Presentation: Super Tramp: The Art of Charles Chaplin

All right, okay. Hello, hello. Oh, applause. Wow. I haven't even done anything yet. Uh hello, good evening, and welcome to your San Francisco Public Library Koret Auditorium for tonight's program, Supertramp: The Art of Charlie Chaplin. My name is Sam Genovese, and I will be your introductory remarks dude for the evening. Uh this evening, we have the good fortune to once again be joined by writer, composer, music and cinema historian Nicole V. Gagné. But first, a land acknowledgement. The San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples. We benefit from living and working on their traditional land. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples, and we wish to pay our respects to ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramaytush community. Last year, Nicole gave two spirited talks on musicians Scott Joplin and interstellar sonic explorer Sun Ra. Was anybody here for those talks last year? Anybody? Yeah? Woohoo! All right, me too. Me too. Uh tonight, Nicole will focus on cinema and a true giant of the art, Charlie Chaplin. Just a few words about Nicole before we get started. Nicole is the author of the books Sonic Transports: New Frontiers in Our Music, Sound Pieces 2: Interviews with American Composers, Historical Dictionary of Modern Contemporary Classical Music, and is the co-author with Chace Caras of Sound Pieces: Interviews with American Composers. In the world of cinema, which is why we're here tonight, she has written essays, reviews, and interviews relating to film for the periodicals Film Journal International, Cineaste, and Britanian, as well as online at wellsnet.com, a shaded view of fashion, unicornbooty.com, fandor, and allmovie.com. She has lectured on film at the CUNY Graduate Center and the California Institute of the Arts. Her collection of short fiction about movies, Film Dreams, was published in 2024, and there may be a copy or two or three available at the back at the end of the program. Nicole knows her stuff. She is a passionate and thoughtful voice for music and cinema. So, without further ado, let us please give a warm welcome to Nicole V. Gagné. >> [applause] >> Thank you. Hello, friends. Thank you so much. Let's get this set mouth level. I'll turn this around. There. Thank you to the whoever left that. >> [clears throat] >> Oh. Before we begin. There's a t-shirt for every occasion. All right. I'm here to speak with you today about the art of Charles Chaplin. And there's a lot to say. But, let's start with a film clip. This is the first part of a one-reel comedy from the Keystone Studio called Mabel's Strange Predicament. It was released over 112 years ago on February 9th of 1914. Chaplin was 24 years old. This is the second time he's ever acted in a film, and the very first time he played what can be recognized as his character. All the elements of Chaplin's iconic costume are there. Oversized shoes, baggy pants, tight jacket, small derby, the cane, the mustache. But, he's not quite a is he? He could be just a so much shabby occupant of a somewhat fancy hotel. He certainly has none of the elegance of any of the other hotel guests we see, least of all the incomparable Mabel Normand, whom he's trying to pick up when the film starts and whom he pursues throughout the short. She was already a very popular film star when this uh film was made. And as you can tell from the title, which alerts the public to Mabel's starring role. I hope someday soon to give a talk on her because she was an extraordinary talent. But today we'll stick to the subject at hand, Chaplin. Setting him apart from everyone else we see in this film is his drunkenness. When Chaplin came to the States, he was a member of Fred Karno's comedy troupe, which had been very successful performing sketches in the music halls of their native England. They were a hit on tour here as well, not least because of Chaplin's eye-catching turn as a drunk who causes havoc. And throughout his film career, he would return to playing someone who's inebriated. One of his last feature films was Limelight, completed in 1952 when he was 63 years old. And in his first scene, he's returning to his room in a boarding house and he's drunk. Now, in the footage we just saw, the character Chaplin plays is someone who's interfering and aggressive. He's a pest. And pestiness tended to define his character in his films at Keystone. In the next comedy he made there, the tramp's intrusiveness is the whole joke. He keeps wandering in front of a newsreel camera, checking it out as they're trying to film a race held for kids in go-karts. It was only after he had lived with his character for a while and had moved along to other studios where he could control his work more and develop the personality of the that Chaplin understood he was more successful playing defense rather than offense. As an underdog, the audience's sympathy was totally with him. But to my mind, what really distinguishes Chaplin in this short comedy is his method of operation, which is to take his time. You've seen him when he's wandered into Chester Conklin's hotel room in pursuit of Mabel Normand. He does almost nothing in there. What's funny is that he's there at all. And the less he does, the more he's just there, the funnier it becomes. And Chaplin knew that. Such an approach, however, went against the grain at Keystone, where activity tended toward the frenetic. Uh the studio's directors, Henry Lehrman, George Nichols, Mabel Normand, uh Mack Sennett, would typically urge Chaplin to run around more and act and react more quickly, which he resisted. And so confrontations ensued until Sennett, the head of Keystone, who had signed Chaplin to a one-year contract, finally agreed to let Chaplin direct himself. Uh that began about 3 months after Chaplin started performing in movies. At Keystone, the situation was the comedy, the strange predicament in which Mabel finds herself. For Chaplin, the character was the comedy. And he needed time in which the audience could come to appreciate who the is. That appreciation snowballed quickly. The reason Chaplin got the nod to direct himself was because he had made an immediate hit with the public. He became so popular, in fact, uh that by 1915, just 1 year after he had started making films at Keystone, where he was paid $175 per week, the Essanay studio offered Chaplin a salary of $1,250 per week plus a bonus of $10,000 just for signing a contract with them. He had appeared in some three dozen short films during his year at Keystone, as well as one feature. At Essanay, Chaplin would make 14 shorts over the next 18 months. And by mid-1916, at the end of his Essanay contract, he was what we would now call a superstar. Here's how Peter Haining described it in his book The Legend of Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin had become world-famous, the center of a remarkable craze on both sides of the Atlantic. The Little figure was to be found in all manner of books and magazines, in cartoons and comic strips, on postcards, and in advertising. Toys and statuettes were produced in his likeness, as were cups, mugs, vases, and even candles. People began to imitate his clothes, his walk, and his mustache. Popular songs were written about him, such as The Chaplin Strut, The Chaplin Waddle, and Those Charlie Chaplin Feet. And he was widely impersonated on the stage and screen. After Chaplin finished his contract at Essanay, he traveled to New York City by train, and everywhere it stopped, Amarillo, Texas, Kansas City, Chicago, huge crowds of people swarmed the train hoping to catch a glimpse of him. Before arriving in New York, the chief of police telegrammed him and asked him not to get out at Grand Central Station because the crowds there already were too enormous. Chaplin had to disembark at 125th Street in Manhattan and take a limo to his hotel. What had happened? Well, a lot. You can see a constellation of themes in that opening scene from Chaplin's 1916 two-reeler, uh his last for Essanay, called Police. There's homelessness, hunger, a hostile predatory environment. Of course, many a rump still gets kicked just as they had at Keystone. But now Chaplin has the space he needs to react with some personality, uh to be perplexed or shed tears or become enraged. He has time in which he can cogitate and process the strange predicaments that unfold around him. The audience is on his side now as he struggles against deprivation, injustice, assault, the cruel, cruel world. After Essanay, uh Chaplin moved on to the Mutual studio in 1916 and the gold just inundated him. He became the highest-paid motion picture star in the world getting $670,000 to make 12 two-reel comedies, which took him about a year and a half. At Mutual, he created some of his greatest work, a dozen short masterpieces in which he defined not just who the was, but how the was funny. The how of it was pretty straightforward. Uh Chaplin would have a set built and then improvise gags and situations on it. None of these films ever had a script, which is why over the years he would need more and more time to make a film because he had to figure out something funny. In other words, something that was odd but logical. And if he filmed something but it just wasn't funny enough, he would discard it and start over. As for who the was, the answer became a person of boundless possibilities. Despite whatever slip-ups or confusions or messes he may generate, the ultimately proves himself to be more capable than anyone around him. As a fireman, he rescues the heroine. As a policeman, he conquers the most terrifying brute on the street. Give him a pair of roller skates and he's Nijinsky on wheels. Put him to work in a pawn shop, a movie set, a department store, and he resolves every dilemma that's thrown at him. The French film critic, Andre Bazin, summed it up, writing in the late 1940s, "He is never at a loss in any situation. There is a solution for everything, even though the world, and especially things in it, rather than the people, is not made for him." What the world does offer him is an endless plasticity. Uh there's a wonderful throwaway gag in behind the screen when the pies