August 1, 1930-to-July 31, 1931, was one of those movie years where the list of the Academy's nominees and winners would give you a completely distorted idea of what was actually going on in movie history.
1931 was a pivotal year. James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Clark Gable all went from bit players to stars within the space of twelve months and in so doing, they gave the cinema a distinctly American feel for the first time. Instead of actors aping polished stage performers with British or faux-British accents, audiences heard the inflections and rhythms of urban wise guys like Cagney and Gable, or in the case of Robinson — who was born in Romania and raised in New York's Lower East Side — the voice of the American immigrant experience.
Gangster pictures starring Cagney and Robinson — The Public Enemy and Little Caesar, respectively — proved to be big, if controversial, hits with both critics and audiences. Censors were not so thrilled, however, contending that the films (and Howard Hawks's Scarface the following year) glamorized crime.
Hollywood, as usual, proved to be of two minds on the subject, happy to bank the money that was rolling in while paying lip service at Oscar time to the notion that gangster pictures were bad for us.
It was the same story with Universal's cycle of great horror pictures, which began in 1931 with Dracula, and continued in November of that year (too late for an Oscar nomination) with Frankenstein. Their stars, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, would dominate the genre and box office for years to come without either ever receiving any recognition from the Academy.
There was also the groundbreaking western The Big Trail, starring an impossibly young John Wayne and featuring the first widescreen movie in history.
And, of course, Groucho Marx gave us what was perhaps the most famous monologue of his career, confessing to audiences, "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know."
If, however, you look at the list of winners and nominees from the Academy Award ceremony held on November 10, 1931, you won't see any of these films or performers:
Picture: Cimarron
Actor: Lionel Barrymore (A Free Soul)
Actress: Marie Dressler (Min and Bill)
Director: Norman Taurog (Skippy)
Admittedly, although the Academy failed to recognize the revolution in their midst, Cimarron makes sense in the context of the times — it was based on a best-selling novel, critics loved it, and helped sell the notion that movies were high art. Not to mention the opening sequence is spectacular.
As for Marie Dressler and Lionel Barrymore, they were big stars and turned in good performances in solid films.
The only truly inexplicable award went to Norman Taurog for his direction of the comedy Skippy.
Skippy is pleasant enough, with a fine performance from child star Jackie Cooper, but in terms of what went on in the director's chair, it isn't much unless you count Taurog's threat to shoot Cooper's dog if the kid didn't cry on cue (he cried buckets and earned an Oscar nomination).
Nothing compared to the accomplishments of Charlie Chaplin and René Clair, who were eligible for the award, or Josef von Sternberg and Lewis Milestone, who were actually nominated.
Not to mention Taurog might be the worst director to ever win the award — aside from nabbing the Oscar itself, Taurog is mostly remembered now for directing nine Elvis Presley movies (and not the good ones either).
Well, okay, he directed Boys Town, I'll give him that. But that hardly makes up for Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine.
Anyway, these are my picks:
1930-31 PICTURE (Drama) winner:The Public Enemy (prod. Darryl F. Zanuck) nominees:The Big Trail (prod. Winfield R. Sheehan); The Dawn Patrol (prod. Robert North); Dracula (prod. Tod Browning and Carl Laemmle, Jr.); Morocco (prod. Hector Turnbull)
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical) winner:City Lights (prod. Charles Chaplin) nominees:Animal Crackers (prod. Adolph Zukor); Bimbo's Initiation (prod. Max Fleischer); The Front Page (prod. Lewis Milestone); Min And Bill (prod. George W. Hill)
PICTURE (Foreign Language) winner:M (prod. Seymour Nebenzal) nominees:L'Âge d'Or (prod. Le Vicomte de Noailles); Le Million (prod. Frank Clifford); Prix de Beauté (prod. Romain Pinès); The Threepenny Opera (prod. Seymour Nebenzal)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical) winner:Marie Dressler (Min And Bill) nominees: Virginia Cherrill (City Lights); Ina Claire (The Royal Family Of Broadway); Lya Lys (L'Âge d'Or); Jeanette MacDonald (Monte Carlo)
DIRECTOR (Drama) winner:Fritz Lang (M) nominees: Tod Browning (Dracula); Howard Hawks (The Dawn Patrol and The Criminal Code); Josef von Sternberg (Morocco); Raoul Walsh (The Big Trail); William A. Wellman (The Public Enemy)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Charles Chaplin (City Lights) nominees: Luis Buñuel (L'Âge d'Or); René Clair (Le Million); Lewis Milestone (The Front Page); G.W. Pabst (The Threepenny Opera)
SUPPORTING ACTOR (Drama) winner:Peter Lorre (M) nominees: Dwight Frye (Dracula); Clark Gable (A Free Soul); Fredric March (The Barkleys of Broadway)
SUPPORTING ACTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Harry Myers (City Lights) nominees: Adolphe Menjou (The Front Page)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical) winner: Lotte Lenya (The Threepenny Opera) nominees: Mae Clarke (The Front Page); Margaret Dumont (Animal Crackers); Marjorie Rambeau (Min And Bill)
SPECIAL AWARDS
René Clair (Le Million) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound); "Makin' Whoopee" (Whoopee!) (Best Song); Fritz Arno Wagner (M) (Cinematography)
The story of a girl from the country who makes it big in Hollywood was a staple of the silent era — see, e.g., A Girl's Folly, Souls for Sale, The Extra Girl, Ella Cinders — so much so that when Marion Davies (with King Vidor directing) spoofed the genre in the 1928 silent comedy Show People, everybody in town was in on the joke.
