Chaplin and The Circus

I first saw Charlie Chaplin’s movie “The Circus” at the Oak Street Cinema near the University of Minnesota campus in Minneapolis. I was visiting my parents before heading down to Florida to start rehearsals for my second season as a clown with the Ringling Brothers Blue Unit.  The Oak Street Cinema often presented silent film revivals, and I still recall the frosty nip in the air as I walked the 2 miles to the show by myself -- no one in my family wanted to see such foolishness, and the girl that I asked to go with me queried “Who’s Charlie Chaplin?” -- so I dropped her like a hot potato. I was thoroughly frozen by the time I got to the theater, but the Homeric gusts of laughter during the movie soon had me warm again. We Scandinavians love a good belly laugh.

Chaplin won one of the first Academy Awards ever given for this movie in 1928. He certainly deserved it -- for endurance if for nothing else! It took over a year to make the movie, and during that time he went through a devastating divorce, saw his studio burnt to the ground, had to buy a second big top when the first one blew away in a Santa Ana wind storm, and was threatened with studio foreclosure by the IRS. Only a clown genius keeps his sense of humor during such a string of catastrophes.

The movie opens with the whiteface clowns already underfoot and in the way as the equestrian star, played by Merna Kennedy, jumps through paper hoops to the audience’s applause. Anonymous, superfluous, and annoying -- these whitefaces are an exact fit for the doleful lines from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing.

In this movie the clowns truly ‘signify nothing.’ They are looked down upon by everyone from the propman to the ringmaster, and, indeed, never perform a single truly funny clown gag. About the best they can do is wear some decidedly odd hats -- such as one clown who sports a miniature washtub complete with laundry hanging on a line on top of his bald pate. Chaplin’s serendipitous appearance in the ring, when he is chased by first a cop and then a mule, is the only risible event in their act -- and they had nothing to do with it. It’s as if Chaplin were saying to his brethren in the slapstick fraternity “The harder we try for a laugh the more we have to depend on accident!”

I’ve always wondered about the major ‘ring gag’ the clowns have at the beginning of the movie. It’s just a gaudy little circular treadmill, on which the listless funny men leap on and fall off of. Later in the movie Chaplin and the clowns do a bit of the barbershop gag and the William Tell gag -- hoary staples of circus comedy. But that weird treadmill is like nothing I’ve ever seen in any clown alley anywhere. It must have sprung whole from Chaplin’s imagination -- although there are precursors to it in the cycloramas Mack Sennett often used for his Keystone comedies.

Although there are several major gags in the movie, such as Chaplin on the highwire and in the lion cage, for me the funniest and most satisfying moment of the film comes early on when the ringmaster is auditioning him for clown alley and says those cursed words that have ruined many a professional comic’s day -- “Go ahead and be funny.” Chaplin’s attempts, needless to say, are woefully inadequate. There is only one effective reply to people who say to a clown “Make me laugh” -- and that is to take out a pistol and shoot them.

“The Circus” takes a sweet and sour poke at that fleet-footed fame whose comings and goings remain such a mystery to showfolk. One moment Chaplin is the king of the clowns, demanding, and getting, preferential treatment and a big salary. The next, when his heart is broken in the traditional manner by a woman, he loses his touch and is left behind to fend for himself with the rest of the wind-blown trash.

Much has been made of the fact that this silent movie was made just as sound disrupted the whole movie-making industry in Hollywood. In a matter of months the wonderful pantomime infrastructure of silent comedy came apart at the seams, never to be fully rehabilitated. As Chaplin finished up “The Circus” he must have been wondering what this new technology would mean for his character, the Little Tramp. Could he survive in a suddenly rackety world or would he be left behind in the cinematic dustheap? His contemporaries like Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon fared badly with the coming of sound. Fortunately for the gaiety of nations, Chaplin decided to ignore the cacophony and go on clowning his own way.

As I left the Oak Street Cinema that cold December night for the long and lonely walk home, young and brash and foolishly optimistic about my own future as a clown, I didn’t have any such deep thoughts. Back then, I merely thought that I’d never be a clown with a broken heart -- it’s too cornball! I hadn’t yet realized that the secret to all great clowning is to risk your heart with every performance, until it really does break . . .

“ An inability to admire silent films, like a dislike of black and white, is a sad inadequacy. Those who dismiss such pleasures must have deficient imaginations.”  Roger Ebert.