start to fly. The overturns a table and ducks behind it for protection. Then he grabs two empty bottles by their necks and looks through them like they're binoculars, surveying the pastry battlefield. If Edna Purviance is making biscuits and her dough is like lead, uh the Tramp'll use them as weights to exercise with. In The Gold Rush, the is trapped in a snowbound cabin and starving. So, he boils and eats his own shoe. But the laces become spaghetti to be twirled on a fork, and the nails in the sole of the shoe, bones to be sucked at and savored. The virtuoso example of this technique, which has been called the transposition of objects, takes place in a two-reeler he made while at Mutual called The Pawn Shop. Just as the object can become anything, depending on how it's handled, so too the can become anything. In that one short scene, we see him go from a pawnbroker to a doctor examining a patient, a carpenter working a hand drill, a cook with a can of tuna, a jeweler examining a ring with the mouthpiece of a telephone substituting for a loop, a mechanic with oil can, pliers, hammer, a tailor measuring cloth and snipping it to size, an exterminator confronting crawling clock innards, and finally a bouncer dispatching a rowdy patron. Yes, the plasticity of the material world extends to the as well. In a couple of his films, he actually plays dual roles. A night in the show, The Idle Class, The Great Dictator. More frequently, however, the is impersonating someone, mostly with great success. At Keystone, he passes himself as the Premier of Greenland, the Count de Beans, uh a dentist, a woman. At Essanay, he's mistaken for a prop man, pretends to be Count Chloride de Lime, and does another female impersonation. At Mutual, confusion arises because a robber looks just like him. The also presents himself as Count Broko, as Sir Cecil Seltzer, or he's an escaped convict pretending to be a gentleman guest at a swanky party. After leaving Mutual, Chaplin began working in his own studio, one built for him by First National. Uh there he made Shoulder Arms, in which he plays a World War I doughboy who impersonates a German officer. He also made The Pilgrim, where he's another escaped convict, this time pretending to be a clergyman. This theme would be raised to a high style in Chaplin's later features. In City Lights, the pretends to be a millionaire because he's been befriended by a real millionaire, but only when that millionaire is drunk does he recognize the When he's sober, he doesn't recall who Chaplin is. And of course, in Chaplin's later talkie, Monsieur Verdoux, he assumes an array of aliases, uh Varnay, Bonheur, Floray, depending on which wife he's planning to murder. Oh yes, there is a dark side uh to this plasticity of identity. In his book, The Silent Clowns, Walter Kerr located it. The secret of Chaplin as a character is that he can be anyone. That is his problem. The secret is a devastating one for the man who can, with a flick of a finger or the blink of an eyelash, instantly transform himself into absolutely anyone, is a man who must, in his heart, remain no one. To be able to play a role, to know the role as a role, is to see through it. To be able to play them all is to see through them all. But that leaves nothing, no way of life, no permanent commitment in which such a man can possibly believe. Just as Don Juan, loving everyone, can love no one, so Chaplin, impersonating everyone, can have no person. Sometimes the dark pain filling Chaplin's eyes is in excess of the situation at hand. It comes from the hopeless limitation of having no limitations. Now, there's also a side to the plasticity of objects. Yes, they can transpose into anything in his hands. But they can also become something else when he doesn't want them to. This is why the has to be a chameleon, because he has to function in a basically unstable environment. In The Gold Rush, he's prospecting in the frozen north, and when he leans on his cane and surveys his surroundings, the cane goes right through the snow, and he topples over. But this instability characterizes the everyday world as well. If the rests against the picket fence, that's the plank that gives way. If he places his elbow on a table, it goes into a cup of coffee. Here's a quintessential example of from his classic feature, City Lights. The wanders over to the window of an antiques gallery, and there pretends to examine the objet d'art, although his real interest is to gaze at the statue of a nude woman. From the fingers of his glove to the little guy on the elevator who suddenly becomes a big guy, nothing is stable, not even the pavement. City Lights was released in 1931 when everyone else in Hollywood had stopped making silent films. Chaplin took an enormous gamble uh making a film without talk. But the film was so brilliantly funny as well as deeply moving uh that it became one of his greatest financial successes and arguably his masterpiece. >> [clears throat] >> He had to make silent films in the 1930s because Chaplin was absolutely convinced that the could not speak. The role had to be played in pantomime. Years