented trench warfare and the strategy of attrition it facilitated, and when all sides in World War I adopted it, it was a classic example of fighting the last war: Grant could fight a war of attrition because he knew the Union had three times as many men of military age as the Confederacy, whereas the potential fighting forces on both sides of World War I were basically the same size and therefore trench warfare became a bloody slaughter that chewed up hundreds of thousands of lives for minimal territory gains) and then watch trench warfare fully developed in Shoulder Arms.