The Circus

Charlie Chaplin, 1928

You know, it's hard to get motivated to write these posts when Alan Vanneman does it so much better than I do over at Bright Lights. In his piece, he posits that Garcia (Pierre Revel), the brutish, frustrated circus director in this film, is a caricature of Chaplin himself:

Chaplin liked to fantasize about being an imperturbable homme du monde in the manner of Adolphe [Menjou]/Pierre,  but he was surely aware that his paranoid manic-depressive lifestyle was scarcely sans souci, and it's not hard to imagine that Garcia's character is a shrewd, bitter self-portrait — Charlie as a tiny, willful king, reigning over a pathetic kingdom of overweight leading ladies  and fat, old, unfunny clowns.

I never even though of that! And one of my favorite movies, Lola Montes, is all about a circus where everything is a metaphor! Also, I never thought to think about the spectacle put on in Children of Paradise as a circus; I wonder if it will change my perspective on the film. (I must write about that one of these days to My Five Favorite Movies If I'm Forced at Gunpoint to Choose.)

Taking a look at my approach to Chaplin, I think the problem stems from the fact that I focused on two (admittedly important) things, the gags and the emotional side, and I threw everything out. (It's true there's not much focus on camera work, editing, and lighting here; the technique only functions to put the gag to best display, which is fine.) I don't know why I didn't look for what Zizek saw in the ending of City Lights. It's times like these that I get paranoid and worry I'm not insightful enough to do this properly.

Netflix calls this one of Chaplin's little-known features; a new print just ran at the Film Forum and it also played at MoMA, so one can presume this is changing. If any other director had made this film, it would be hilarious; as it is, it falls just short of the mark of the great comic set pieces in Modern Times and The Gold Rush. 

And yet even as I say that, I wonder if it's really true. The first big comedic "number," if you will, has two great moment illustrating Chaplin's comedic genius. In the first, the hungry Tramp takes a bite of some kind of bread product that a baby is holding. (The father holding the baby can't see because the baby sort of rests backwards on his shoulders.) The Tramp looks around, and then satisfied that he hasn't been caught, he takes some jam from the food stall behinds him, brushes it on the bread, and proceeds to finish the lot. It's the added touch with the jam that really makes the bit; thinking of that requires really finesse. Perhaps that's what we can say about Chaplin's skill: he made funny things funnier. In a detail that's almost as inspired, when the father turns around, the Tramp wipes the baby's mouth to suggest it ate bread. Here we see comedy that's anything but broad.

A thief plants a stolen wallet on the Tramp and the police chase him into a carnival attraction. There's a bit with a mirror maze, which was alright but not my favorite; it's hard to tell how innovative this was at the time. On his way out, Chaplin "hides" by pretending to be one of the life-sized mechanical dolls perched on the side of the exterior. First he rotates and moves mechanically. Again, this would be funny enough. But just then the real pickpocket (also chased by the police) appears: the Tramp ropes him into the act. Using the same mechanized movements, he feigns hitting the pickpocket with a club. After each stroke, he imitates that throw the head back and shake it furiously move that mechanized dolls do in a ridiculous facsimile of laughter.

So when it comes to clowns, we know all there is to know about the crying game. Sad clowns is a trope with some serious lineage. This is the only Chaplin where Chaplin doesn't get the girl, and there's a definite tragic tone. The Tramp overhears a fortune teller telling the circus rider he loves (Merna Kennedy -- who has a languid, limpid quality to her; a kind of aura and way of being you don't seem to see much of anymore. It reminds me of Kay Francis, but without the mellifluous sexuality underneath; it's how I imagine my maternal grandmother was when she was young) that she will marry a dark handsome man who's already close to her. The Tramp is so overjoyed he does a minimized version of the I'm-so-in-love-I'm-going-to trash-everything-in-sight moment from The Gold Rush and buys an engagement ring. Just then the circus rider meats the new tightrope walker (Harry Crocker) and is instantly smitten; the Tramp overhears her tell the fortune teller about it. In a wonderfully underplayed scene, we watch him from a long distance as he sits down and hangs his head. The girl eventually runs away from the circus and wants to travel with the Tramp; knowing he can't offer her anything material, he convinces the tightrope walker to propose. The sense of sadness isn't immediate -- Chaplin definitely opts to not milk the moment, and we see him happily throwing confetti as the newlyweds emerge from the church. But as the circus trailers roll by, moving on to the next town, and the tramp is left in a cloud of dust in a vast desolate landscape, the feeling of alienation is as accomplished and palpable as anything you'd find in Antonioni. The mere image of his frame tottering off toward the horizon moved me just as much as the finale of City Lights.

But that's not the whole story. In an unusual departure, the Tramp's antics and tendency to cause chaos, work to his advantage on the job. But there's a catch: he's only funny when he doesn't know what he's doing. Thus we're treated to a scene of the Tramp trying to make people laugh and failing, surely one of the most delicious metaphysical ironies in all of cinema. I wonder if this isn't a little metaphor (shut up) on the vicissitudes of creative life; you work your ass off trying to do something great and it's a totally unconscious stupid thing that the audience actually responds to.