later, he wrote in his autobiography, "Although City Lights was a great triumph and had made more money than any talking picture at that time, I felt that to make another silent film would be giving myself a handicap. Also, I was obsessed by a depressing fear of being old-fashioned. Although a good silent film was more artistic, I had to admit that sound made characters more present. Occasionally, I mused over the possibility of making a sound film, but the thought sickened me. For I realized I would never achieve the excellence of my silent pictures. It would mean giving up the character entirely. Some people suggested that the might talk. This was unthinkable. For the first word he uttered would transform him into another person. Besides, the matrix out of which he was born was as mute as the rags he wore." And in 1936, Chaplin released his final comedy, again without dialogue, the exquisite Modern Times, which was also a big hit at the box office. The previous year, when he was immersed in the filming of Modern Times, Chaplin paid a visit to a great American writer who had long been residing in France and who had returned to her homeland to give a lecture tour. Her name was Gertrude Stein. And in her account of her American visit, an amazing book she called everybody's autobiography, perhaps hoping to recreate the success of her 1933 book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she told us in three sentences what Chaplin told her about the problems of working with dialogue. Of course I like Charlie Chaplin. He is a gentle person like any Spanish Gypsy bull fighter. He is very like my favorite one, Gallo, who could not kill a bull, but he could make him move better than anyone ever could, and he himself, not having any grace in person, could move one as no one else ever did, and Charlie Chaplin was like Gallo. Gypsies are intelligent. I do not think Charlie Chaplin is one. Perhaps not, but he might have been. Anyway, we naturally talked about the cinema, and he explained something. He said naturally it was disappointing. He had known the silent films, and in that they could do something that the theater had not done. They could change the rhythm. But if you had a voice accompanying, naturally after that, you could never change the rhythm. You were always held by the rhythm that the voice gave them. By the way, Stein clocked him. Uh recent scholarship has revealed that there is Romany blood in Chaplin's family on his mother's side. And Chaplin had shared with Gertrude Stein his real dilemma in making films after the advent of talking pictures, the rigidity of rhythm, of tempo, imposed by the human voice. And to this very day, whenever a film needs to alter its tempo, to speed up its rhythm, people have to stop talking. Look at the greatest uh high-velocity, rapid-fire editing scenes in sound films, the Battle of Shrewsbury in Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight, or the climax of Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, the dialogue has to cease in order for these films to make that great rhythmic leap. Whereas a silent film can kick into high gear on a dime, whether it's a one-reeler from Keystone or a monumental drama such as D.W. Griffith's Intolerance or Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Napoleon or Abel Gance's Excuse me, Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin or Abel Gance's Napoleon. A Chaplin's problem was talking, not sound. Both City Lights and Modern Times have some of their funniest moments thanks to the soundtrack. The is boxing in a prize fight in City Lights and his neck gets entangled in the string that's used to ring the gong and signal the end of the round. So, he gets hit and goes down, which causes the gong to ring and obliges his opponent to retreat to his own corner rather than to go in for the kill. But as the staggers to his corner, his neck pulls the string, the gong rings again, and the round resumes. He gets hit, goes down, the gong rings, you get the idea. Um or in Modern Times, a minister and his frosty wife are visiting a prison where the is incarcerated. And Chaplin is left alone with the wife in the warden's office where the two of them endure the embarrassment of their rumbling stomachs punctuating the silence. In his two feature films of the 1930s, uh Chaplin also had the advantage of turning off the sound when he needed to. Consider the most mind-blowing moment in Modern Times. That exceptional gag would never work in a talkie. What person would not hear an angry workers' march coming up right behind them? In a silent film, it works perfectly. Earlier, I referenced Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux, released in 1947, and I have to say at least a few words about it now because it is quite simply one of the greatest of all American films. He subtitled the film a comedy of murders, and it is precisely that, the blackest of black comedies, perhaps the funniest, too, in which an amiable Frenchman goes around assuming different identities and marrying women whom he murders for their money. It is also the bitterest