Cinema: Quixote with a Bowler

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The most familiar image of Charlie Chaplin remains that of the little tramp turning away from the camera, shaking off his disappointments like so much lint and jigging off toward some more benign horizon.

It is a fitting comment on Chaplin's past 20 years. During much of that time he has turned his back on the U.S. He saw his work picketed in the '50s and his verbose new talkie (A Countess from Hong Kong) panned in the '60s. Though such indisputable masterworks as The Gold Rush and Modern Times have been sporadically revived, the tramp is now customarily seen in scraps and splices in anthology films. They seldom probe an aspect of the clown that was once the most universally acknowledged: his genius.

The return of his 1928 film, The Circus, may correct the imbalance. Refurbished with a new score and an opening song croaked personally by the 80-year-old director/ composer/ producer/star, the film is incontrovertible proof of Chaplin's protean ability to eliminate absolutely everything outside the confines of the screen. Armed with nothing but cane and bowler, the tramp sets out like Quixote with lance and armor. His enemy is the cruel owner of the big top; his love, the villain's misused stepdaughter (Merna Kennedy).

Voilà! Each of Charlie's intentions is given a variety of interpretations, like a sunbeam hitting a prism. A pickpocket on the lam deposits a stolen watch in the tramp's trousers. Charlie looks at the watch—which the original victim spots as his own. A policeman gives chase—and corners Charlie in a hall of mirrors, where an infinity of cops vainly pursues an equal number of tramps. Disappearing into a tent, Chaplin seeks cover during an act. A top-hatted prestidigitator covers a girl with a cloth, walks to a large wardrobe, opens it, and voilà!—out steps Charlie.

Those familiar with Chaplin only through fragments will discover in The Circus an architectural discipline. Chaplin would spend minutes on-screen setting up a single gag or pratfall, and even longer giving his comedy the true roots of pathos. At the finale, Charlie has caused the owner to stop abusing his stepdaughter, but at a terrible price: the tramp has stepped aside so that the girl can marry a tightrope walker in a claw-hammer coat. Charlie watches the circus wagons wheel off, then once more turns and waddles away.

The walk-off is the bittersweet image by which, undoubtedly, Chaplin wishes to be remembered. But beyond his own films is a far more valid reason for remembrance. Since the '20s, international screen comedians have owed their art to him; Harry Langdon, Laurel and Hardy, Harpo Marx, Abbott and Costello, Jerry Lewis, Peter Sellers, Fernandel, Danny Kaye, Cantinflas, Jacques Tati ... all were born in a tip of the Chaplin chapeau.