Look for cameos from just about everybody who was anybody including Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, John Gilbert and even Marion Davies and King Vidor as themselves.
While she is mostly remembered now as the inspiration for the no-talent opera singer in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane — a grossly unfair characterization if that's what Welles really thought of her — Marion Davies was actually a very good comedic actress and this movie was the best showcase of her talent.
I've been on the road for most of February and only this morning heard about the Buster Keaton Blogathon ongoing at Silent-ology. I cobbled together this contribution from some previous posts.
Of all the developments that made 1917 such a landmark year in film—the industry-wide adoption of what is now known as "classical continuity editing," Mary Pickford's emergence as the most powerful woman in Hollywood history, Charlie Chaplin's maturation as an artist—perhaps the happiest for movie fans today was the big screen debut of the greatest film comedian of all time, Buster Keaton.
That Buster Keaton is only now arriving on the scene may come as a bit of a surprise to those of us who naturally think of Keaton as a contemporary of Chaplin—certainly we frame the debate "Chaplin versus Keaton" in those terms—but the fact is, Chaplin was already an international star with sixty films to his credit (including forty he directed himself) before Keaton ever set foot in a film studio. And although Keaton would brilliantly subvert most of the rules of early film comedy in a brief but prolific run between 1920 and 1928, it was by and large Chaplin who had established those rules, a fact that Keaton himself later conceded.
Which is not to say Keaton was an amateur when he joined Roscoe Arbuckle during the filming of The Butcher Boy in early 1917. He had been performing on the vaudeville stage with his parents from the age of four as part of a rough and tumble "knockabout" comedy act.
"I'd just simply get in my father's way all the time," Keaton said, "and get kicked all over the stage. But we always managed to get around the [child labor] law," he added, "because the law read: No child under the age of sixteen shall do acrobatics, walk wire, play musical instruments, trapeze—and it named everything—but none of them said you couldn't kick him in the face."
Legend has it he was dubbed "Buster" when escape artist Harry Houdini saw the infant Keaton take a fall down a flight of stairs and bounce up unharmed. Whether he was born with it, or developed it doing routines with his father, if Keaton wasn't the most talented pratfall artist in movie history, I'd like to see the guy who survived long enough to be a better one. He did stunts that rivaled those of Douglas Fairbanks, and when he was done, he doubled for his co-stars and did their stunts, too.
"The secret," he once said, "is in landing limp and breaking the fall with a foot or a hand. It's a knack. I started so young that landing right is second nature with me. Several times I'd have been killed if I hadn't been able to land like a cat."
In early 1917, Keaton was booked into New York's Winter Garden for a series of shows when he bumped into Roscoe Arbuckle while strolling down Broadway.
For those of you who only know Arbuckle—"Fatty" to his fans, "Roscoe" to his friends—through the tabloid scandal and subsequent trial that (despite his acquittal) ended his career, you're missing out on one of the greatest comedic actor-directors of the silent era. Although I wouldn't put him in the same league as "the three geniuses"—Chaplin, Keaton and Harold Lloyd—Arbuckle was, in terms of his popularity and impact, the best of the rest, the very top of the second tier of comedians that included Mabel Normand, Charley Chase, Harry Langdon, Ford Sterling and Max Linder.
