Chaplin Comedy Begins a Second Hundred Years
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| Here's a Posed Still From The Films Of Charlie Chaplin Book. My Query Then ... How Many Actual Stills Were Taken For This Short, and How Many Survive? |
Charlie's First Film Released A Century Ago
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| Note The Curious Pair Looking On From a Window Behind Charlie and Cast of Making A Living |
UPDATE: 2/6/14 --- 5:00 PM: Noted historian Michael Hayde, author of the outstanding recent book, Chaplin's Vintage Year, sent along the above 1914 ad for Making A Living as it played in Buffalo, NY. As the photo demonstrates, the one-time Frontier Theatre, later the Senate, still stands, though many years have passed since it served as a picture-house. Thanks to Michael for this fascinating bit of history.
posted by John McElwee at 9:26 AM
5 Comments:
The "bum on the street" is Chester Conklin and it's the inauguration of an on-screen dynamic (Chaplin, dominant; Conklin, put-upon foil) that would continue, in spurts, all the way to THE GREAT DICTATOR (1940). Conklin was, allegedly, the first Keystone-ite who saw Chaplin's potential from the get-go.
It rankles that MAKING A LIVING is still perceived as being a flop, thanks to Mack Sennett's untrustworthy 1954 memoir. As I noted in CHAPLIN'S VINTAGE YEAR, the film was as successfully received as any other Keystone release, which is to say it got laughs and made money. Moreover, Chaplin returned to the get-up for his ninth film, CRUEL, CRUEL LOVE, so the not-yet-named "Little Tramp" get-up wasn't a lock as far as Keystone was concerned.
Dan Mercer reflects on Charlie Chaplin and times as they were when "Making A Living" first appeared:
The stills from "Making A Living" are fascinating for their glimpse of a time now far removed from our own. Chaplin in his original guise was an Edwardian dandy, with his top hat and long, pinch-waisted coat. And indeed, that was a time scarcely removed from the reign of Edward's mother, Victoria, who died in 1901. Hierarchies and class distinctions were readily picked out then by the cut of one's cloth. A hat might suggest an accent or a dialect, values shared or not, or something immediately understood as being similar or different, sinister or amusing. How very different from our age, with its own perspective and taboos, but where a billionaire wears the same style jeans as the boy walking his dog, and even a President would prefer to be seen without a tie. The marvelous thing about Chaplin, however, is that he touches something so deep within the human soul that it transcends those often superficial distinctions, or what may or may not be permitted. If we still laugh with him, it's because the truth remains true, whatever our conceits.
Daniel
Donald Benson looks back at Chaplin the Indestructible:
Working through the Chaplin at Keystone box, the thing that jumped out at me was the sheer stamina Charlie and all the Keystoners seemed to have. Simple physical violence isn't that funny in itself, but Chaplin jumping at an adversary as if shot from a gun, or impossibly bouncing back from tumbles on very real cement, was funny and startling.
A little later Buster Keaton would make bone-crushing falls mysteriously abstract and poetic, but early Chaplin sometimes suggested a hyperspeed Warner Brothers cartoon. Soon enough Chaplin toned it way down; to make his tramp sympathetic and his stories sentimental he gave up the toonish invincibility.
Craig Reardon offers a terrific glimpse of LA, then (as in Chaplin era) and now (Part One):
Hi John,
Great post about Chaplin. I often marvel at what kind of spunk (hey, there's another term which has become a museum piece) it must have taken to make one's way to the "wild, wild west" that was greater L.A. in the early 20th century, when you were born in a slum in faraway London...and then to conquer the medium of motion pictures in only a few years. I think there is a view of the Hollywood hills (to the north) that's preserved in B&W movies showing the construction of Chaplin's famous studio off of La Brea (am I right, or off-base on this?) and Sunset, and that you can see the kind of Asian palace up there that's still there today as Yamashiro's Restaurant, one of the local points of fascination even in today's Hollywood. In fact, I remember when you could drive up Highland Blvd. and see Yamashiro's up in the hills in the '80s. Not today, however, since they've constructed multi-story shopping and hotel frontages along the boulevard which obscure those attractive views. Progress. I recently saw a rather wonderful link at Criterion's page to a short video put together by "It's a Mad...World" enthusiasts contrasting very well-known cuts from that frenetic film with quite contemporary views (on video) of the same locations, and while some today look more forlorn and rustic than in the movie---surprisingly!--- others are predictably and sometimes nevertheless astonishingly more domesticated, including all three scenes that were made here in Agoura Hills (called simply 'Agoura' in those years before being incorporated as a city.) With such outlying communities having joined the march toward 'progress' and development, one is never surprised to see huge changes closer in to downtown L.A.