and most despairing of black comedies, a film that could only have been made in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Only someone who had seen the newsreel footage of Auschwitz and Hiroshima could have made this film. Just look at how we first meet the character of Monsieur Henri Verdoux, here under the assumed name of Monsieur Varnay. It's all there, isn't it? Ooh la la, don't step on a caterpillar while his latest victim is turning into ash and black smoke just over his shoulder. There's the zone of interest in a nutshell, more than 75 years earlier. In fact, what Chaplin did was so incisive, arriving at the root of the problem, because we come to like Henri Verdoux. I was trying to think of any other American film prior to Monsieur Verdoux in which a serial killer is heinous and yet sympathetic and funny. Uh there have been comedies where comedians dealt with murderers, but it's the comedians who are sympathetic and funny, not the killer. The murderer is played for menace. The only earlier example I found is, of course, Arsenic and Old Lace, which was originally a play uh written by Joseph Kesselring. And when it premiered on Broadway in 1941, Chaplin was in the audience. The film of it was made that same year, but not released until 1944. Uh the director was Frank Capra. How remarkable uh that the two American filmmakers, um arguably the ones most beloved of for their humanity, uh both saw the humor in serial murder. Two men who were not simply aware of their shadow, but who were capable of laughing at it. Two men who were also immigrants, Chaplin coming from England and Capra from Sicily. Don't forget that Chaplin and Capra were also the only two non-Jewish filmmakers who, prior to the start of World War I, were denouncing fascism. Chaplin tackling its European form in The Great Dictator, and Capra denouncing its American manifestation in Meet John Doe. It was another anti-fascist filmmaker, Orson Welles, who gave Chaplin the idea to make Monsieur Verdoux. Welles had proposed to write and direct a film in which Chaplin would star about the French serial killer Henri Landru, who murdered upwards of 10 women in the years after World War I. But Chaplin, resisting the idea of having anyone else direct him, bought the property from Welles and wrote his own script. Now, the never kills anybody. But the reason Chaplin was able to play a serial killer so well was because he was not the He contained the but he was not the The British writer Thomas Burke put his finger on the difference after getting to know Chaplin in the early 1920s. Your ordinary actor is always an actor on and off. But as I walked and talked with Chaplin, I found myself trying vainly to connect him by some gesture or attitude with the world-famous Charlie. There was no trace of it. When a little later I saw one of his films, I again tried to see through the makeup the Chaplin I had met, and again I failed. The pathetic, fragile clown of the films is purely a studio creation, having little in common with its creator. For Chaplin is not a funny man. He is a great actor of comic parts. >> [snorts] >> Every second of his pictures is acted. And when he is not acting, he casts off Charlie, drops the mask of the world's fool, and his queer glamorous personality is released again. In the early 1960s, looking back over his work in film when he wrote his autobiography, Chaplin insisted that his time at Mutual from 1916 to 1917 quote was the happiest period of my career. I was light and unencumbered, 27 years old, with fabulous prospects and a friendly glamorous world before me. Within a short time I would be a millionaire. It all seemed slightly mad. I could never take it for granted. The reason he couldn't take it for granted was because his childhood had been appalling. Sigmund Freud made a very interesting comment about Chaplin in 1931. He is undoubtedly a great artist. Uh certainly he always portrays one and the same figure. Only the weekly poor, helpless, clumsy youngster for whom, however, things turn out well in the end. Now, do you think that for this role he has forgotten about his own ego? On the contrary, he always plays only himself as he was in his early dismal youth. He cannot get away from those impressions, and to this day he obtains for himself the compensation for the frustrations and humiliations of that past period of his life. When Chaplin's parents uh or rather they split up in 1892, they were both musical performers. Chaplin was about 3 years old at the time. His father drank himself to death. His mother suffered with mental instability and was repeatedly into institutionalized. At age 7, young Charlie was taken away to a workhouse, and from there to a home for children without families. By the age of nine, he was performing in theaters and music halls and he kept at it despite awful periods of deprivation, hunger, and poverty until at age 16, he signed on with Fred Karno's celebrated comic troupe. And like a lot of people who endured awful childhoods, a Chaplin as an adult making films in the years of World War I had little patience for sentimentality