Mark Bourne in his review of the Arbuckle/Keaton collection for The DVD Journal suggested that Arbuckle was to his biggest commercial rival, Charlie Chaplin, what Adam Sandler is these days to Woody Allen, "less artistic and sophisticated by miles, but nonetheless obviously skilled and unquestionably popular with his own characteristic wacky and raucous manner."
The collaboration between Keaton and Arbuckle was to prove pivotal for Buster.
"Arbuckle asked me if I'd ever been in a motion picture," Keaton told Kevin Brownlow in 1964. "I said I hadn't even been in a studio. He said, 'Come on down to the Norma Talmadge Studio on Forty-eighth Street on Monday. Get there early and do a scene with me and see how you like it.' Well, rehearsals [at the Winter Garden] hadn't started yet, so I said, 'all right.' I went down and we did it."
That first scene, in the Arbuckle short comedy The Butcher Boy, ends in one of the best of Keaton's early gags. At the 6:25 mark of the film, Keaton wanders into the country store where Arbuckle works as a butcher and by the end of the scene, Keaton's trademark porkpie hat is full of molasses and the store is a wreck.
"The first time I ever walked in front of a motion picture camera," he said, "that scene is in the finished motion picture and instead of doing just a bit [Arbuckle] carried me all the way through it."
It's a terrific sequence, but it's as notable for what isn't in it as what is—Keaton does not wear an outrageous costume or wild facial hair, nor does he indulge in the over-the-top reactions and shameless mugging common to the era. He's just a thoroughly average American—albeit, one who can take a swipe at Al St. John, do a 360º spin in mid-air and wind up flat on his back—who has somehow wandered in off the street and found himself thrust into the insanity of a two-reel silent comedy.
Keaton's understatement was the antithesis of the Mack Sennett approach, and was so wholly original, it constituted something of a revolution. Audiences and critics alike instantly took note, if not always approvingly.
"The deadpan was a natural," Keaton said. "As I grew up on the stage, experience taught me that I was the type of comedian that if I laughed at what I did, the audience didn't. Well, by the time I went into pictures when I was twenty-one, working with a straight face, a sober face, was mechanical with me.
"I got the reputation immediately [of being] called 'frozen face,' 'blank pan' and things like that. We went into the projection room and ran our first two pictures to see if I'd smiled. I hadn't paid any attention to it. We found out I hadn't. It was just a natural way of acting."
But deadpan, as any Keaton fan can tell you, isn't synonymous with inert, and as film historian Gilberto Perez has noted, Keaton was able to show us a face, "by subtle inflections, so vividly expressive of inner life. His large deep eyes are the most eloquent feature; with merely a stare he can convey a wide range of emotions, from longing to mistrust, from puzzlement to sorrow."
Keaton's next film with Arbuckle, The Rough House, is one of their best. Not only does it feature some of the best gags of Arbuckle's career—the dancing dinner rolls, trying to douse a raging fire with a teacup, squeezing out a bowl of soup with a sponge—but many film historians also now list Keaton as its uncredited co-director.
"The first thing I did in the studio," he told Robert and Joan Franklin in 1958, "was to tear that camera to pieces. I had to know how that film got into the cutting-room, what you did to it in there, how you projected it, how you finally got the picture together, and how you made things match. The technical part of pictures is what interested me."
Keaton and Arbuckle made three more comedies in 1917, His Wedding Night, Oh Doctor! and Coney Island. Each features an aspect of Keaton rarely seen after.
In the first, Keaton plays a milliner's delivery boy and winds up in drag as he models a wedding dress. Mistaking him for the bride, Al St. John kidnaps Keaton and hauls him off to the preacher at gunpoint.
In Oh, Doctor!, he plays Arbuckle's little boy, a reprise of the sort of comedy Keaton and his father Joe had done for years on stage, and pulls off a stunt you have to see to believe—Arbuckle smacks him, Keaton tumbles backwards over a table, picks up a book as he falls, and lands upright in a chair, with the book on his lap as if he's been there all along, reading comfortably.
And while Coney Island is mostly an excuse to watch Arbuckle caper around Luna Park—its plot of men wooing women on park benches is a throwback to the Keystone comedies—the film is worth seeking out for two reasons: one, for its documentary footage of Coney Island nearly one hundred years ago, and two, a rare chance to see Buster Keaton smile!
