Year(s): 1914-1918
Charles Spencer “Charlie” Chaplin was born on April 16, 1889 in South London. At the time of his birth his parents were both music hall entertainers. Unfortunately by 1891 his parents were estranged and the following year, after the birth of Chaplin’s brother, he was taken from his father into his mother’s custody.
Chaplin’s childhood was filled with poverty and hardship, mainly due to his mother’s ongoing mental illness and his estranged father refusing to give any support. Having no means of income, Chaplin was sent to Lambeth Workhouse where he was housed at the Central London District School for Paupers. It was a miserable existence which would get worse when his father died from alcohol abuse and his mother would be committed to the Cane Hill Mental Asylum.
By age 13 Chaplin had abandoned a formal education. He supported himself with a variety of jobs while struggling to become an actor. He toured with the Eight Lancashire Lads and, when the manager finally saw some potential in the boy, he had earned a role in Sherlock Holmes.
This was the humble beginning of his vaudeville and stage career, and by 1910 (when Chaplin was 21 years old) he began to receive considerable press for his roles. Reviewers began to praise him, on a North American tour they claimed that he was "one of the best pantomime artists ever seen here". A representative at Keystone Studios was particularly overjoyed by his performance and intended to sign him to the studio. On Sept 1913, Chaplin signed for $150-per-week ($3,635 adjusting inflation)
It was here, specifically in Kid Auto at the Races that Chaplin debuted his iconic Tramp Character. The Tramp was a well-dressed vagrant with a funny moustache and a funny penguin-like walk who would often find himself in a troublesome yet hilarious situation. The Tramp stood up for the little man whenever necessary and was always adamantly anti-authority.
Chaplin’s star would grow and, as any sensible star would do, Chaplin would ask for an increase in pay. When Keystone couldn’t give him the $1,000/wk he wanted Chaplin went with Essanay Film Manufacturing Company. There he would have more control over his pictures and would slowly tweak the tramp into a more gentle and romantic character. Serious film critics began to notice and appreciate his work. Film scholar Simon Louvish would claim that at Essanay Chaplin "found the themes and the settings that would define the Tramp's world."
Though Chaplin was not an important figure at the start of World War One, he would become a cultural phenomenon in 1915. He was featured in cartoons, comic strips, songs and had his own line of toys, which would stock shelves across the world. He became the film industry’s first international star and thus, like every star ought to do, he asked for more money when his contract ran out. His signing at Mutual Films would earn him $10,000/wk, making him one of the highest paid people in the world.
The Great War was the first of its kind to be fought as Motion Picture Cinema was reaching maturity. In the field, reconnaissance became airborne and cinematic; at home, propaganda leapt from the page to the screen. On the front, perceptions became accelerated, discontinuous,mechanized, as if the soldiers' eyes had turned into cameras.
Chaplin himself said of his films at the time “Laughter is the tonic, the relief, the surcease for pain”
His silent films crossed language barriers and thus he could reach armies of all nationalities. Infact, the Universal accessibility of his language-free films would be the main reason Chaplin would be so hesitant to adapt to sound in his later career. Speaking for Chaplin wouldn’t come until 1940’s The Great Dictator.
British soldiers in the trenches held up cardboard cutouts of Chaplin’s Tramp, hoping the enemy would die laughing. In 1915 a writer to the Oamuru Mail wrote: “The Scottish regiment was marching through a seaport town somewhere in the South of England on its way to the front when several members of the battalion noticed the cutout, and decided to have it. Some time later the owner of the establishment was visited by two swarthy Highlanders who begged to be allowed to take the figure of the cinema favorite with them. The proprietor of the house could not resist, and the cutout is now in the trenches, and possibly before now has attracted a few German bullets.”
Chaplin himself did not enlist in the war, which made for quite a bit of controversy both at the time and later in his career when he was questioned by the FBI. The unusual timing of his popularity and the onset of the war made him an easy target for pundits. For instance, one Spanish cartoon depicts Chaplin and the Kaiser as buddies, with The Tramp wearing a German helmet instead of his trademark bowler cap.
Chaplin would defend himself against these accusations, stating that he would fight for Britain if called and had registered for the American draft, but he was not summoned by either country. Northcliffe’s Daily Mail would attack Chaplin for the war risks bond in his contract with Mutual Films. Essentially it stated that as long as the war was going on, Chaplin was to not return to Britain.
The British Press continued attacking Chaplin, by July 1917 article demanded that Chaplin fight stating “It is Charlie’s duty to offer himself as a recruit and thus show himself proud of his British origin. It is his example which will count so very much, rather than the difference to the war that his joining up will make.”
Northcliffe’s bullying tactics were aggressive, but unsuccessful. Chaplin was known to have invested 25,000 pounds towards the war and gave another $25,000 to US and British activities in the war. The British embassy itself stated that “We would not consider Chaplin a slacker unless we received instructions to put the compulsory services law into effect…”
Other newspapers, like the Charlie Ward would claim that Charlie’s use was better served in the film studio, creating films that would ease the pain of soldiers on the battlefield. Reports would come out that Chaplin had been rejected for the draft due to being undersized and underweight. This stopped much of its harsh critics in the press, though years afterwards he would receive white feathers.
Part of the media’s severe attack against Chaplin was due to The Immigrant (1917). This short film portrays the immigrant’s time as, well, difficult at best and that is partly due to figures of authority. When the US declared war on Germany they were particularly hard on German Immigrants. Anti-German and anti-immigrant sentiment rose across the nation. Though attacks were rare, they were incredibly violent. Immigrant homes and businesses were vandalized and education of other countries and languages was boycotted. President Widrow Wilson flamed the fuel by claiming that “Every citizen must declare himself American- or traitor.”