about children. Look at this image from one of his last short Keystone, His Trysting Place. >> [laughter] >> Mabel Normand playing Chaplin's wife is horrified by the way he handles their infant son. When I saw that moment in Chaplin's film, I realized that there was an image of another comedian doing something comparable. At first, I couldn't place it who it was. Then it finally came to me. Handling a young child like their baggage instead of a human being came naturally to W.C. Fields, who like Chaplin had also suffered a hard and painful childhood. In fact, the character Chaplin played at Keystone had distinct similarities to Fields' personality, a disdain for the others around him and their niceties, a fondness for alcohol, a disinterest in observing the constraints of the law. Their styles of comedy were very different, of course, but their characters had a lot in common, including an aversion to children. Both comedians were perfectly willing to appear on screen with bratty, ill-behaved kids, thereby justifying or at least removing some of the sting in their antipathy toward youngsters. In Chaplin's The Pilgrim and Fields' early talkie The Old Fashioned Way, both comedians avenged the abuses heaped upon them by an obnoxious little boy by giving him a kick once nobody else is around. In Chaplin's classic mutual two-reeler Easy Street, there's a scene where the now a police officer, is taken by heroine Edna Purviance to visit a needy slum family. They bring groceries for them because the family has about a dozen small toddlers ensconced in wash tubs and laundry baskets around the living room. Chaplin takes a box of cereal and gives the food to the children by scattering handfuls of it at them as if they were chickens. He later explained, "I did that because I despise them. I don't like children." He made that comment in 1930, speaking to the great Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, who was then visiting the States. That's the two of them on the tennis court together. Notice the transposition of objects with the pair strumming their tennis rackets like guitars or balalaikas. Eisenstein was convinced that the essence of Chaplin's genius lay in his ability to retain the perspective of a child, and he was not flummoxed at all when Chaplin admitted his hostility toward children. Reflecting on it in 1940, Eisenstein wrote, "But who normally does not like children? Only children themselves." Eisenstein also pointed out, "And that is the secret of Chaplin, and that is his greatness. To see things most terrible, most pitiful, most tragic through the eyes of a laughing child. To see the images of these things spontaneously and suddenly, outside their moral ethical significance, outside valuation, and outside judgment and condemnation. To see them as a child sees them through a burst of laughter. In that, Chaplin is outstanding, inimitable, and unique. The The immediacy of his look gives birth to a comic perception. The ability to see as a child is inherent in Chaplin personally. To see the world thus and have the courage to show it thus on the screen is the attribute of genius alone. Though incidentally, he doesn't even need courage. He can only see it that way and no other. How do we know this is true? Well, how would a child, ignorant of politics, incapable of conceptualizing fascism and bigotry and imperialism, how would that child react if shown a newsreel of a little man with a funny mustache wearing a military style uniform and ranting and screaming hysterically in an incomprehensible language? In his private life, Chaplin raised 10 children, which was almost as many as he tried to feed in Easy Street. Two boys with his second wife Lita Grey and eight kids, five girls and three boys, with his fourth and final wife Oona O'Neill, a daughter of the great American playwright Eugene O'Neill. And Chaplin made sure to include several of his children in his later films. I'd like you also to consider a story that sheds more light on Chaplin's personal attitude toward children. The story is 100% true and is not well known. It appears in the autobiography of someone who as a child had an encounter with Chaplin outside of the realm of filmmaking. That person was maybe 10 or 11 years old at the time. This would be about 1916-1917. He suffered then from poor health. In fact, was bedridden and he and his mother had just arrived in California to spare him any exposure to a brutal winter. Here's how he recalled it many years later. We stayed at the Alexandria Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. There were no good hotels out in Hollywood then, and the Alexandria was where people from the motion picture colony congregated. One day the telephone rang. My mother talked for a few minutes, put down the phone, and said excitedly, "John, I have a wonderful surprise for you." What? That was Charlie Chaplin. He heard there was a sick boy in the hotel, and he's coming up to see you. A few minutes later, there was a knock at the door. Mother opened it, and Chaplin came in. My heart was pounding. I couldn't contain my excitement. No one