The smile notwithstanding, in terms of his look, his acting style, his fearless physical stunts and his fascination with technology, the basic Keaton was already on full display in these early two-reel comedies. He had only to add the context—that of a rational man enmeshed in the machinery of a universe that exists only to achieve absurd ends—for his unique brand of humor to reach its full flower.
In 1918, Keaton made five more two-reel comedies with Arbuckle before shipping off to France to serve in the army during World War I. Although not credited as such, by this time Keaton was working as the assistant director when Arbuckle, the credited director, was in front of the camera.
"You fell into those jobs," Keaton said later. "He never referred to me as the assistant director, but I was the guy who sat alongside of the camera and watched scenes that he was in. I ended up just practically co-directing with him."
The new balance in their collaboration showed up in front of the camera as well. In the first three films of 1918, he and Arbuckle are equal partners, more Laurel and Hardy—with Keaton as a thin straight man and Arbuckle a rotund goof—than the star/supporting player dynamic of 1917. The first film of the year, Out West is a parody of the Western genre, popular at the time, with Arbuckle playing a drifter riding the rails who winds up working for Keaton as an uncharacteristically tough saloon owner. Parody would soon prove to be one of Keaton's trademarks—indeed, his two-reeler The Frozen North in 1922 was such a savage parody of William S. Hart's "good bad guy" westerns that Hart refused to speak to Keaton for two years.
Next up was The Bell Boy, the story of two Stooge-like bellhops in a shabby hotel. The horse-drawn elevator is pure Keaton who was always fascinated by machines, and built several movies around them, culminating in his classic train picture, The General.
The film that followed, Moonshine, is the most Keatonesque of all his collaborations with Arbuckle. Ostensibly the story of a pair of inept revenuers (Keaton and Arbuckle) hot on the trail of West Virginia bootleggers, this is really a movie about movies, with the title cards constantly breaking the fourth wall to explain the filming process. "Look, this is only a two-reeler," one says, "We don't have time to build up to love scenes." Opening up the mechanics of movie making for laughs was a Keaton trick he would revisit time and again, culminating with Sherlock Jr. in 1924 when a projectionist gets sucked into the film itself.
The next two shorts, Good Night, Nurse and The Cook, both came out after Keaton had shipped out for the European war and his contributions look hasty, as if he filmed a couple of scenes for both, leaving the main plot for Arbuckle to flesh out later. Still, they're both worth a look, particularly The Cook which was thought to be lost for decades until rediscovered in Norway in 1999.
After a year in the Army left Keaton deaf in one ear, he went right back to making short films with Arbuckle. The first of them, Back Stage, is a traditional "hey kids, lets put on a play" story with one extraordinary scene—anticipating Keaton's most famous stunt in 1928's Steamboat Bill Jr., a house falls on Arbuckle only to miss him thanks to an open second floor window. Here, the house is only a cardboard stage prop and, unlike that latter example which might have killed Keaton, nobody is in danger, but seeing this early attempt at a famous gag is a bit like finding a preliminary sketch of Picasso's Guernica on the back of a cocktail napkin.
There were two more shorts, The Hayseed in 1919 and The Garage in 1920, after which Arbuckle left to make full-length feature films, but not before leaving the keys to the studio to Keaton. With Arbuckle's public blessing, Keaton began to direct films of his own.
Katie-Bar-The-Door is still out of town, so Mister Muleboy and I again met at the AFI-Silver, this time for the Charlie Chaplin talkie Limelight.
This was Chaplin's third sound picture and the last film he made in the United States. I guess everybody has their favorite Chaplin talkie — I assume most would choose The Great Dictator (1940), his savage spoof of Adolf Hitler, while others might go for Monsieur Verdoux (1947), a black comedy about a serial killer whose latest victim simply refuses to die.
Me, I prefer Limelight.
It's the story of an alcoholic has-been (Chaplin) who rescues a suicidal ballerina (Claire Bloom), nurses her back to health, gets her on her feet again. During the day, she talks about her troubles; at night he dreams of his past as London's greatest music hall comedian. Once she recovers, her career takes off while his continues to decline. Along the way, a love triangle of sorts develops, with the ballerina torn between her platonic devotion to Chaplin while falling deeply in love with a shy young composer (played in a nice Freudian twist by Chaplin's son Sydney).
Chief among the film's delights is the casting of Buster Keaton as his stage partner, the only time these two silent comedy legends appeared in a movie together. Both men were past their primes here — Chaplin hadn't had an unalloyed success since Modern Times in 1936 and Keaton's heyday was even more distant, with his peak years running from just 1920 to 1928 — and Keaton's appearance is not much more than a cameo. But boy, what a cameo.
