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Silence is golden: Charlie Chaplin's The Tramp is 100 today

The enduring comic brilliance of the iconic underdog

Independence day

In light of such success, his demand for a decent reward seem fair enough now, especially when viewed with the hindsight of the 21st Century, when film and music stars are often amongst the wealthiest, most publicly known members of society. But back in 1915, many film studios regarded actors – even rising stars – as being not much more than glorified extras who could easily be replaced, hence Keystone’s reluctance to enter serious negotiations with Chaplin.

Getting straight to the point with a farmhand

Getting straight to the point with a farmhand in The Tramp

Yet Chaplin eventually grew disillusioned even with Essanay, his ‘excessive’ wages soon looking minimal as box office receipts began to hit five and even six figures. Chaplin himself became increasingly suspicious of the sharp business tactics of the company’s co-owner George K Spoor – suspicions that were later to be proved right.

When Chaplin left Essanay, the studio cobbled together various out-takes and two-reelers behind his back to make several more feature-length films. These makeshift movies were regarded by Chaplin, and most of the critics, as being shoddy-looking and artistically dodgy enough to be damaging to his reputation in the short term. But silent classics like The Kid and The Gold Rush, where he famously devoured a pair of shoes, soon had Chaplin back at the top.

Meal time in Gold Rush

Beef Wellington? The tramp serves an unforgettable dish in Gold Rush

The silents couldn’t, however, stay silent forever. Indeed, the 1927 musical The Jazz Singer was the ideal vehicle for Warner Brothers to showcase its Vitaphone sound-on-disc system perfectly synchronised to the performance of crooner and actor Al Jolson. From now on, movies would come with the spoken, and occasionally sung, word.

So where, many pundits wondered, did that leave Charlie Chaplin? For he was, by then, not just Hollywood’s leading comic actor – a man big enough to bring his brother Syd Chaplin over from England and swiftly make him into a big star too – he was also the most famous man on the planet. An actor and film-maker who was instantly recognised on the streets of New York, London, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo... And a man skilled enough to adapt to a new format.

United Artists: Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin and D.W. Griffith

United Artists founders: Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin and DW Griffith

Feature-length films such as City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936) showed ‘Charlot’ waltzing through the new world of the ‘talkies’ but while the other characters spoke the tramp himself remained silent – he remained funny too, helping those movies do some serious business at the box office.

So wordless comedies didn’t have to be silent – as Mr Bean was to (re)discover over 60 years later – and they could still make money. And not all the money went to the middlemen either. Chaplin – along with director DW Griffith and silent stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks – had formed the United Artists film company years before in order to protect and project his own productions.

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In Modern Times drugs in prison is played for laughs

These 1930s productions sailed pretty close to both the wind and the zeitgeist; Modern Times showed the tramp accidentally ingesting ‘joy powder’ – contemporary slang for cocaine – before quietly freaking out. In the same movie, he also starts a riot by innocently picking up a red traffic flag as he walks down the road – within seconds a political demonstration forms up behind him, a demo which is soon attacked by the cops.

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