today holds a position in a child's world even remotely comparable to the one Charlie Chaplin held then. He was more than a picture star. He was a myth incarnate. Nobody thought of him as a real being. Yet here he was, flesh and blood, standing before me. After shaking hands with me, Chaplin turned to Mother and said, "My dear, you must have something to do, some shopping perhaps. You go on out. Take as long as you like. I'll stay with John." She was gone for more than an hour, and it was an enchanted hour for me. To see Charlie Chaplin on the screen was a joy, but to see him in person, to be an audience of one for my idol, was beyond words wonderful. He was a trainer in a sideshow performing with invisible fleas. He folded a handkerchief and did a little puppet show. Then we talked. I asked how they made everything go slow in movies, and he explained the principle of slow motion to me. I asked how somebody could jump off a diving board and before hitting the water reverse and come back up. He told me how that was done. His explanation was simple and clear, and I understood perfectly. It seemed as though only a few minutes had passed before I heard the sound of Mother's key in the lock. I didn't see Chaplin again until I came to California years later to work in pictures. We were reintroduced in David Selznick's house, but some reticence kept me from reminding him of our previous meeting. One night there was a party at the French Consulate. Charlie, Oona, and I were by ourselves for a moment in a corner of a room. It was probably the good champagne that prompted me to speak about our first meeting. Charlie, do you recall coming to see a little sick boy in the Alexandria Hotel? He stiffened, gave me a strange look, and then abruptly turned and hailed someone across the room. It was a mystifying reaction. It was as though he was ashamed of my mentioning a good deed. I saw Charlie often after that, but there was no reference to this subject again, ever. In 1965, I happened to be at the Shepperton Studios in London where Charlie was making A Countess from Hong Kong. The cast and crew were having a party to celebrate his 76th birthday, and I joined them on the set. Charlie rushed over and embraced me with tears in his eyes. It was the only time I ever saw him emotionally demonstrative. Here they are at Shepperton in 1965. Yes, that's the great American director and actor and script writer John Huston talking to Charlie Chaplin at Chaplin's birthday party. By the way, Chaplin Huston was filming The Bible when that picture was taken, and he had been very keen to have Chaplin play Noah. According to Huston, he was tempted and toyed with the idea for some weeks. I thought we had him, but he finally said no, he couldn't conceive of being in someone else's picture. So, Huston played the role himself. All right, now let's face facts. There's no way that encounter in the Alexandria Hotel in the mid-teens between John Huston and Charlie Chaplin was the only time Chaplin had spontaneously given himself over to a scared and vulnerable child who was a stranger to him. And Chaplin's reaction some 30 years later when reminded of his openness and kindness reveals why we don't know more about similar events in Chaplin's life throughout the years. So, there's a contradiction working in the man. A personal reluctance to deal with children. Largely due I would suggest to his unwillingness to be reminded of his own desperate and sorrow-filled childhood. And at the same time an impulse to bring healing to that tragedy. I mentioned earlier how Chaplin first made a hit by playing a troublesome drunk for Fred Karno's troop. A role he would reiterate many times in his film career. Well, this was also his way of working out his relationship with his abandoning alcoholic father. His way both to ridicule the foolish old drunkard and to forgive his father, too. By embodying those failings himself. Which is the way most of us wind up forgiving uh the failings of our parents. Only Chaplin had the luxury of doing so in pretense on the stage and on the screen rather than suffering with those failures in his own personal life. Chaplin was also able to realize his love for his mother and compensate her for how she had struggled despite poverty and her own severe limitations to care for her children as best she could. Upon achieving success in the States, he brought her here to live the rest of her life in comfort and security. To work through his own issues of abandonment and loss, Chaplin made his first feature film in 1921 while at First National. It was called The Kid. And the story revolves around a baby boy abandoned by an unwed mother and discovered by the who raises the child as his own. Adding to the poignancy and wish fulfillment of The Kid is the fact that Chaplin had just become a father for the first time. This was with his first wife, Mildred Harris. But the infant died on July 10, 1919, 3 days after he was born. Three weeks later, Chaplin started filming The Kid. And it took him over a year to complete it, finalizing it at the end of 1920. The 5-year-old Jackie Coogan who