In their scene together, Chaplin's has-been teams up with Keaton's has-been to perform a silent sketch where two clumsy musicians destroy a piano and a violin mid-concert. If you've ever seen Chaplin in, say, The Pawnshop or Keaton in The Boat, you know just how much damage these guys can do.
Chaplin always played well off an opposite number — think of Roscoe Arbuckle, Eric Campbell, Mack Swain and Harry Myers — and his and Keaton's contrasting styles, the clown and the stoneface, work especially well. For a few minutes, the two legends defy the passage of time and remind us of what made them so special in the first place.
The novelty of seeing the silent era's two greatest comics together at last would be enough to make the film worth watching, but Chaplin also revisits the Tramp in at least three scenes, albeit with a different moustache and a check vest. Sure, he's not twenty-five anymore, but he can still bring it.
There's something poignant about watching a fading legend facing his loss of talent, energy and inspiration so directly, and those scenes where the has-been looks out on an empty theater that once was filled with cheering fans must have been particularly haunting for Chaplin as his real-life audience deserted him. But Chaplin being Chaplin, he finds an answer: to inspire the next generation, the only immortality an artist ever really knows.
Nigel Bruce — better known as Dr. Watson to Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes — turns in a good supporting performance as a theater manager, and there's a long ballet sequence reminiscent of The Red Shoes that I thought was quite beautiful. There's also a terrific silent gag about a high-end prostitute working the theater crowd that was worthy of Ernst Lubitsch.
Which is not to suggest that Limelight is a perfect film. Far from it. It suffers from the same flaw as all of Chaplin's sound pictures — he talks too much! In the silent era, Chaplin's Tramp could speak volumes with a single look. In the sound era, he simply speaks volumes. And frankly, as a moral philosopher, Chaplin is a hackneyed windbag.
Too, your opinion of Limelight depends on your willingness to tolerate Chaplin's return to the theme that haunted most of his work — his compulsive need to rescue damsels in distress. No doubt he was replaying, consciously or not, his boyhood situation with his mentally-ill mother, but the fact is, damsels who are chronically in need are beyond help, and the rest get better and move on, which suggests that the compulsion to rescue them is less about helping others and more about courting rejection and self-pity.
At least here, Chaplin at last finds the only solution to the dilemma that really works. I'll leave it to you to discover what that is.
Look, I'm not one of those people forever crabbing about Chaplin and sentimentality. Sentimentality is just a way of saying "an appeal to emotion rather than reason" and I happen to think that that's exactly what the movies are for, to bypass the frontal lobes and head straight for the lizard brain where love and anger and fear reside. If a movie can make me think, fine; but it had better make me feel something first or it's wasting my time.
My quibble here is that, at least where the ballerina's story is concerned, Chaplin more insists on the sentiment than actually creating it.
Still, the good far outweighs the bad.
I'd like to tell you that Limelight was a critical and commercial success, but the fact is, the film never received a proper release in the United States. When the film was completed, Chaplin boarded a boat to visit his home in England, and as soon as the ship cleared the harbor, the U.S. government declared Chaplin an undesirable alien and revoked his visa.
There were two types of anti-Communists in the 1940s and '50s: those seeking to best the Soviet Union in the existential struggle of the Cold War (e.g., Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, George Kennan, George Marshall); and those seeking to destroy their political and personal enemies with scurrilous accusations (Joe McCarthy, HUAC). Chaplin was a victim of the latter. He wouldn't return to America for twenty years.
The odd situation with Limelight did lead to the answer to a trivia question that film fans often get wrong: name the movie for which Chaplin won a competitive Oscar. In 1972, fans of Chaplin realized Limelight had never played in Los Angeles, so they rented a theater for a week and screened it, making it eligible for an Oscar under the rules of the time. Chaplin's original score received a nomination and when the envelope was opened, Chaplin had won. It was a sentimental gesture, but then Chaplin was a sentimental man so it seems fitting.
Awards or no, though, Chaplin achieved his immortality — he continues to inspire artists and will for as long as films are shown.
The gang at True Classics reminds us that today is the one hundredth anniversary of the debut of Charlie Chaplin's Tramp.
Believe it or not, I've written about Chaplin before. This is what I had to say about that magical moment:
It was while filming the otherwise forgettable Kid Auto Races at Venice that Chaplin stumbled upon an idea for what would become the most memorable character of the entire silent era.
