In the tramp's footsteps

H ard as it is to believe, we are nearing the hundredth anniversary of the start of one of the most important careers in film history. I was reminded of this recently when I read some transcripts of inter-office memos by Universal Pictures, circa 1912. The memos have people in high positions discussing the worth of a young comic who had applied for a job at the studio, and the first one goes:

“Interesting eccentric comedian. However, not outstanding enough to warrant either testing or sending to coast.”

And later, when the test did happen after all:

“Many objections have been raised to the use of the derby hat...also, the moustache must go. And do not allow him to walk comically...we must try to avoid offending people who are bow-legged.”

Happily, Charles Spencer Chaplin won the battle to keep his hat, his moustache and his walk, and here we are a century later, still marvelling at the effect he had on a new art form — most popularly as a performer, but just as vitally as a filmmaker and all-round creative genius, one of the first true auteurs.

I was delighted to find that Eagle Home Entertainment has made available a series of Chaplin’s feature-length movies in fine, restored prints — it’s been a good excuse to catch up on films that I took for granted when I was a child. There are many gems here, including The Gold Rush, Modern Times and, from later years, Limelight and Monsieur Verdoux, but if I had to pick an absolute favourite it would probably be the lovely City Lights, which Chaplin determinedly made as a silent film at a time when talkies were all the rage. (A sly opening scene has pompous officials speaking gibberish while inaugurating a statue — probably a reflection of what Chaplin himself felt about talking movies!) This story about a tramp who falls in love with a blind flower girl, while also managing a strange, on-again-off-again friendship with a drunk millionaire, combines all the best qualities of his work: imaginative physical comedy, clever sight gags, gentle romance and pathos.

To watch the classic Chaplin films is to marvel at the influence they have had on cinema over the decades — and to realise, almost from one scene to the next, how strongly his work has seeped into popular culture all over the world. The effect is a bit like realising that a favourite novel (say Richard Matheson’s What Dreams May Come or Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury) gets its title from a phrase made popular by a Shakespeare play.

Everyone knows about the effect that the Little Tramp had on Raj Kapoor’s early work, for instance, but watching the beautiful last scene of City Lights, where the tramp meets the girl, her sight now restored, I was reminded of the final moments of the Kamal Haasan-Sridevi tearjerker Sadma, where a man finds that a girl who he had cared for through a mental affliction no longer recognises him now that she has regained her memory. It almost doesn’t matter that City Lights ended on a positive and hopeful note whereas Sadma’s ending is sad and pessimistic; for in the Chaplin world, the possibility of melancholy exists in the most joyful situations, and vice versa.

So resonant is the connection between the two scenes that Haasan — a skilled and individualistic actor — almost seems to resemble Chaplin in that scene, his moustache drooping in a similar way; it’s as if two movies, made half a century apart and in entirely different cultures, are having a little conversation with each other. But then, that’s the Little Tramp’s legacy: you’ll find traces of him in the most unexpected places.

Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer