In this Studies article from 1960, author Neil Hurley delves into what he considers the ‘social philosophy’ of renowned Golden Age actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin.
Discussing Chaplin’s impoverished beginnings, Hurley projects the lifelong impact this poverty held on Chaplin through the lens of the commentary contained within his films. From Chaplin’s ‘little tramp’ character to The Great Dictator, Hurley outlines how Chaplin made cinema both for and about those who suffered most in the society of the early 20th century, on both sides of the Atlantic.
Neil Hurley, ‘The Social Philosophy of Charlie Chaplin’, Studies: An Irish Review, Vol. 49, No. 195 (Autumn, 1960), 313 – 320. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30099234
…If any one person has dominated the film industry by the scope of his creative genius, it has been Chaplin. He has been among the first in the movie world to realize the power of the screen as an instrument for education, art, and entertainment. Where others have sought by means of the word, spoken or written, to promote social justice and a better understanding of personal human dignity, Chaplin succeeded in spreading his social gospel by his pantomime…Since each Chaplin picture is uniquely the product of his genius and since Chaplin is a man of pronounced views, his following is sharply divided. Those who agree with him idolize him; those who disagree with him, loathe him. In France he is universally loved; in the U.S.A. he is definitely a persona non grata.
…We cannot fully understand Chaplin and his social views of life unless we take cognizance of his sensitive and temperamental character, his early life and its role in shaping his social consciousness, his Jewish heritage and its influence on his almost messianic mission, his artistic virtuosity and his ability to convey universal truths and reactions by common everyday scenes from life…The psychological proverb that the child is father to the man is notably discernible in the career of Chaplin…Born in the poverty-stricken Kennington district in London in 1888, Chaplin learned to eat of the bitter fruit of deprivation and hardship, a taste which never left him. According to his own confession no amount of prosperity would ever efface the boyhood fear he had of the impending hunger each new dawn brought.
He said: ‘I am like a man who is ever haunted by a spirit, the spirit of poverty, the spirit of privation’. Chaplin made his theatrical debut at the age of six. The depressing milieu, so characteristic of a Dickens novel, had certain advantages for the budding mimic…Everywhere were the haves and the have-nots to be seen and the impressionable young Chaplin smouldered with a longing for protest and expression. There is little doubt but that these many years with Dame Poverty were to hold the future in fee.
…The keen competition he faced, the need to win customer approval in an allotted eight minute skit, the threat of hunger which failure brought, all cooperated to bring Chaplin’s talents to rapid bloom. Chaplin’s themes were always human themes with profound implications. He sensed that comedy is, in some ways, more subtle than drama in that it seeks to touch the depth of the human spirit and not merely that emotion we ordinarily associate with the human heart. He grasped Henri Bergson’s principle that le rire s’adresse a l’intelligence pure. Avoiding banalities and low comedy, Chaplin developed a visual comedy rooted in facial expressions, human reactions and situational poses…With the gift of pantomime Chaplin was to re-capture the pristine unity of pre-Babel times: ‘And the earth was of one tongue, and of the same speech’ (Genesis, 11: 1).
…To mention Chaplin’s name is to bring to mind the character he made famous – the comic tramp who satirized pre-World War I London by the very clothes he wore: the under-sized derby, the shoes with up-turned toes, the cane, cravat, and the rose in the lapel. The character alone exuded pathos and humour; for more than twenty years Charlie moved audiences to tears and to laughter…However beneath the flow of comic action in the Chaplin films of the silent screen ran a philosophy and a message. Charlie symbolized the man on the margin of society, the man society needed but always overlooked, the ‘underdog’, the déraciné. Pretty girls reject Charlie, policemen pursue him, polite society scorns him. Millions the world over not only were attracted by this gauche character but they felt themselves identified with him.
…But the message throughout all of Chaplin’s silent films is one of hope. It is the Shakespearean truth that there is a divinity which shapes our ends rough – hew them how we will. No matter how often society dashes the ‘little tramp’s’ hopes to pieces, he shrugs his shoulders resignedly and wanders off to begin life anew. Some have seen in Charlie a symbol of the wandering Jew, condemned to travel from place to place without taking root anywhere. Certainly the lesson of detachment from society and individual dignity was forcibly brought home by Chaplin in pictures such as The Kid, The Circus, The Gold Rush, City Lights. From the first appearance of the whimsical vagabond in 1914 it was obvious that Charlie the tramp was a witness, albeit a silent one. His mute appeal attacked humanity and society at those points where it seemed most secure, namely in its pride and pomp. Like a child pricking a toy balloon, Charlie deflated the reasonable world about him, taking immense pleasure in its collapse.
…Though never taking himself or society seriously, the ‘little tramp’ of Chaplin’s silent period (1914-1932) is a highly sensitive creature whose wounded feelings are capable of evoking great pity. Nor does the movie-goer ever cease admiring the dignified manner in which he bears life’s bruises. He showed in unforgettable scenes that the dignity of the ‘common man’ was greater than wealth, social status, industrial society or any collectivism. With boundless powers of recovery he meets the adversities which society places in his path in order to ‘cabin and confine’ him within its arbitrary rules of etiquette and its superficial, if not hypocritical, posturings. Chaplin used his miming powers to great effect; he could distil in his face all the pain and inconsiderateness of man’s inhumanity to man. Witness the recognition scene in City Lights where the flower girl, her sight now restored, discovers by her sensitive sense of touch that the miserable tramp before her is the benefactor whom she took earlier to be a millionaire. So poignant is the distress on Charlie’s countenance at being discovered that the scene becomes intolerable to the point of pain.
