June 24, 2010

Someone recently landed a bargain on eBay, and their plunder wasn’t an immaculate set of early-70s Rock-em-Sock-em Robots or a stolen Chanel handbag. It was a genuine piece of cinema history.

Morace Park, a British eBay surfer, paid a grand total of $5.68 (when converted into wheezing American dollars) for an old film canister that was described by its seller as containing, rather non-informatively, “an old film.” It’s not clear why Park would lay good money down on something so apparently mundane, but he was in for a surprise when he received the canister in the mail and opened it up— inside was a 7-minute short made by and starring none other than Sir Charles Chaplin!

“Zepped,” a World War I propaganda film shot in 1916, was designed to keep Brits from fearing German zeppelin bombing runs. Park says it opens with shots of Chaplin as the Little Tramp, then switches to dreamlike images of a zeppelin attack, then back to Chaplin again, who makes light of such theoretical attacks. Film historians have long thought that “Zepped” was lost for good, so this is a significant addition to our knowledge of Charlie Chaplin during a period when he was fast becoming the most famous and beloved person on planet earth.

But this isn’t even close to the most momentous Chaplin-related film discovery. That one happened almost 40 years ago, and consisted of literally hours of footage that had never been seen by anyone outside of Chaplin and a handful of his collaborators.

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In the early ‘70s, British Filmmakers Kevin Brownlow and David Gill badly needed some Chaplin footage for a TV documentary they were making called “Hollywood,” but the person who then owned the rights to Chaplin’s work was not about to cooperate with them. Chaplin biographer David Thomson (his book is pretty great) then suggested that Brownlow and Gill attempt to contact Rachel Ford, who was Chaplin’s longtime business manager, to see if she had anything they could use.

Ford was willing to give Brownlow and Gill “a snippet” of footage, and that was all. But, while digging through a vault piled high with silver canisters, the astonished directors realized that Ford was sitting on 30-40 cans of never-before-seen Charlie Chaplin outtakes! And she still refused to give them anything more than a brief strip of it!

In due course, Brownlow and Gill revealed their cinephilic dismay to a secretive British film collector who, it turned out, actually possessed the negatives to the mysterious footage, and more! I know I’ve used exclamation points at the ends of three consecutive sentences, but think about this. These guys were getting their hands on hours of footage containing one of the true artistic geniuses of the 20th century. Imagine someone finding a giant stash of previously unseen paintings that Picasso had discarded while working toward his masterpieces, and you’ll get the general idea. This was the mother lode.

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Brownlow and Gill finally had their footage, but they still faced the seemingly insurmountable task of trying to figure out what they were looking at while watching hours and hours of negative images. They couldn’t possibly afford to print everything they had, so, in a desperate attempt to make some sense out of the rushes, Gill sat down with an editor to cut the shots together in the order in which they were filmed, an act that led to yet another astonishing discovery— when he was making a picture, Chaplin basically “sketched” his ideas on celluloid without bothering to write a real script!

This explained how Chaplin could have shot as much footage for one of his Mutual Films productions, which ran two reels and 25 minutes, as D.W. Griffith shot for his three-hour epic, “Intolerance!” Chaplin just kept the camera rolling while he improvised character moments and comic set pieces, fine tuning them for days on end before, quite often, discarding them completely and trying something new.

On several occasions, Chaplin even built fresh, more comically fertile sets and headed back to square-one, “making it up” as he went along, much as a writer does, but at a much higher physical and monetary cost. But if that’s what it took, that’s what it took. It’s not like he was making “Rush Hour 3.”

The cans of improvised footage were then tucked away where no one else could view them, at least until Brownlow and Gill made their fascinating, incredibly entertaining documentary, “Unknown Chaplin,” which was broadcast on the BBC in 1983. Narrated by James Mason, “Unknown Chaplin” is a must-see for hardcore Chaplin fans as well as anyone who’s simply interested in the working methods of a great artist.

