The Circus was Charlie Chaplin’s release for the back half of the ‘20s. Happily toiling for his very own United Artists, features starring the Tramp were now all Chaplin was putting out, and he hadn’t done anything since 1925’s The Gold Rush. This is not even remotely problematic, for though The Circus underperformed relative to The Gold Rush (finishing 7th for the decade financially, as opposed to 5th), its more modest scope and ambitions fit that.
The Circus is the result of a long-term thought, dating back a decade: What if the Tramp went to a circus? This is a simple idea, deceptively so, more in line with the mentality which produced the shorts of the ‘10s – change up the location, and in each film explore the new comic possibilities it presents. The Circus feels, with no insult intended, like an old Chaplin short stretched out to three times its length. There are barely any plot complications one couldn’t find in some of Chaplin’s superior shorts – in fact, both The Tramp and The Vagabond provide the dramatic backbone which The Circus then elaborates upon.
Here is the plot, in total: The Tramp (Chaplin, duh) goes to the circus. He gains employment, falls in love with a nameless Girl (Merna Kennedy), and ultimately leaves dejected upon learning her heart belongs to a more traditionally manly suitor (here, Harry Crocker). For reference, it’s pretty close to the plot of Big Top Pee-Wee as well.
The meat of this story is obviously the romance, same as it is not only in the majority of Chaplin’s filmography, but in that of practically every silent era comedian. A love interest makes for a great MacGuffin for all the ridiculous stunt sequences filmmakers cooked up in the ‘20s. And with the circus setting, nicely hermetic and self-contained, a love story does not distract from the setting’s promise in the way it does in The Gold Rush. Any zaniness the Tramp gets up to under the big top can be traced back to his desires to impress the Girl – that is, when he’s not engaging in tomfoolery in order to eat, because hunger remains the driving force in the Tramp’s universe, which really makes one worry about living conditions in the 1920s. (Gags such as stealing away the apple from a William Tell performance would, in today’s climate, be obesity jokes. Here, it’s a joke on paucity, not abundance – an interesting distinction.)
The broad strokes of The Circus are absolutely nothing unique in the Tramp’s playbook, and for that reason it gains the same advantages as the shorts. One advantage is that the story is preset, formulaic in the way which benefits comedy, because it creates anticipation, can then subvert it, all in an intimately familiar framework. Like a short, The Circus excels around that basic story, because the cloying love scenes between the Tramp and the Girl are nothing new whatsoever, and I’ve said my peace on this side of Chaplin’s game. So it’s a good thing that the circus is a rich setting, wholly capable of sustaining a short film’s formula for feature length, with a varied series of individual comic sequences:
- First, a cop chases the Tramp through the fairgrounds, which is another way of saying “Silent Comedy 101.” This particular cop chase stands out through the clever use of a Mirror Maze, long before The Lady from Shanghai or Enter the Dragon did so more seriously. Moving outside, Chaplin also gets the opportunity to fashion an animatronics-inspired pantomime routine, all the better to fit in with the Noah’s Ark robots on display actively violating God’s laws and the Uncanny Valley.
- The chase continues into the big top, along the way passing over Gravitrons and other such spinning amusements. Unintentionally taking the circus’ center ring, the Tramp upstages the traditional (and purposefully unfunny) clowns – surely a bit of self-congratulatory meta commentary on Chaplin’s part, and indeed the start of a thread. The gist of it is that the audience (the circus’ audience that is; people at home may be of more wildly divergent opinions) find the Tramp hee-la-ri-ous, and thus our hero is employed.
A few more random scenarios:
- The Tramp performs as the magician – and screws it up royally. An attempt to pull a rabbit from his top hat (which he traded his traditional derby out for) results in the mass escape of bunnies, piglets and doves. Furthermore, the Tramp exposes the trick’s entire secret – the Alliance isn’t going to be too pleased with this.
- The Tramp is locked in the cage with a sleeping lion. He tries to escape without waking the great beast, resulting in a silent symphony of noises nearly made, then avoided – slamming doors, falling pots, barking dogs, even a tiger at one stage just in case lions aren’t your particular big cat of choice. (This moment has its ancestor in “Don Quixote,” which is an automatic way to curry my favor. Mmm, curry…)
- Climactically, the Tramp performs on the high wire trapeze – to impress the Girl, natch. Anticipating future developments in Hong Kong cinema, the Tramp hooks himself up with a safety wire, to prevent falling…and Chaplin is among the few situational comedians who can actually make the inclusion of a safety device the cause of greater danger. (There isn’t, overall, the same sort of devotion to danger here as in The Gold Rush, but those unexpected moments are most impressive indeed – Hell, I’d wager Chaplin’s tightrope performance is even the closest he’s come to approximating the more death-defying stunts of Keaton or Lloyd.) And all this is before the scene inundates with monkeys, because like with “Don Quixote,” monkeys automatically make anything better.