In Charlie bedrock humanity found a spokesman and the ‘underdog’ an advocate who could plead his cause eloquently. The best evidence of how successful Chaplin wedded the one and the many (i.e. by concentrating the universal aspirations and emotions of mankind in one concrete character) was the names which cropped up in each nation for the pathetic nomad. The French, Italians and Spaniards baptized him anew: Charlot, Carlino, Carlos and Carlitos. When one considers the times in which Chaplin’s celluloid puppet performed before the world, the universal appeal of Charlie becomes understandable. The generations of the World War I period felt the discipline of conscription and military regimentation; those of the ‘roaring twenties’ knew the giddiness of prosperity and the sharp social inequalities which attend the appearance of a nouveau riche class; the generation of the early thirties felt the pinch of world-wide depression and a few years later the uneasiness of the spread of totalitarian governments.
…It was not till The Great Dictator (1940) that Chaplin became more vigorous in his commentary on society to the point of adopting the role of an Old Testament prophet. In the period from 1914 to 1932 Chaplin contented himself rather with giving expression to the disappointments and fears of the ‘common man’ and providing him not only with cathartic release but with a message of hope. Thus for the World War I generation Chaplin produced Shoulder Arms, in which he played a buck private, a re-incarnation of Kipling’s Tommy Atkins or a latter day Private Hargrove. Millions recognized themselves and the truth which the film conveyed.
…When Chaplin allows his tramp the companionship of another person and the luxury of some affection, it is always that of one who has also been caught in the gears of the social machine. The attraction which the disenchanted of society find in one another is presented in the orphan’s gratitude in The Kid, in the role of the flower girl in City Lights, and that of Paulette Goddard in Modern Times. In these three pictures Charlie was the quintessence of disponsibilité. There were moments of Franciscan lyricism in these films in which the comic vagrant, freed from material ties, drifted effortlessly through life’s troubled waters. He was much like a schooner, all sail, no anchor and with Providence at the helm. If the hopeful chord is struck again and again, then it is due to the messianic character of Chaplin’s films…He surrenders everything to the enemy, save his personal dignity. Even his lack of speech added force to his witness.
(…)
The ‘little tramp’ always seemed to find a door in the walled-up cubicle of society. Over, under, around or through the set walls of convention which it had erected – the way did not matter, as long as Chaplin made his escape from social restrictions. And having once escaped he beckons the audience to follow him down the rosy dawn of tomorrow. The scene which most typifies the hope Charlie held out to people was the last one in Modern Times, where Charlie, hand-in-hand with Paulette Goddard, turns his back on mass-production society to disappear down the unending road which leads into the hopeful horizon of the future.
It is in Modern Times, The Great Dictator and Monsieur Verdoux that we see the prophetic quality of Chaplin and his rebellious nature at its apogee. Whereas in Modern Times the aesthetic and functional aspects of his art remain in delicate balance, the last two pictures of the trilogy give precedence to the functional. That is to say, that the message predominates over the art. In his anti-totalitarian The Great Dictator…Chaplin directs his message upstage and his art downstage when, at the end of the film, he puts aside his characterization to fling blunt questions directly at the audience. To appreciate the mordant nature of Monsieur Verdoux (1947), one must not lose sight of the stormy weather which Chaplin’s personal reputation was undergoing in the U.S.A.
Chaplin has ever been critical of American mores and folkways; his refusal to become a naturalized citizen despite over thirty years’ residence in America was due to his unwillingness to forego this privilege of criticism. Besides the unfavourable publicity his private life received, Chaplin’s Soviet sympathies were aired in a congressional investigation in 1940. The final estrangement of Chaplin from America came in 1947 when the State Department refused him a return visa upon the occasion of his visit to London for the premiere of Monsieur Verdoux. We cite these facts to help to explain the nihilism of Monsieur Verdoux, the most negative film Chaplin has produced to date.
In this picture Chaplin plays the part of a man who, forced out of work by an acquisitive, unfeeling social order, turns to supporting his family by marrying and successively murdering a number of rich widows. Monsieur Verdoux, is, at bottom, the little tramp come back in disguise to take revenge on those flighty women who would not have him, to take by violence what society in its callousness had denied him, to fight hypocrisy and cunning with its own arms. The tenor of the film is best grasped by Verdoux’s own remarks: ‘I shall see you all very soon’ (addressed to the court after receiving the death sentence); ‘one murder makes a villain, millions a hero’, ‘I am at peace with God, my conflict is with man’. One critic has aptly described the vitriolic tone of the film: ‘This time there is no long road to the horizon, no pretty girl for companion, no pathetic fatalism. It is a stark march to death.’…Living to-day in exile in Switzerland, Chaplin reminds us of another twentieth-century artist, James Joyce, whose credo aptly fits the career of Chaplin: ‘I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile and cunning’.
(…)
Photo: Still from The Great Dictator, Wikimedia Commons