The Adventurer and The Pilgrim

The Adventurer (1917)/The Pilgrim (1923)

(I only posted a link to the Adventurer because I couldn't find a good full copy of The Pilgrim streaming)

I decided to watch the Adventurer as a lark (because it was the only other Chaplin film on a silent film list I hadn't seen yet), but it turns out to be quite appropriate.  Both are "fish out of water" comedies, and both begin with the Tramp as an escaped convict taking on a new identity.  In the Adventurer, he claims he is a Commodore, and in The Pilgrim it is assumed that he is a minister.

The basic joke of both is that the Tramp must act like an educated, cultured gentleman, when he is anything but.  In The Adventurer, this is shown by Chaplin eating ice cream without a spoon, realizing his mistake, which then causes even more mayhem.  In The Pilgrim, it is primarily shown by him being told he must lead a worship service, when it is clear he had never been to one in his life. The last is a hilarious sequence.

The real difference is what Chaplin learned about comedy in the intervening years.  Although he was a matured comic in his final Mutual film, and the timing and story of his comedy is coherent and well ordered.  But in The Pilgrim we can see that he also learned about the necessity for real drama to make the human connection with those in the film.  It isn't enough to add some tension, he pursued melodrama and truly heroic action. 

A comparison of the endings of each film also shows quite a bit of maturity.  This is surprising, really.  Many directors and writers and comedians have a schtick and stick with it, not growing.  Chaplin has his bag of tricks, but he is constantly expanding and improving his art.  It is this that makes him an artist and not just a comedian.

The Adventurer-- 3.5/5

The Pilgrim-- 4/5

The Kid (1921)

It has been more than a year since Chaplin released his last film.  First National Films agreed that Chaplin could set his own schedule for films, but this was getting a bit carried away.  They had spent a million dollars on their star, but this isn't the way they would be getting their money back.  They knew he was working on a project, but it was simply taking too long.  So they approach Chaplin, and demanded that he produce something, quickly.  He showed them some of the film he had put together up to that point.  And then he had the execs meet his young co-star, Jackie Coogan.  Mollified, they gave Chaplin what time he need.  From their perspective, they were rewarded, for The Kid grossed the second highest amount of any film that year.

And we are still rewarded today.  Here we have a film that captures everything that Chaplin had been trying to do, almost from the beginning of his career, and it is all wrapped up here.  It isn't primarily a comedy, but a compelling drama with some comic elements.  We don't see the Tramp for the first five minutes of the feature, which is shocking for a star vehicle of the time.  Instead we are given the story of a woman (Edna Purviance) who is desperate from her poverty to surrender her infant son to a wealthy family.  But just after she deposits her son in the family's car, the car is stolen, and the ruffians leave the child on the side of the road, where he is found by the Tramp, who raises him as his own son.

The plot is touching and melodramatic, but the secret of the film is the chemistry between Chaplin and Coogan. Coogan's actions resemble the Tramp's, but doesn't exactly imitate it.  At times, we look at Coogan and we really see a small version of Chaplin-- the charm, the smooth action, the precise hand movements.  But Coogan as something that Chaplin never had-- he is adorable, and he can emote believably.  This is a great Tramp movie, not because the Tramp is so wonderful, but because it really is a shared performance.  For years, every Tramp film had the Tramp in every scene, and it is rare to find a single cell without him.  Here, we have long stretches of the film without the Tramp ever appearing.  And we appreciate him all the more for his absence, for he shares his screen time with other fantastic performers.

This is possibly Chaplin's most personal film.  He grew up with mean social workers controlling his early life in London.  Just before production, Chaplin lost his firstborn son, probably the inspiration of the film.  This project was so important, and Chaplin gave it his all.  We can see it in the quality of the production, the excellent writing and the fact that he shared with Coogan many of the big laughs of the film.  This, plus City Lights, are the perfect combination of pathos and comedy, and they changed the definition of the superior comedy forever.

