THE TRAMP
ICONIC MOVIES
CHARACTER PAVED WAY FOR TALENT
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED MAY 5, 2017
By PETER THOMAS BUSCH
Charlie Chaplin’s contributions to early cinema continue to influence modern filmmaking.
Chaplin was so entertainingly successfully that he would, in rather short order, eventually write, star in, direct and produce his own films. And perhaps of special note in the silent era, Chaplin also composed the score for his films, having taught himself to play piano, violin and cello.
The much gifted young lad left London, England and started out in America on the vaudeville stages doing three to four shows a day, 7 days a week before meeting executives of Keystone films in New York City. The dirty little tramp then went to Hollywood under contract in 1914.
And by the 1920s, Chaplin was producing his own full length feature films after founding United Artists with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith in 1919. The United Artist production company was an early response to the Hollywood studio system in which actors were owned under contract by just a hand full of commercial studios.
The studio system produced movies in Hollywood movie lots, with production houses retaining complete ownership in a vertical integrated market to control and maximize profits until the system was broken apart by the government antitrust department in United States v. Paramount Pictures Inc, 1948.
The studios had owned everything needed in producing movies including the actors, the studios, the booking system and the theatre chains in the vertical market.
Chaplin eventually beat this studio system and became one of the world’s first international superstars by developing the Tramp as a recurring character in his films. Chaplin was such a smash star that he was well received throughout the world, often socializing with such other international celebrities of the day as Winston Churchill, Gandhi, Albert Einstein, and George Bernard Shaw.
The Tramp character was a kind of under achiever that used burlesque and pantomime to make comedy out of tragic events.
THE TRAMP
You know this fellow is many sided, a tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure, Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography: Charles Chaplin, 1964 (pg. 144).
Under United Artists, as an independent filmmaker, Chaplin was able to quickly move beyond slap stick comedy and produce films with social, political themes.
City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936) were produced as silent films, although sound technology had started to be used in the talkies as early as 1929. Chaplin, along with many other film artists at the time resisted films that synced sound with the acting as the medium transitioned from a familiar art form to something unfamiliar. Chaplin, as a result, would not produce his first talkie until the Great Dictator (1940).
In the biography, Chaplin: His Life and Art, (pg 389), David Robertson states that Chaplin’s Tramp character had made pantomime into an international language. “Speech would instantly rob (the Tramp) of this universality.”
City Lights is one of the first great successful full-length narratives produced on film. The script is about self-sacrifice in a time of industrialization, showing how consumer products such as the automobile would give people social status, and make a blind girl see again.
Chaplin often used unifying themes to integrate an organic structure into his films (Robertson, 459).
In 2007, the American Film Institute named City Lights as the 11th most important film ever produced.
Modern Times, produced six years into the Great Depression, illustrates how the rapid industrialization of the world would be the end of reasonableness.
Once that task was accomplished, Chaplin became even more political by producing the political satire, the Great Dictator. The film parody took a wide swipe at the leadership behind the onset of World War II. Struggling to keep United Artists afloat in a competitive sea of production companies, the director and producer and actor spent a year making miniature models and props prior to the start of filming to keep production costs down.
The influence of all three Chaplin films is evident in such modern movies as Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). Harrison Ford plays Indiana Jones, an archeologist always one step behind his more unethical competitor.
Ford frequently uses caricature and exaggerated physical movements in scenes to convey meaning to the audience. And the film builds emotional responses in the audience through the use of a form of pantomime, particularly during the many chase scenes.
The Indie script also has a Chaplinesque undertone, finding humour in frightful escapes from terrible situations.
THE CHASE
This method was edifying, but personally I hated a chase. It dissipates one’s personality; little as I knew about movies, I knew that nothing transcended personality, Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography: Charles Chaplin, 1964 (pg. 141).
Jones’s escape from a collapsing crypt, only after almost stumbling to his death, mimics the Chaplin brand of a serious beginning gradually disintegrating into tragic-comedy.
Similarly, Jones’ attempt to recapture the ark by fighting German soldiers on or about and around a moving truck convoy brings fright and laughter together just as Chaplin often did.
Raiders of the Lost Ark is number 66 on the American Film Institute’s list of the most important films.
Other action-adventure films infuse comedy with the adrenaline impact scenes, such as in the Lethal Weapon Franchise in which the main character played by Mel Gibson falls back on the humour of one of the many other comedy acts that followed Chaplin’s success.
Chaplin universalized the feature film genre when many producers were still struggling with a film narrative short no longer then 15 minutes at first and then only perhaps as much as 45 minutes. United Artists also produced these films with socially relevant content that quickly became as transformative to global culture as the Tramp had been to Hollywood.
