The Circus
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA, NR, 71 m, 1928
Directed by Charles Chaplin. Stars Charles Chaplin, Merna Kennedy, Harry Crocker, et al. 

Charles Chaplin remains one of the purest filmmakers the world has ever known. For most of his career, Chaplin enjoyed complete autonomy; if a picture clicked or failed (I can’t cite an example of the latter), he was the sole determining force. (Though some might argue—myself included—that the amazing Jackie Coogan had a lot to do with the success of The Kid.) Looking at any entry in the Chaplin canon can still fill the most persnickety moviegoer with awe: every frame, every cut, every musical note is the result of an unwearied obsessiveness that makes Stanley Kubrick look like a cappuccino-gulping speed freak with ADHD. Kubrick’s fussiness often robbed his films of their breath; Chaplin was twice the perfectionist but his flicker shows crackled with life and had a sense of spontaneity. Probably because every take was of markedly different quality—the guy was making it up as he went along and wouldn’t dream of hollering “print” until he was 100% certain that he nailed it. (Sir Dickie’s 1992 biopic did the layman a disservice by suggesting that Chaplin’s greatest bits were born of divine inspiration instead of very hard work.) Like Jean-Luc Godard (and to a certain extent, Christopher Guest), Chaplin wrote with his camera, allowing his audience to share in the joy of discovery. If I could take only one director’s body of work with me to a desert isle, it would be Chaplin’s. (My second choice would be a much harder one to make; Capra, De Sica, Hitchcock, Scorsese, and Spielberg would all be in the running.)

The Circus, originally released in 1928, was the deceptively ebullient result of a two-year shoot marred by one crisis after another. Not only did Chaplin have to deal with a messy and well-publicized divorce from Lita Grey (she played the teasing seraph in The Kid’s fêted dream sequence), but the US Treasury was trying to hold him to $1 million in back taxes. Personal travails were nearly eclipsed by a hellish shoot: hammering rains ruined the main circus tent (other sets were taken out by Smokey the Bear’s arch-foe), teenage pranksters made off with key props, and lackadaisical lab work rendered a month’s worth of footage utterly valueless. Making The Circus was such an unhappy experience for Chaplin that he couldn’t bring himself to mention the film in his otherwise comprehensive 1964 autobiography. But time, as they say, heals all wounds, and Chaplin revisited The Circus in 1969, composing a new score and even singing (at the age of 81!) its opening ditty, “Swing, Little Girl.”

The Circus isn’t as uproarious as A Dog’s Life (though I can’t think of many films that are) or as poignant as The Kid (though I can’t think of many films that are), but it’s of considerably more interest than At the Circus, which inexplicably wasted the Marx Brothers in what should’ve been an ideal vehicle for their untamed tomfoolery. The Greatest Show on Earth gives Chaplin more comic inspiration than he knows what to do with, though often it’s the littlest props that instigate the most memorable gags. (Such is the case with a lot of Chapliniana. Who can forget The Gold Rush’s dancing rolls?) When the picture opens, we find the splayfooted Little Tramp bumming around the circus grounds and taking in the sideshows. His financial situation hasn’t improved much since we last saw him. In fact, he’s so hungry that he’s reduced to stealing bites from a toddler’s ten-cent hotdog. When an unexpected windfall results in him being wrongly fingered as a pickpocket, the Tramp leads some coppers on a foot chase that winds through a funhouse (with a mirror maze gag that may have inspired The Lady from Shanghai’s most celebrated set piece) and finally the big top, where he inadvertently becomes the star attraction. The circus proprietor/ringmaster (played by the incomparably evil Al Ernest Garcia) encourages the Tramp to try out for the clown troupe, but the audition goes so badly that he orders him off the premises. The Tramp is quickly taken back, though, when the circus becomes desperate for a propman. Of course, the Tramp bungles that job, too, and his screw-ups extend into the ring, inviting belly-clutching guffaws from the spectators. The ringmaster (woozy from the smell of money) keeps the Tramp on the pay roll, but he refrains from telling him that he’s the one sending the house into hysterics and driving ticket sales sky-high. Not only is the ringmaster crooked, he’s a sadistic son-of-bitch: whenever his daughter, Merna (stunning Merna Kennedy in her screen debut), misses a beat in her hoop routine, he lays her out. (I was reminded of Eric Campbell’s constant flogging of poor Edna Purviance in The Vagabond.) He also withholds her food, and bops around anyone who dares to sneak her a morsel. The Tramp, who’s no stranger to hunger, takes pity on her and gives her an egg he stole from a chicken. He also comes to give her his heart.