4.5/5

What Can a Simple Worker Do To Serve His Country? (The General, 1927)

#100--The General (1927) 

Buster Keaton’s manly honor and his ability to have a chance at his love is dependent on his becoming a soldier in the Confederate army.  Yes, this is the South of 1961, but surprisingly, they are not the bad guys, nor is there any question of the pure patriotism for the Confederacy here.  It doesn’t matter who Keaton was loyal to for us to connect with him—what we associate to is the faithfulness to his nation.  So he stands in line to sign up with the army, but he is rebuffed again and again.

The whole film was shot in Cottage Grove, Oregon

It is interesting that he is rejected as a soldier not because he is weak in some way, but because he is too important.  He is a railway engineer, and they can’t waste such important workers on being simple foot soldiers.  But that doesn’t matter to Keaton’s honor.  Societal respect is found in participation in the army, nothing else, and Keaton is left out. 

The rest of the movie shows Keaton’s heroism and athleticism in serving his country and being much more than any single soldier could be.  I would stand this movie next to any modern action flick and say that the excitement and  intensity matches, at least.   This is an amazing film and deserves all the allocates over the years.   And Keaton is truly one of the few great actors of the silent era.

The Limitations of Silents and The Last Command

My friend 1SO at the Filmspotting Forum commanded me to watch The Last Command.  It was his right.  We have a dictation club and he was my Dictator this last month and the subject was silents.  I had never heard of this film before.  Perhaps I had seen it on lists of good silent films. But I had never read a review, or even caught a description of it.  The title makes it sound like a war film.  So it's a silent war film.  

I am not thrilled.

To be honest, I have had this movie sitting on my shelf for weeks.  I needed to watch it, was ordered to watch it, but I kept watching other movies instead.  Even the seventh season of House.  Why?  Because I hesitate watching silents.  

One thing I certainly love and that is good dialogue.  A film rarely makes my top list unless the dialogue sparkles in some way.  My favorite books are those with a lot of dialogue.  And I put down The Road because it had very little of it.  So silent films have one knock down right from the beginning.

From Seventh Heaven, another great melodrama

Also, silent films tend to be either melodrama (like Sunrise: A Tale of Two Humans, a favorite of mine) or slapstick comedy (like The General or City Lights, both favorites).  Not always, but almost always.  And what if I am not in the mood for either of those kinds of film?  What if I'm looking for something more subtle, or more complex, which is usually the case?  Then I'm not ready for a silent.  It isn't that there aren't many silents I absolutely love.  But I don't want to watch that type of movie most of the time.

So, here I am with The Last Command sitting on my shelf.  And, frankly, I almost forgot it was there.  Today, I delved in.

Damn.  What was I thinking?  How was I to know that this was  a character study?  This film was much more like The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (another favorite) than any silent I had ever seen.   

It begins with a director in Hollywood, making Russian films.  He picks a Russian actor, an extra, to play the general in a pivotal scene.  He is humiliated by the other actors, partly because of an uncontrollable head shake, due to a stress event in his past.  Then we see him in his past, ten years before, where he was a real general, under the Czar, in the final year of the Russian Revolution.  And we see his nobility, his honor, and his love of his nation. 

It deals with the honor of forgotten, old men, like The Last Laugh, another silent or Hugo, from this last year.  But it deals with it better than either of those films.  Like Colonel Blimp, we see why the man deserves honor, and not just the respect due to us all, and so the conclusion is just that much more thrilling, although somewhat reserved.

What a fantastic, rare film-- whether silent or otherwise.  The acting was marvelous, generally understated, and subtle.  The character Natalie was very complex and hard to read throughout most of the film, due to the excellent performance by Evelyn Brent.  I am also impressed by the script and how it draws in a number of characters, giving them each their time and end. 

I only found two weaknesses to the film: I think there was a single misstep in the plot, which make it too tidy (when the train fell into the river) and the music. I know the music wasn't original to the film, but whoever put it in there, to have all the horns blasting nobly throughout the entire film was just too much.  I shut it off after half the film.

Still, a generally marvelous film and one I will recommend to many others.  In fact, if you have not seen this film, I think, as a film buff, you should.   Thank you, thank you, 1SO.  4.5/5