Charlie Chaplin - A Comedian Sees the World

The World Crisis in Dumb Show. The genius for using sound without syllables, which was so effective in his last film, can adapt itself to any locality, any necessity for expression. One imagines the little comedian in his usual picture make-up pleading soundlessly at Geneva for custard pies instead of poison gas. Or at Harbin he sits on a keg of powder and kicks his big, flat shoes against it while he shows a few Generals how to win. The Chinese sound effects in this scene should be good. Riding a Soviet tractor in the Russian fields, wearing a loin cloth and carrying his flexible cane in India, taking off his battered derby to an American bank that never failed, he can remain as silent, wistful and funny as ever in his old character.

New York Times, 15 April 1932

As the New York Times news writer suggests in this excerpt, Charlie Chaplin was (1) often conflated with his film persona, the Little Tramp, and (2) viewed as seemingly at home in diverse locations and situations across the worlds landscape. Chaplin took advantage of the juxtaposition of these two phenomena twice during his long forty-year residence in the United States, in 1921 and in 193132. Each of these trips followed the completion of a film that marked significant risk on Chaplins part, as well as a period of some personal scandal publicized in the press.

When Chaplin left for London in September 1921, he had recently completed his first feature comedy, The Kid. The film was important for several reasons. First, as Charles Maland points out, it followed close on the heels of two relative failures, Sunnyside (1919) and A Days Pleasure Copyrighted by the International Features Service, the article would have appeared in newspapers throughout Americas heartland, thereby presenting Chaplin as a real person who contradicted his film persona.

His 1931-32 trip was propelled by much the same set of conditions. City Lights, the film he released just before his departure, despite its synchronized sound track, was essentially a silent film. By 1931, sound technology had been in place in the film business for more than five years.moralizing middle America. In Europe, there was no split, for most refused to judge Chaplins art on the basis of this particular human frailty. In an essay entitled Hands Off Love, printed in transition in September 1927, a group of thirty-one European artists and intellectuals, including Louis Aragon, Andr Breton, Marcel Duhamel, Max Ernst, Man Ray, and others transmitted their own comments on Chaplins situation to the public:

A Dogs Life. That is at the very moment the life of a man whose genius wont win him his case; of one on whom everyones back will be turned, who will be ruined with impunity, from whom all of his means of expression will be taken, who is being demoralized in the most outrageous fashion, for the benefit of a miserable, spiteful little bourgeoisie, and for the sake of the grandest public hypocrisy possible to imagine. A dogs life. Genius is nothing to the law when matrimony is at stake, the blessed state of matrimony. And anyway as we know, genius is never anything to the law, never. (10)

The American government chose this inconvenient moment (20 January, to be precise) to sue Chaplin for back taxes, seizing and sealing all of his assets, including the studio (Maland 97). By 1931, though, despite the predictions listed in the essay cited above, public rancor had largely been shelved, but the specter of its ability to arise at any moment must have added to the tense atmosphere that surrounded the production of City Lights. As I have tried to show, both junctures (the release of The Kid in 1921 and the release of City Lights in 1931) were tentative ones in Chaplins career and might make or break him professionally. As such, these junctures demanded strong and innovative promotional texts. At each of these points, the travel narrative comes to the rescue, for following each tour, Chaplin released a promotional travel book: My Trip Abroad (1922) and A Comedian Sees the World (193334) respectively.

Historical Context

The world Chaplin decided to tour in early February 1931 was in crisis, both economic and political. In Germany, Hitler had been agitatingthe populace against the tenets of the Treaty of Versailles since the late 1920s. The British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Horace Rumbold (who was to accompany Chaplin to the theater in Berlin in March 1931), in a memo to his financial adviser in March 1929, warned that if war reparations were set at the rumored two million marks, there may be a pretty good row over here leading perhaps to the holding of fresh elections (qtd. in Gilbert 757). Nazis and other political groups in Germany became less and less willing to bear the brunt of World War I guilt on their shoulders. Also, the country itself became less and less able to pay. In fact, the gold standard was causing major problems to the economies of countries across the world. As Carroll Quigley suggests, it was estimated that the worlds stock of gold money needed to increase by 3.1 percent per year in the 1920s to support the worlds economic development with stable prices on the gold standard. The production of new gold after 1920 was below this rate (340). This, combined with the League of Nations recommendation that all countries get on the gold standard, caused a gold rush and subsequent gold shortage. The fact that gold was no longer being distributed evenly among countriesas occurred before World War Isuggested as well that the economic system of that prewar period was no longer adequate. In fact, the United States practice of extending credit indiscriminately at this time caused the Federal Reserve to curtail this practice, with the result that more credit was extended to stock market speculators than before, even though the Reserves measure was supposed to alleviate this problem. The resulting stock market crash on 24 October 1929 in New York sent shock waves around the world. Possibly one of the worst years for Europe and especially for countries like Austria and Britain was 1931.