Out with the old and in with the new – except if the old is really good. In the case of Charlie Chaplin, whose “The Kid” and “The Idle Class” enjoyed afternoon showing at Amherst Cinema on Sunday, it seems that there are still many who aren’t quite ready to let him go. A number of Chaplin fans, both young and old, filed into the theater in anticipation of an experience that was probably not unfamiliar to them. If you’ve seen one Chaplin film, you haven’t seen them all – but you know what to expect. The experience is usually one of vicarious anarchy, mixed with a healthy amount of cheek-smarting laughter.
This was certainly the case at Sunday’s show. It might have been a fight scene that consists of more dodging than hitting or Chaplin delivering a quick look of awkward acknowledgment to a nearby policeman, and laughter broke out in the crowd. Just about every shot gave the viewer a reason to laugh. Of course, this is always the way with Charlie Chaplin. Once the laughter starts, it doesn’t stop.
In “The Kid,” the Tramp stumbles upon an infant left in an alley and raises him to become his partner in crime. The film, totaling 54 minutes, was Chaplin’s first foray into feature-length storytelling. When it came out in 1921, it was a huge success. “The Idle Class,” also released in 1921, is just a half hour long. It tells a simple tale of mistaken identity at a masked ball.
As any true fan of Chaplin knows, the secret to his comedy resides not in his slapstick, but in his characters. The greatest of these was the Little Tramp, whose black-and-white image is still branded in America’s-and a good chunk of the worlds-memory 96 years after his debut in Chaplin’s first film, “Kid Auto Races at Venice.” We can all picture him, a lonely-looking fellow with a little moustache, mooning about some park, perhaps twirling a cane.
The Tramp occupies an iconic status mainly due to his popularity – he was a huge success during the silent-film era, and even during the rise of the talkies – and also due to his unforgettable appearance. Dressed in a tight coat and baggy pants, a dark derby and oversized shoes, he wobbles to and fro with a strange air of confidence that seems inappropriate for such a helplessly silly man.
While the physical comedy in these films, praiseworthy for its naturalness and ingenuity, is enormously entertaining to watch, what made Chaplin’s work timeless was its simple premise: The story of a good-natured man who doesn’t fit in. His eccentricities make him the frequent object of interest of policemen. The Little Tramp can’t tramp far without either inspiring, often quite innocently, absurd amounts of suspicion, or else winding up in the arms of an authority figure from whom he invariably escapes.
Chaplin once said, “All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman, and a pretty girl.” In fact, this is typically how one of his films came into being, starting with these bare components. Chaplin’s directorial process consisted almost wholly of improvisation. He would start with a character and an environment and then let them naturally interact. With a character like the Tramp, a funny-looking man who does as he pleases, how could this simple formula fail? It’s in the Tramp’s unbounded liberty that the comedy, as well as the anarchy, lies.
After “The Kid” and “The Idle Class” finished screening, there were no credits. When the screen went blank and the lights went up, Chaplin fans slunk back into the world, remembering their membership in society as decent, law-abiding poltroons, when in the back of their mind they all must have wanted to whip out their cane and derby.
Kevin Mele can be reached at [email protected].
