Program Notes }
Exhibitors Circuit and was able to build
his own Los Angeles studios, designed to
look like a little English Cotwolds village.
Here he exercised nearly complete control
over his films: writing his scenarios, casting his actors, directing and editing his
films, as well as starring in them.
The Idle Class
One of the last of Chaplin’s two-reelers,
The Idle Class was actually shot after The
Kid in 1921 and represented a throw-back
to the antic slapstick comedies that had
made him famous. Having succeeded
with a longer, more complex form in The
Kid, he still owed First National four more
short films and his heart was not in them.
In his autobiography he recalled: “In a
state of quiet desperation, I wandered
through the property room in the hope
of finding an old prop that might give me
an idea: remnants of old sets, a jail door, a
piano or a mangle. My eye caught a set of
old golf-clubs. That’s it! The tramp plays
golf — The Idle Class.
“The plot was simple. The tramp
indulges in all the pleasures of the rich.
He goes south for the warm weather, but
travels under the trains instead of inside
them. He plays golf with balls he finds on
the gold-course. At a fancy-dress ball he
mingles with the rich, dressed as a tramp,
and becomes involved with a beautiful
girl. After a romantic misadventure he
escapes from the irate guests and is on
his way again.”
Chaplin added a new twist to The
Idle Class: here, he would play not one
character, but two. Not only is he the
Little Tramp, he also takes the role of the
rich man who is sending his beautiful
wife (Edna Purviance again) into despair
with his addiction to alcohol. One of his
more intriguing conceits is to stage a fight
between the two characters: Chaplin
vs. Chaplin! The film’s most delicious
sequence, however, is the Little Tramp’s
anarchic behavior on the golf course featuring his double pirouette of a swing.
Frustrated with First National’s control
over his creativity, Chaplin decided to
leave the organization and found United
Artists Corporation with the film stars
Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks
and the legendary director D. W. Griffith.
From now on, there would be no one
restraining his imagination.
The Kid
Filmed in 1920 and released in 1921, The
Kid was an ambitious leap for Chaplin into
feature-length films after a career of one
and two-reelers. Moreover, it was the first
time he risked combining serious drama
with his patented slapstick comedy. The
opening title card announces that this is “a
picture with a smile — and perhaps, a tear.”
And Chaplin’s daring paid off, for The Kid
was perhaps his biggest success ever with
audiences around the world.
Chaplin added a new twist
to The Idle Class:
here, he would play not
one character, but two.
The film came at a particularly low
moment in Chaplin’s life: he had just
lost his first child, a son who’d died in
infancy, and his marriage was headed to
the divorce courts. Depressed and unable
to come up with any ideas for a new film,
he attended a theater performance featuring an exotic dancer, which burst into life
when the dancer’s four-year-old son, Jackie
Coogan, Jr., tripped onto the stage to do a
few dance steps of his own. The audience
was enchanted by the little boy, and an
equally dazzled Chaplin had found his
next film subject.
For The Kid, Chaplin drew on the bitter
memories of his own hardscrabble childhood in the London slums, when he was
several times separated by force from his
mentally ill mother. In the film, a young
unwed mother (played by Edna Purviance, who appeared in many of Chaplin’s
films) leaves her infant son in the backseat
of a luxury car parked outside a mansion,
hoping to give him a better future. When
thieves steal the car, they abandon the child
on a filthy slum street, and he is found and
raised with loving devotion by the Little
Tramp. The mother’s efforts to find the
child, and the Tramp’s determination to
keep him despite the persecution of police
and child welfare officials form the movie’s
bittersweet story. And the Tramp’s chase
over the rooftops to rescue the Kid became
one of Chaplin’s greatest sequences, with
his gift for physical stunts enlarged into a
moment of heartbreaking pathos.
In little Jackie Coogan, Jr., Chaplin
found his perfect co-star. “All children in
some form or another have genius,” he
wrote in his autobiography, “the trick is
to bring it out in them. With Jackie it was
easy. There were a few basic rules to learn in
pantomime, and Jackie very soon mastered
them. He could apply emotion to the action
and action to the emotion, and could repeat
it time and time again without losing the effect of spontaneity.” Jackie became the Little
Tramp’s diminutive alter ego, able to mimic
anything Chaplin did. The Kid made him
Hollywood’s first child star.
Chaplin’s Musical Scores
The arrival of sound gave Chaplin a delightful new possibility: he could now not
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