The Immigration Act of 1917 was the most sweeping immigration act that America had passed. It was the first bill to restrict, instead of regulate, immigrants. IT imposed literacy tests on immigrants, created new categories of inadmissible persons, and barred immigration from the Asia-Pacific Zone. The law banned everyone from “criminals and convicts” to the “physically ill” and “homosexuals”. Needless to say, immigration would slow because of this act, but it was to the detriment of Europe.
Due to the immigration act of 1917, Hollywood also felt a tremendous amount of pressure because much of the studio chiefs were immigrants. It is likely they felt they had to toe the line and agree with the President’s vision of Hollywood as a propaganda vehicle or else risk being deported to a hellish landscape. These fears were justified in the fall of 1915 after several British newspapers accused Hollywood films of being backed by German capital.
The German Carl Laemmle, president of Universal Film Manufacturing Company (later Universal Studios) felt the most heat, but quickly distanced himself from any perceived German alliances. Once Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany Universal produced a slew of films including Uncle Sam at Work, The War Waif, The Birth of Patriotism and Uncle Sam’s Gun Shops. They also produced The Kaiser, The Beast of Berlin (1918) and a satire, The Geezer of Berlin (1918).
Taking aim at businesses and individuals who demonstrated any “pro-German” sensibilities was forefront in Woodrow Wilson’s war effort. Any non-American (and thus pro-German) war sentiment would be immediately censored, as was the case of the war challenging Spirit of 76’ produced by Robert Goldstein. William Fox, the Hungarian who ran Fox Corp, threatened to fire any employee who wasn’t 100% American. Branch managers were instructed to submit confidential reports “as to anybody whom they even suspected of not being true Americans,”
Chaplin would star in a number of Propaganda films designed to show the importance of the United States entering into the war would be. When the United States entered the war in the spring of 1917, Chaplin became a spokesman for Liberty Bonds with his close friends, and later co-owners, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.
It was during this period that Chaplin created at his own expense and starred in ‘The Bond’, a propaganda film for the Liberty Load Committee. The film was designed to help sell U.S Liberty Bonds for the allied cause of World War One. It was fairly successful in doing so as the rate of which war bonds sold greatly increased because of Chaplin’s film.
In 1918 Chaplin would set his sights in making a comedy set in France during World War One, although he had some doubts. Should such a horrendous and bloody war, the likes of which the world had seen until then, be made into comedy fodder by Chaplin? If the Tramp had been in the trenches, watching his friends slowly die a chemically induced death I doubt he would have agreed. Though like all who were not in the war, he had to be motivated by the pro-American press that had come out.
Shoulder Arms (1918) had a fair bit of melancholy in the midst of many hilarious gags.Though criticized for looking cheap, the trenches in which Charlie and his gang are held up are impressively claustrophobic and dark. Shoulder Arms provides some of Chaplin’s funniest humour. When Charlie is asked to explain how he captured 13 German soldiers single-handedly, he replies via title card, “I surrounded them!”
Previously British Media had The Tramp chumming with The Kaiser, and in Shoulder Arms Chaplin would have the last word as his beloved character captured The Kaiser disguised as a tree trunk.
A contemporary New York Times review said of the film (and Chaplin) “There have been learned discussions as to whether Chaplin’s comedy is low or high, artistic or crude, but no one can deny that when he impersonates a screen fool he is funny.” Ultimately Chaplin thought very highly of the film, the doubts that plagued him during production had left his conscience as he claimed “Saying something is too terrible to joke about is like saying a disease is to terrible to try to cure,”
Perhaps Shoulder Arms was so well received because; unknown to Chaplin at the time, the film was released within weeks of the first war being over with the armistice signed by German officials. At the end of the war America, Britain and the Tramp were triumphant. Chaplin proved to the world that his comedy was the best medicine against a brutal, bloody, lengthy war.
After the war Chaplin would co-found United Artists along with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W Griffith. The arrangement was revolutionary in the film industry, as it enabled the four partners – all creative artists – to personally fund their pictures and have complete control. Chaplin’s Tramp would continue being a mischievous character that was adamantly for the proletariat.
Even though this essay is about Chaplin, it would be difficult to tell the story of Chaplin and Hollywood without mentioning D.W Griffith’s Hearts of the World. Made two years after his pacifist film Intolerance, Griffith’s pro-war film was about young lovers (Lilian Gish and Robert Harron) in a French village are torn apart with the coming of the Great War.
The fact that Griffith could go from making a film centering on peace to a picture glorifying war says a lot about the pressure Hollywood was facing from financial backers at the time. The US film industry suffered losses by the closing off of certain European territories, war shortages, regulations and war-related disasters.
The war changed the conditions of filmmaking. Before the war, French Cinematic giants Pathe and Gaumant had enjoyed considerable success. After the war the studios all but ceased production, struggling to find any market recognition outside their borders.
Much of the world’s Cinema had become stagnant until the 20’s, with exception of the cinema of the United States. One immediate consequence of World War One to American Cinema was Hollywood's domination of screens around the world. It took over the markets from which France had withdrawn; it hired away (or provided refuge to) the best talent that Germany had to offer.
Hollywood and Charles Chaplin had grown significantly since the start of the war, mainly due to not having had battles on North American soil. Without this war, the biggest Cinema distributing country in the world right now might very well be France & the biggest star of the 20's could've been a French mime.
This would not be the last war Chaplin would have a part in. When World War Two and the Nazi menace took Europe by storm the formerly silent Tramp would speak loudly even when America would attempt to be neutral. It's a grand story that will be saved for another time.
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