Genius as Infinite Pain

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

A TV series finds the root of Chaplin's gift in outtakes

For The Gold Rush he took a huge cast and crew into the high country near Truckee, Calif., built a complete mining-town set, labored in the deep snow for weeks--and then used only a couple of shots from the location in the final film. He preferred to rebuild the town on his Hollywood back lot, where only his own caprices, not nature's, could affect the process by which he achieved his most nearly perfect artistic vision. To shoot what seems to be a simple sequence, the meeting of his tramp character and Virginia Cherrill's blind flower girl in City Lights, he spent 83 days, 62 of which were devoted to thinking the scene over while his company idled, on salary, waiting for genius to assert itself. Sometimes, as with a comedy called The Professor, he would start a film, complete whole sequences as masterly as anything he had ever done, and then simply junk the entire work.

He, of course, was Charles Spencer Chaplin, in his time the most beloved figure in film, perhaps in the world, and for all time the greatest master of screen comedy. He was also one of the century's great celebrities and surely one of the most mysterious. Part faun, part satyr, he was avidly stalked, not just by gossips and journalists but by artistic, intellectual and political leaders fascinated by his movies. Yet he permitted only the briefest glimpses of his true self as he flitted through the thicket of myth and misinformation he deliberately created as a hiding place. Even his autobiography had almost nothing useful to say about how his genius functioned. It is an appropriate irony that the best record we shall probably ever have of Chaplin's methods comes to us in a series of films derived from his own films.

Called Unknown Chaplin, it consists of three hour-long documentaries made for Britain's Thames Television by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, the team responsible for the best overall film history ever made, 1980's 13-part Hollywood. They were given access to Chaplin's film vaults by his widow, and to numberless outtakes from the pictures he made in 1916-17 for the Mutual Film Co., which are now controlled by a silent-film collector-impresario, Raymond Rohauer. From hundreds of hours of this material, the pair has fashioned not only a priceless contribution to film history, but an essay that makes visible that most invisible of human endeavors, the creative process.

Chaplin was an improviser. He would order up a huge set or an elaborate mechanical prop (like The Floorwalker's escalator, the comic potentials of which we watch him explore) with only the vaguest notion of what he might do with it. Then, with all his co-workers assembled, with Chaplin doing detailed demonstrations of their pantomime ("he became me," Cherrill remembers) and working up the long, intricate comic lines that are his art's hallmark, the cameras would turn. And turn. And turn some more, through hundreds of takes. For it was only by studying what Chaplin the comedian had done that Chaplin the director could judge his work in progress. In The Cure (1917), for example, he starts with a simple entrance, pushing a gouty man's wheel chair. Nothing very funny about that. But as the days wear on, that single chair be comes half a dozen of them, and Chaplin turns himself into a bellboy functioning as a policeman trying to straighten out the splendidly lunatic traffic jam they inevitably create. He then abandons this marvelous scene entirely to turn himself into a spiflicated patient entangling him self in a revolving door, a sequence that turns out to be even more brilliantly timed. Unknown Chaplin offers dozens of examples of this kind of comic grace under self-generated pressure. (He was obliged by his Mutual contract to turn out a film a month, and later, when he was entirely his own boss, it was his money that he could see gurgling down the drain when inspiration failed.)

Yet, finally, it is not Chaplin's profligacy that awes the viewer of Unknown Chaplin but the relentless perfectionism of his all-encompassing ego and, curiously, a sort of higher frugality. He seems never to have forgotten a good idea, returning to half-formed conceptions years after they occurred to him in order to perfect them. Brownlow and Gill have, for instance, found home movies taken at a Douglas Fairbanks party that show Chaplin dancing with a globe. Something like a decade later, that little improvisation becomes the basis for The Great Dictator's strongest image, that of a power-mad tyrant's lustful pas de deux with the symbol of the world he intends to conquer. From The Professor he salvaged, three decades later, the flea circus routine, now more delicately rendered, that is one of Limelight's comic high spots.

In their narration, Brownlow and Gill say the footage they recovered and lovingly shaped into a scholarly and joyous television show is akin to finding the sketch books of a great painter. They are right. What is wrong is that no U.S. television distributor has as yet agreed to broadcast the work. But the series will be on view at New York City's Museum of Broadcasting July 12-16. It is worth any amount of trouble to examine the treasures these raiders of the lost film cans have found .

-- By Richard Schickel This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.