A Little Tramp in modern times
Charlie Chaplin's films remain relevant and continue
to delight audiences today
BY JOHN MACKIE
Charlie
Chaplin's heyday was in the 1920s and '30S, and many of his biggest movies were
made during the silent era. But he remains one of the greatest movie stars of
all time, an instantly recognizable figure whose movies still play regularly on
TV.
Nothing
compares with seeing them on the big screen, though, and Pacific Cinematheque
is staging a major retrospective of his work beginning Thursday, through Feb.
11, in new 35-mm prints from Europe .
"They're
beautiful, pristine, brand-new prints," says Jim Sinclair of Pacific
Cinematheque.
"It's
like seeing the films for the first time. Seeing them the way they were meant
to be seen, on the big screen, in excellent copies."
The 17-film
retrospective brings together almost every feature Chaplin directed, from
classics like The Gold Rush, Modern Times and The Great Dictator to
lesser-known works like A Woman of Paris, Payday and Limelight.
The big
question is how many people will come out to see them, particularly the silent
movies.
"Anyone
who tries to show black and white films to young people will know the reaction:
`Oh, what's this, black and white?' " says Sinclair.
"It's
going to be curious, we'll see [how big the audience is]. These are great
films, and he's a great physical comedian. But they're also heart-wrenching and
poignant, smart, moving, funny films. So we hope they will find an
audience."
They have
been doing just that since last summer, when the retrospective made its North
American debut in Los Angeles .
"It's
amazing, how Chaplin translates," says Sarah Finklea of Janus Films, the
North American distributor. "I've had a lot of programmers say they were
watching it with small kids and the kids were just losing it, watching Chaplin.
They'd forgotten how much it does appeal to young children."
Janus
specializes in classic movies; it's an associated company to the Criterion
Collection, which does deluxe DVD reissues. Finklea says that Chaplin's films
are "absolute perennials."
"I
don't think these films ever died," says Finklea, who is a distant
relative of the late dancer-actress Cyd Charisse (whose birth name was Tula
Ellice Finklea).
"But I
know [that with] some of the slightly earlier stuff, there hadn't been prints
around since maybe the '8os. I don't even know when the last time a wide
retrospective was done. But there's always demand within certain theatres, and
we like keeping the library alive."
Besides
being a great actor and director, Charlie Chaplin was a savvy business-man. He
co-founded United Artists pictures, owned the copyrights to his work, and kept
prints.
Chaplin
died in 1977 and his legacy is ' handled by the Chaplin estate in Paris , which has been working with the Cineteca of the
Comune di Bologna in Italy
on restorations of his catalogue. The new 35-mm prints came from this
arrangement.
Chaplin was
a comedic genius who produced some of the most famous moments in movie history,
such as the part of Modern Times in which Chaplin's Little Tramp is caught in
the giant gears on an industrial assembly line, and the scene in which the
starving Chaplin eats his shoe in The Gold Rush.
But when
she's asked for her favourite Chaplin film, Finklea picks a relatively obscure
one.
"Mine
is one of the shorts, The Idle Class," she says. "I love that one.
Of the
features I'd have to say The Circus, I think it's hilarious.
"The
Idle Class is one of the Tramp shorts. It's a film [in which] he also plays an
aristocratic drunk, so he has two parts in the same film. It's a mistaken
identity film, he plays a rich alcoholic husband at this sort of country club
estate. The Little Tramp arrives at the country club to take the air, and play
golf with some clubs he ' picked up somewhere. At some point the drunk's wife
gets the two of them mixed up at a costume party.
At a glance
When: Thursday, through Friday, Feb. 11
Where: Pacific Cinematheque, 1131 Howe
Tickets: $10.50 single bill; $12.50 double bill
Information: http://www.cinematheque.bc.ca/chaplin
SCREENING SCHEDULE
The Gold Rush, Payday: Thursday-Sunday
The Circus, The Idle Class: Thursday-Saturday
The Kid, A Day's Pleasure: Saturday, Sunday
A Woman of Paris, Sunnyside: Sunday-Thursday
A Dog's Life, Shoulder Arms, The Pilgrim: Thursday, Jan.
27-Saturday, Jan. 29:
City Lights: Friday Jan. 28-Sunday Jan. 30, Tuesday Feb. 1
Modern Times: Friday Jan. 28-Sunday Jan. 30
The Great Dictator: Monday, Jan. 30, Tuesday Jan. 31, Sunday, Feb.
6:
A King in New York
Limelight: Monday, Feb. 7, Thursday, Feb. 10, Friday, Feb. 11
Monsieur Verdoux: Monday, Feb. 7, Thursday, Feb. 10, Friday, Feb.
11
"The
Circus is really great. Again it's a Little Tramp story. The Little Tramp finds
a job working as a comedy act in the circus. He doesn't know he's funny: he is
mistaken as a pickpocket and gets chased through an actual performance. The
crowd is not laughing at the actual clowns, but as soon as he appears running
from the police, the crowd loses it. So he gets hired on, falls in love with a
tightrope artist, and hilarity ensues."
Both are in
the retrospective, along with his lesser-known talkies like Limelight (a sad,
beautiful film about an aging vaudeville star in which Chaplin makes his only
onscreen appearance with another silent movie icon, Buster Keaton), and
Monsieur Verdoux, where he plays a ladykiller, literally.
"They're
very truck in their perspective," says Cinematheque's Sinclair.
"Monsieur Verdoux kind of freaked people out, with Chaplin playing a
serial killer.'
His most
acclaimed talkie is The Great Dictator, a satire of Adolf Hitler that' Chaplin
made almost two years before the United States went to war with Germany;
shooting started in September 1939, the same month Germany invaded Poland.
The Great
Dictator maybe the funniest serious movie ever made (or vice-versa). Chaplin's
cinematic fuehrer is dubbed the Phooey, Hitler becomes Adenoid Hynkel, Nazi
propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels is renamed Garbitsch, and Luftwaffe head
Hermann Goering becomes Field Marshal Herring.
Chaplin mocks Hitler's plans for world domination by having
Hynkel play with a balloon done up like the world; at one point, he's lying on
his desk and sends it skyward with a bump from his bum. But when Hynkel tries
to squeeze the world too tight, it explodes.
"It is amazing," Sinclair says. "[But]
Chaplin did say later if he had known about the enormity of Hitler's crimes he
wouldn't have ridiculed him in the same way, or made a funny movie about
him."
jmackie@vancouversun.com
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