I was on a film shooting in downtown late last week and I can testify that the core city is experiencing an ongoing revival which has seen hundreds of young people move there to live in old converted lofts (a concept imported from NYC by enterprising and far-sighted developers and financiers as far back as the '90s) and new apartments. I'm talking about some stylish, knockout women and dashing consorts...spotted in force on the streets all day and well into the night. Some of these lofts and penthouses go for as much as $1M! I can't even conceive of having, much less spending that much on a dwelling in the middle of old L.A., but it points to the re-vivification of the city as much as anything. And there are increasingly more and more places to go to partake of culture, food, you-name-it in downtown L.A. I remember going to L.A. with film and TV companies over the past 35 years and a time when you really wanted NOT to be there after dark, and man, has that changed. Guys are out walking with their gals well after dark, and people are on the streets, and it's bustling on Friday night. Same thing's been the case for at least a decade in downtown Hollywood.
Part Two of Craig Reardon and reflections on Hollywood Then and Now:
We were in an old theater which has survived the many years since it must have been built. I recognized it as we shot there on a TV show I worked on from 2003-'06. The same sign painted on the big, cast concrete back of the theater is there today, and it's very easy to make out the names Virginia Mayo and Hoagy Carmichael, though it's not clear whether this was some kind of public appearance or an ad for a movie. This fragment is superimposed with another boldly lettered sign identifying the theater as a Newsreel Theater, something I remember having seen when I worked there almost ten years ago, and I think wrote you about when you did your interesting piece on the one-time practice of some lesser theaters converting to this format during a day prior to the advent of televised news. Yet the interior of this one-time newsreel theater was relatively posh and grand in concept.
I saw a movie recently (and can't remember for the life of me what it was!) which had a kind of cameo with Geraldine Chaplin, and though she's admirably free of the kind of numbing nip 'n' tuck stuff so many older women in film undergo, it was somewhat shocking to see how aged she looks today, as I remember going to see "Dr. Zhivago" with my (original!) family almost as if it was yesterday, when she was a dewy young thing. Yet the thought that Geraldine, the actual daughter of Charlie Chaplin, is still alive and kicking so many years since her dad first came into prominence is amazing in and of itself.
Oh, and this may interest you. I've been going through my late Mom's belongings including a picture album her mother kept. My grandmother, to me! She had a job working in a secretarial pool at Universal in 1923. There's one mysterious picture in and among very typical and rather commonplace snaps of my grandfather (who I never met, as he died of a heart ailment in the late '30s), my mother and her sister as children, etc. These have value to me, naturally, but apart from an interesting flavor of an era gone by, very little for anyone else. But that one 'mystery' picture shows what appears to be a sound stage, and people scurrying about, and at least one of them is clearly in a costume for a movie---a military outfit---that makes him stand apart from the rest, who might as well be wearing costumes themselves by contemporary standards, but in context with the age of all these old snapshots in the album are obviously merely in everyday apparel---ca. 1923! And I think this picture must have been taken with an old 'Brownie'-type Kodak camera on the Universal lot. They might have officially frowned upon employees smuggling in cameras and taking pictures then as they did when I worked there 54 years later in 1977, but maybe not! I wish not only my grandmother, but I myself, had taken more surreptitious snapshots on the lot when we respectively worked there, but especially her! Think of it---she was there the year Lon Chaney made "The Hunchback of Notre Dame"! And, I know she met Lon Chaney, because she rather casually mentioned it to her daughter (my Mom) and talked about him and what a nice man he was.
Craig
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