In this clip, Chaplin is devising the central piece of action for a 1916 Mutual short entitled “The Floor Walker.”

“Unknown Chaplin” also reveals that the timing required to pull off such set pieces was often a struggle to maintain, which isn’t surprising, given their almost ballet-like precision. There are countless shots of Chaplin and his co-stars literally falling on their faces while trying to perfect a bit of business, only to have Chaplin abandon the joke when he felt it wasn’t working.

Here’s my favorite clip. In this sequence, the Little Tramp is wandering through a number of different sets inside a busy movie studio, thus generating more comic possibilities for actor-director Chaplin to explore.

Get in touch with me if you’ve ever thought of anything even remotely that brilliant, then threw it away in search of something better.

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You might imagine that once Chaplin started shooting feature-length films he’d be forced to scale back on his before-the-camera improvising as a matter of course. But you’d be wrong. In fact, as his pictures grew more ambitious in scope, Chaplin seemed to become even more meticulous about what did and didn’t want in a scene. Compromise never entered into it.

There was a truly obsessive quality about Chaplin, an unrelenting need to make films that, as closely as they could, reflected his personal world view; this was one of the reasons he formed United Artists with Griffith, Mary Pickford, and his dear friend, Douglas Fairbanks. He didn’t care what it cost. He didn’t care how long it took. He just wanted it right, and, as an iconic figure on movie screens around the globe, he had the power to do what he wanted to do, with no imposition whatsoever from an antsy producer or studio executive.

From his classic 1921 film, “The Kid,” onward, Chaplin seldom settled for streams of slapstick topped off by a bit of melancholy. The sentiment in his best pictures is meticulously interwoven with the humor, with the elements of a sequence often swelling in ascending movements to a heart-rending crescendo.

Perhaps the most fascinating images Brownlow and Gill located concern the shooting of what many consider to be Chaplin’s greatest film— 1931’s “City Lights.” Here, in the rarest of all the “Unknown Chaplin” footage, we see Charlie painstakingly acting out the gestures he wants from his un-trained leading lady, a self-possessed young woman named Virginia Cherrill.

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I wrote earlier that Chaplin was a genius, and I meant it. He wasn’t just a “comedian." With the passage of time, silent film has become emotionally antiquated— many people assume it’s impossible to connect with an art form that hasn’t been a part of the cultural landscape for over 90 years. But please do yourself a favor and approach Chaplin’s films with an open heart and mind; his immense sensitivity to the human condition, and his ability to convey it through the subtlest of movements, remains as universal now as it was when he was helping invent the filmic language.

I suggest starting with one of a series of dvd’s entitled “The Chaplin Mutuals,” which contain a sequence of short films that are as exquisitely realized as anything in the Chaplin canon. Then, you can pick and choose from the classic features, but my favorites are “The Kid,” "The Circus," “City Lights,” and “Modern Times.” However, if you still don’t believe Chaplin has anything to offer an iPod-wearing new millennium entity like yourself, I’m closing with the final sequence from “City Lights.”

In the film, the Little Tramp has fallen for a blind flower girl who mistakenly thinks he’s a wealthy benefactor. Not wanting her to recoil when she discovers he’s really just a filthy vagabond, the Tramp breaks his back to earn enough money for the girl to get the surgery that will restore her eyesight. After securing the money through a series of comic mishaps, then presenting it to the unattainable girl he now loves, the Tramp is thrown into jail.

Upon his release, he wanders the streets, not realizing that the girl has, in fact, had her sight restored and is running a flower shop while awaiting the return of her rich and handsome knight in shining armor.

I know it takes a minute to watch this, but please give it the attention it deserves— it’s one of the more tender, stirring sequences in all of cinema, and makes you realize just how much is missing from modern-day filmmaking. (Chaplin, by the way, also composed the "City Lights" score. This guy simply never let up.)

Go get some Kleenex.

Paul Tatara