Charlie Chaplin, Director

Introduction

3 Introduction I think I’m a better director than an actor,” Charlie Chaplin told an interviewer for Life in 1967. There is perhaps no statement with which Chaplin’s critics have disagreed more. He received no shortage of praise, of course, during and after his career. George Bernard Shaw famously called him “the only genius developed in motion pictures.” For Andrew Sarris, he is “the single most important artist produced by the cinema.” Edmund Wilson declared him to be “among his age’s first artists.” And yet, from early in his career through some of the most recent assessments of his work, Chaplin has been criticized as a director even as he has been extolled in almost all other respects. Orson Welles summed up the majority opinion: “Chaplin’s a great artist—there can’t be any argument about that,” he declared. But, Welles said, Chaplin was simply not “a man of the cinema.” In a contemporary review of Modern Times (United Artists, 1936), Otis Ferguson took this idea as one of the central points of his analysis. Chaplin was not, he said, “a first-class picture-maker” because “he keeps on refusing to learn any more than he learned when the movies themselves were just learning.” Thirty-six years later, Richard Schickel repeated this thought in a retrospective of Chaplin’s work on the occasion of his muchanticipated return to the United States, aptly titled “Hail Chaplin—The Early Chaplin.” As a director, he writes, Chaplin is “inadequate”; despite the genius of his early shorts he has refused to accept or incorporate almost “every stylistic and technical change which has come to the movies since the end of World War I.” Reviewing the last film of Chaplin’s career, A Countess from Hong Kong (Universal, 1967)—one of only two films that Chaplin directed in which he did not star—an unsigned article in the London Times returned at length to this question of directorial ability: 4 introduction It is always difficult to separate in one’s mind the various functions of a great composite: how much of the effect of a classic Chaplin film is due to his direction, how much to his writing, and how much to his own central performance? The suspicion has always persisted . . . that he might be at best a director of very modest competence who just happened to have a rare knack of showing off his own work as a performer to maximum advantage. . . . Now that Mr. Chaplin has again ventured on a film denied the special support of his own performance in a central role, we can take stock. And sadly, it must be said that A Countess from Hong Kong confirms our most pessimistic imaginings.1 The reviewer’s reflections were anonymous but not anomalous. To most critics , Chaplin’s career ended with a final confirmation of his failures as a director, reinscribing in the critical consciousness the idea that his talent and expertise consisted chiefly of his masterful comic performances and that his greatest cinematographic achievements could only properly be considered as efforts to show off “his own work as a performer to maximum advantage.” The bias against Chaplin’s work as a director is not limited to the opinions of his fellow filmmakers and popular critics. If anything, it is expounded at greater length and at times with even more fervor by the scholarship that has grown up around his body of work. Dan Kamin offers an effective summary of the common complaints against Chaplin’s visual style: “Chaplin’s camera is often immobile, or moves just slightly, and he frequently frames shots widely. Individual shots often go on for much longer than shots in other movies.” He also has a “cavalier disregard for some basic elements of movie craft, such as continuity in his editing.” He is, in Kamin’s reading, a kind of “stubborn curmudgeon of cinema.”2 Kamin’s analysis is similar to one offered by Michael Roemer, though Roemer acknowledges extra-filmic influences on Chaplin’s technique. “The staging and camera work are derived from the theatre,” Roemer contends . “Space is treated two-dimensionally: sets and action are photographed from a single vantage point—most often from the center of the missing fourth wall; there are few reverse shots and we never see one character from the point of view of another. The camera seldom moves.”3 If Roemer attributes Chaplin’s visual prejudices to the theater, Kamin contends that such an opinion is...