"[O]n the way to the wardrobe," he wrote in his autobiography, "I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat. I wanted everything to be a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large. I was undecided whether to look old or young, but remembering Sennett had expected me to be a much older man, I added a small moustache, which I reasoned, would add age without hiding my expression. I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the makeup made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked on stage he was fully born."
Chaplin exaggerates—the Tramp's debut here may have been the most inauspicious of a legendary character in movie history—but he built on the idea over the course of several shorts and in later years rarely played anything else.
The turning point in Chaplin's stint at Keystone came during the filming of his eleventh short, Mabel At The Wheel. Directed by Normand herself, she and Chaplin had a terrific argument about a gag he had worked out.
"We were on location in the suburbs of Los Angeles and in one scene Mabel wanted me to stand with a hose and water down the road so that the villain's car would skid over it. I suggested standing on the hose so that the water can't come out, and when I look down the nozzle I unconsciously step off the hose and the water squirts in my face. But she shut me up quickly: 'We have no time! We have no time! Do what you're told.'
"That was enough. I could not take it—and from such a pretty girl. 'I'm sorry, Miss Normand. I will not do what I'm told. I don't think you are competent to tell me about what to do.'"
Normand won the argument, but Chaplin won the war. Putting his money where his mouth was—in the form of his life savings as a surety that the resulting film would be worth releasing—Chaplin made his directing debut with his very next film, Twenty Minutes Of Love (April 20, 1914). The film was a success and Chaplin rarely thereafter worked for anyone but himself. (You can see the best of his Keystone efforts, The Rounders, here.)
While at Keystone, Chaplin played the usual assortment of drunks, mashers and incompetent waiters—by then already stock film characters—but he had, especially when directing himself, a sense of rhythm that turned comedy into a dance, and a gift for finding an unexpected twist in any comedic situation, subverting expectations, delaying or denying the expected payoff and giving us something we would have never thought of instead.
Indeed, seeing Chaplin in the context of his times, it's clear to me now he was to film comedy what D.W. Griffith was to film drama, establishing the rules and raising the bar. Even when he's just doing variations on Mack Sennett's everybody-fall-down brand of comedy, the internal logic of the characters' actions creates a sense of anticipation that makes the payoff so much more satisfying than one based on pure surprise and absurdity.
"That Chaplin exploded the boundaries of film comedy with each successive phase in his career," Rick Levinson wrote in Ranking the Silent Comedians, "much like Picasso exploded the boundaries of art with each successive phase of his career, is either known too well or too often taken for granted. You have to have a sense of what film comedy was like before, during and after Chaplin's career to get an inkling of the immense impact he made on 20th century culture."
This is not just a case of pretending to see something in retrospect that no one saw at the time. Audiences immediately recognized that Chaplin was something special and during the silent era, only his future business partners, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, would rival him in terms of box office appeal.
And now here it is, not the most auspicious debut in movie history, but possibly the most significant. Better things would follow in short order.
One of those films I really should write five thousand words about, The Kid was Charlie Chaplin's first feature-length film, a Dickensian-style dramedy about a tramp who finds an abandoned baby in the gutter and raises him as his own. Not only was it a box office blockbuster, it inspired Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd to make features of their own.
We owe The Kid a lot.
This marked the first time Chaplin successfully mixed comedy and pathos. He'd made stabs at it in such shorts as The Tramp and The Vagabond, but here, he pulls it off. I rank it third on my list of favorite Chaplin films, behind City Lights and The Gold Rush.
As close to perfect as you're likely to get in this world. 5 stars out of 5.
I've written quite a bit about Chaplin in the past, especially here, and for those of you who care about these things, it struck me on this repeat viewing how much of The Kid is a re-working of Chaplin's earlier work. There's the story arc of a mother haunted by the loss of her child as in 1916's The Vagabond, a street fight with a bully on what looks like the same set as 1917's Easy Street, and the raising a foundling storyline from 1918's A Dog's Life (there a dog, here Jackie Coogan).
In The Kid, he stitches these subplot together to reach emotional highs and lows greater than the sum of the parts. Must-see.
A note on the viewing experience: Katie-Bar-The-Door and I saw this at the Meyerhoff in Baltimore with the BSO providing the live musical accompaniment based on Chaplin's own score. A word to the wise: the screen is up high, above the musicians, so unless you want to scrunch down in your seat and crane your neck for an hour and a half, buy seats in the mezzanine.
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
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