But Merna wants to give her heart to someone else: a well-groomed but rather impassive tightrope walker named Rex (Harry Crocker). Rex dresses like a magician (with a top hat and cape), and part of his act involves divesting his costume in midair. When the Tramp watches Rex do his bit, he secretly roots for him to slip and plummet to his death. And when he catches Rex flirting with Merna, he imagines pounding the beejezus out of him and then kicking straw over his fallen body like a cat covering its poop. One night, Rex fails to show up for his performance, so the ringleader recruits the Tramp to walk the wire in his stead. Looking to impress his object of affection, he takes the job, but he has a stagehand outfit him with a safety harness just in case he loses his footing. Sometime during the show, the harness snaps off, putting the Tramp in a precarious position to say the least. But things go from bad to worse when he’s joined on the wire by a rowdy band of escaped monkeys. The monkeys pull down his pants, chew on his nose, muss his hair—and all the while our hero must maintain his balance or wind up getting fitted for wings in the sweet hereafter. It’s a hilarious and hair-rating sequence worthy of Harold Lloyd!

After the Tramp blackens the eye of the ringmaster for knocking his daughter around one time too many, he’s given his walking papers. Merna wants to go away with him, but the Tramp knows he can’t give her the sort of life she wants or needs. So he valiantly (perhaps foolishly) arranges for Rex to propose to her, and soon he’s throwing rice at Rex and Merna at their wedding. It’s de rigueur for a Chaplin film to end with the Tramp taking off for God knows where all by his lonesome (I can’t help but think of David Banner and that heartrending piano exit on TV’s “The Incredible Hulk”), but that makes it no less of a bummer to see the Tramp lose the girl to a character we barely know and quite frankly don’t give a damn about. (Rex could have been better defined; he’s just a big lug.) One might recall how the Marx Brothers were usually reduced to playing matchmakers to the colorless leading men and ladies in those godawful musical comedies they made for MGM. For some reason, Irving Thalberg and his idiot writers couldn’t see their funnymen as romantic figures. But why shouldn’t the clown be allowed to score? He is, after all, the one we’re rooting for. Perhaps Merna’s rejection of the Tramp comes down to simple biology. The Tramp may be handsome, funny, creative, urbane, and a complete gentleman, but he’s broke. The tightrope walker will provide Merna security, and that’s what women crave most. Christ, I’d be the greatest catch this side of the Mason-Dixon Line if I only had a few coins in my pocket. 

Like The Kid and City Lights, The Circus skillfully mingles pathos with raucous humor. There are several moments that had me on the floor convulsing with laughter, such as when the Tramp dodges the police in the funhouse by pretending to be an automaton, or when he gets stuck in the cage of a napping lion, or when he erroneously concludes that Merna loves him and runs gaily about, kicking a chubby clown to the floor and spraying seltzer water in his face.

Chaplin cut a lot of stuff out of The Circus to get it down to what he thought was an appropriate running time. (71 minutes is short by today’s standards, but part of Chaplin’s effectiveness as a director lies in his brevity.) Film historians Kevin Brownlow and David Gill tracked down a lot of this excised footage and featured it in their terrific documentary series, Unknown Chaplin. One of their most amazing finds, a 10 minute sequence in which the Tramp hits the town with Merna and Rex and is harassed in a restaurant by obnoxious twin prizefighters (both played by Doc Stone), actually works as its own one-reeler. The outtake can also be seen in its entirety on MK2 Edition’s excellent 2002 DVD release of The Circus. 

In 1929, the first annual Academy Awards banquet was held, and Chaplin received a special award (it had yet to be dubbed “the Oscar”) for “versatility and genius in acting, writing, directing and producing The Circus.” (The movie that bagged the Best Picture statue that year was Wings.) Why Chaplin didn’t receive a little golden man in the ensuing decades for such cinematic marvels as City Lights or Modern Times or The Great Dictator is anyone’s guess, but he was summoned back to Hollywood in 1972 (after spending years exiled in Switzerland) to receive an honorary Oscar for “the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century.” Sometimes it takes the movers and shakers in Tinsel Town a coon’s age to get around to recognizing their most talented peers. Like Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles never received an Academy Award for Best Director. So far, Oliver Stone has taken home two. That’s unconscionable. 

March 13, 2009

“The Circus” Review. © Copyright 2009 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.