played the boy and gave a brilliant performance becoming a big star in silent films. The Kid begins with an opening title that tells us it is a picture with a smile and perhaps a tear. Well, there's no perhaps about it. I want you to see the film's most heart-rending moment when orphan asylum officials take the child away from the Jumping into the film like this severely undercuts the film's the scene's emotional impact, which is visceral in the full film because you've had time to know and love these characters and to laugh your head off, too. But for our purposes here, isolating this moment makes it easier to consider the technique at work. >> What does Gloria Swanson say about silent film acting? In Billy Wilder's classic Sunset Boulevard, we didn't need dialogue, we had faces. >> And what face can compare to Chaplin's at that moment when he hears the kid from the back of the pickup truck on the street screaming and begging for him while the is being physically restrained by a policeman and the asylum official. I've mentioned Walter Kerr's reference to what he called the dark pain that sometimes fills the Tramp's eyes in Chaplin's films. Well, it's devastating at this moment and we're shown it twice. Then the explodes and dashes to the rooftops. He's been chased by cops since his days at Keystone, but never does he dispatch a cop as ruthlessly as here. And when the is reunited with the boy, the love they feel for each other cascades off the screen as they embrace and kiss. The profound depth of that image is rooted not simply in the film's narrative of guardian and child. What we're witnessing right before our eyes is the reintegration of Chaplin's own psyche. He is rescuing himself from the nightmare of workhouses and orphanages into which he had been abandoned as a child in the 1890s. A lecture with a smile and perhaps a tear. I keep in mind that uh throughout his career from the teens to the 1960s, uh Chaplin's method of directing actors was to act out for them exactly how he wanted them to behave on screen. So, when that child becomes hysterical, Chaplin was performing those same emotions with him just off camera. I want to add here that Chaplin, the professed child hater, was unfailingly kind to Coogan and protective of him throughout the lengthy filming of The Kid. Look at this photo of the two of them on the set together. >> [snorts] >> There's only one word to describe that child's face, adoration. The same way that John Huston at the age of 10 gazed at Chaplin on the afternoon together in the Alexandria Hotel just a few years before the making of The Kid. And [snorts] that's the way we still look at Charlie Chaplin today, more than a century later. I'd like to close by reading to you a short poem that is attributed to Chaplin. We're told it was read by him on the occasion of his 70th birthday. It's called as I began to love myself. As I began to love myself, I found that anguish and emotional suffering are only warning signs that I was living against my own truth. Today, I know this is authenticity. As I began to love myself, I understood how much it can offend somebody as I tried to force my desires on this person, even though I knew the time was not right and the person was not ready for it, and even though this person was me. Today, I call it respect. As I began to love myself, I stopped craving for a different life and I could see that everything that surrounded me was inviting me to grow. Today, I call it maturity. As I began to love myself, I understood that at any circumstance, I am in the right place at the right time and everything happens at the exactly right moment. So, I could be calm. Today, I call it self-confidence. As I began to love myself, I quit stealing my own time and I stopped designing huge projects for the future. >> [snorts] >> Today, I only do what brings me joy and happiness, things I love to do and that make my heart cheer, and I do them in my own way and in my own rhythm. Today, I call it simplicity. As I began to love myself, I freed myself of anything that is no good for my health, food, people, things, situations, and everything that drew me down and away from myself. At first, I called this attitude a healthy egoism. Today, I know it is love of oneself. As I began to love myself, I quit trying to be always right, and ever since I was wrong less of the time. Today I discovered that is modesty. As I began to love myself, I refused to go on living in the past and worry about the future. Now I only live for the moment where everything is happening. Today I live each day day by day, and I call it fulfillment. As I began to love myself, I recognized that my mind can disturb me and it can make me sick. But as I connected it to my heart, my mind became a valuable ally. Today I call this connection wisdom of the heart. We no longer need to fear arguments, confrontations, or any kind of problems with ourselves or others. Even stars collide, and out of their crashing new worlds are born. Today I know that is life. Thank you, friends. Thank you. >> [applause] >> You've been very patient. Thank you. >> [applause]