The Kid (Charles Chaplin, 1921)

Jackie Coogan and Charles Chaplin in The Kid

Cast: Charles Chaplin, Jackie Coogan, Edna Purviance, Carl Miller, Henry Bergman, Lita Grey, Jules Hanft, Raymond Lee, Walter Lynch, John McKinnon, Granville Redmond, Charles Reiser, Edgar Sherrod, Minnie Stearns, S.D. Wilcox, Tom Wilson. Screenplay: Charles Chaplin. Cinematography: Roland Totheroh. Art direction: Charles D. Hall. Film editing: Charles Chaplin. Music: Charles Chaplin. 

Charles Chaplin's first feature film is not as mawkish as a story about the Little Tramp's raising a foundling might have been. It includes one of Chaplin's wackier fantasy sequences, in which he dreams that he and his fellow slum denizens have become angels and must fight it out with devils. 

A Woman of Paris (Charles Chaplin, 1923)

Adolphe Menjou and Edna Purviance in A Woman of Paris

Marie St. Clair: Edna Purviance
Jean Millet: Carl Miller
Pierre Revel: Adolphe Menjou
Jean's Mother: Lydia Knott
Jean's Father: Charles K. French
Marie's Stepfather: Clarence Geldart
Fifi: Betty Morrissey
Paulette: Malvina Polo

Director: Charles Chaplin
Screenplay: Charles Chaplin
Cinematography: Roland Totheroh, Jack Wilson
Art direction: Arthur Stibolt
Film editing: Monta Bell, Charles Chaplin
Music (1976 re-release): Charles Chaplin

Was it Charles Chaplin's great ego that kept him onscreen for almost his entire career as a director? Because on the evidence of A Woman of Paris, his only "serious" film and the only one aside from A Countess From Hong Kong (1967) in which he doesn't appear onscreen (except for blink-and-you'll-miss-him cameos), he was a considerable director of other people. He also had a deftly light touch, not unlike that of Ernst Lubitsch, for livening up a scene with a surprising angle -- such as the way he comments on the frivolity of the Parisian demimonde by concentrating on the somewhat disgusted face of a masseuse as she works on the pampered body of Marie St. Clair and listens to the gossip of Marie's friends. A Woman of Paris is weighed down a bit by the built-in moral assumptions that Marie is to be scorned for allowing herself to become the mistress of Pierre Revel, but Adolphe Menjou's performance as Revel has such gusto that he we understand why Marie is taken with him -- just as we don't understand what she ever saw in the dour, hawk-faced Carl Miller's Jean Millet. A Woman of Paris is a more sophisticated film than it has any right to be, given the melodramatic framework. I like the way Chaplin makes a smart time jump from Marie's departure for Paris to her establishment as Pierre's kept woman. We don't need to know how she got there, just that she did. And the ending, with the obligatory self-sacrifice, is not as saccharine as it could have been: There's wit in the final montage, in which Pierre's automobile passes the wagon in which Marie and one of the orphans she tends are sitting. Pierre's car disappearing into the distance is almost a parody of the endings of Chaplin's "Little Tramp" comedies, in which the Tramp saunters off into the sunset.

Monsieur Verdoux (Charles Chaplin, 1947)

Charles Chaplin and Martha Raye in Monsieur Verdoux

At the end of Monsieur Verdoux, Charles Chaplin, in the title role, walks away toward his execution by guillotine, just as his Little Tramp character used to walk away toward the horizon in his earlier films. It's a richly ironic moment, not just because Chaplin is parodying the endings of his other movies, but also because it would come to symbolize the beginning of the end of his career. He would make three more films, only one of which, Limelight (1952), would attract an audience (mainly in Europe) and earn some critical respect. Of the other two, A King in New York (1957) was not even released in the United States until 1973, and although The Countess From Hong Kong (1967) did get American distribution, it was generally panned even by critics inclined to favor Chaplin and was a major box office flop. Monsieur Verdoux is a key work in its revelation of Chaplin's strengths and weaknesses. His strengths are still there: He was, when he wanted to be, a very funny actor, and there is one scene -- Verdoux and Annabella (Martha Raye) in a rowboat -- that is among the most hilarious sequences ever filmed. His weaknesses stemmed from his desire to be more than funny: to make statements about the way he saw the world. The ending of The Great Dictator (1940) was marred when he shifted from satire to sermon, and the rather muzzy anticapitalism expressed by Verdoux in the final scenes strikes us today as banal. Unfortunately, in 1947 it struck many as worse than that. In the increasingly heated anticommunist fervor of the day it was at least heresy, at worst treason. Monsieur Verdoux was picketed and banned and eventually withdrawn from circulation in the United States, not to be seen here until 1964. It confused most of the critics in 1947 with its shifts in tone and its rather old-fashioned mise-en-scène and cutting, but it had its defenders, chief among them James Agee, who wrote a long, impassioned multipart essay for The Nation defending the film. "I love and revere the film as deeply as any I have ever seen," Agee wrote, "and believe that it is high among the great works of this century." Not many people would go that far today. Monsieur Verdoux has its longueurs and its unfortunate wanderings into Chaplin's particular brand of sentimentality, especially the wheelchair-bound wife and adorable child. It betrays Chaplin's perennial weakness for the pretty girl in his casting of the wooden Marilyn Nash in what seems to have been intended as a key role but which fizzles because it's awkwardly written and performed. Even the title role is inconsistently written and performed: Chaplin's dapper Verdoux suddenly turns into a slapstick clown and just as suddenly back into the suave and sinister serial killer, undercutting the high-minded pseudo-Shavian irony of his final apologia: "As for being a mass killer, does not the world encourage it? Is it not building weapons of destruction for the sole purpose of mass killing? Has it not blown unsuspecting women and little children to pieces? And done it very scientifically? As a mass killer, I am an amateur by comparison." Monsieur Verdoux feels something like a scene from Act IV in the tragicomedy that was Chaplin's life. If the first three acts were about his rise to success, despite controversy over his personal life and his politics, the fourth act finds his artistic instincts failing him and the controversies forcing him into exile. Only in the fifth act does the adulation that once surrounded him revive.

Tillie's Punctured Romance (Mack Sennett, 1914)

Tillie's Punctured Romance was Mack Sennett's first venture into feature-length production, and perhaps the first feature-length comedy ever made. Despite the later reputation of Charles Chaplin, it was designed as a starring vehicle and film debut for Marie Dressler, then the much bigger star. It was adapted from her Broadway hit, Tillie's Nightmare, and Dressler claimed that it was she who persuaded Sennett to cast Chaplin as her leading man. Adding Sennett's then-lover Mabel Normand, who also had a hand in developing Chaplin's early career, created a wonderful dynamic, but the teaming was never repeated: Chaplin's ambitions led him into writing and directing his own films; Normand and Sennett split in 1918, and her career suffered from her drug addiction and association with director William Desmond Taylor, whose murder in 1922 caused a scandal; Dressler was unable to establish a film career after the failure of two short films in which she also played Tillie, though she returned to the screen in 1927 after a nine-year absence. It's a shame, because Dressler was one of the few comic actresses capable of upstaging Chaplin, as their scenes together demonstrate. She had a rare gift for over-the-top physical comedy, which was Sennett's forte. For this anarchic comery, he marshaled all of his regular company, including Mack Swain and Chester Conklin, as well as the Keystone Kops, without ever eclipsing Dressler. Later in her career, Dressler would evoke pathos as well as laughs, but Sennett never lets Tillie be anything but a clown, except at the very ending, when she and Mabel share in their triumph over Chaplin's con man.