So it goes for The Circus’ major set pieces, individual encapsulations of joy which best represent their movie.
Then there’s the question of Chaplin’s meta commentary – and relax, there’s nothing particularly up-its-own-butt with medium awareness here (we leave that to Keaton’s utterly indispensible masterpiece Sherlock, Jr.). Recall the ringmaster (Al Ernest Garcia) hired the Tramp because he was funny. Naturally, the Tramp is made a clown, though he’s never put into the traditional clown makeup, possibly because everyone realizes that the Tramp’s classic appearance is in fact Chaplin’s makeup. Or something – it made more sense in my brain. The only issue is that the Tramp, as a clown trying to be funny, isn’t. Not that the other clowns are funny either (creepy, yes, but you already knew that), but a self-aware Tramp cannot reach even their level of schmaltzy, trite slapstick. To give Chaplin the credit, he (and not his Tramp) remains funny – a guy trying to be funny and failing, portrayed by a guy trying to be funny and succeeding, it’s all pretty good.
…The Tramp cannot be intentionally funny – His whole persona was built upon a poor man with awkward physical delusions of class, hence his cane and derby and ill-fitting pants. (A question arises: How do we get our mirth from the Tramp? Do we laugh with or at him? For all his human desires, he feels wholly unreal, down to the almost ceremonial body language which no longer carries anything identifiably “funny” about it.) To rectify this problem, the ringmaster realizes that the Tramp is funny in non-comic performances – leading chiefly to his magic act (the trapeze scenario is more something of the Tramp’s own devising). There is a potential farce to be had in this notion, to continually reinvent a performer’s act without his own knowing – a farce Chaplin is rather disinterested in, as it butts heads with the growing romantic subplot (which I won’t examine). But it boils down to this: The Tramp brings the circus untold success.
The Circus was originally intended for a 1927 release – a mere two years after The Gold Rush. This was on the dawn of the sound era, and legend has it that some of Chaplin’s more moving trapeze scenes were filmed immediately following the release of The Jazz Singer (the first big deal sound picture). It then becomes easy to read the circus as a microcosm of Chaplin’s greater Hollywood career – Its initial rabble of grotesque, undisciplined clowns clearly a parallel for Keystone Studios. And when the classic ending from The Tramp replays –the Tramp walks alone down a deserted road – it comes when he and the circus part ways, the fallout of his doomed romance. Could it be Chaplin was declaring his hostility towards sound cinema, a movement he proved obstinately opposed to?
Well, there’s a great deal of personal darkness informing The Circus, for as disposable and light as it is (certainly after all the abject starvation of The Gold Rush or the emotional apocalypse of The Kid). That its release was delayed for a year speaks volumes – of Chaplin’s struggles with the IRS, who were on a training run for Capone, demanding back taxes from fat cat celebrities.
Chaplin wound up owing the Federal Government…uh…I actually don’t know, so let’s just say a million dollars. (That’s a rounded estimation, but the most common number cited in any Chaplin biography.) Around the same time, he owed something similar to Lisa Grey, his second wife he was in the middle of divorcing. For you see, Grey was at one time a sixteen-year-old, which is what attracted Chaplin to her, but now she was a doddering old hen at nineteen! Chaplin the humorist was truly his era’s Woody Allen, for he persisted in his public demand for nubile young flesh, reportedly whoring himself around with underage girls repea– What am I, the “TMZ” for 1927?! (For what it’s worth, Nabokov’s “Lolita” was inspired by all this mess. What a legacy!)
Okay, the main point is Chaplin’s life was incredibly crappy while The Circus was being made, well in contrast with his Tramp character – and that’s to say nothing of the film studio burning down, or Chaplin’s mother dying. In light of my repeatedly-stated preference for Buster Keaton (Keaton’s The General is perhaps my favorite film of all time), it’s easy to think harshly of the Chaplin in this era. Basically, he seems desperate for attention. There’s mugging going on, with little grins and sideways glances at the camera. For over the past decade, he’d been the unquestioned comic star of the universe, who could do no (artistic) wrong, and it’s likely brilliance doesn’t best thrive while being actively hailed. I fear I’m largely repeating an old Roger Ebert argument here, and obviously stating it worse.
What I’m saying is that there’s a disconnect between the Tramp and Chaplin, one living hand-to-mouth, the other making movies only when it damn well suits him. Chaplin still expects our opinion of the Tramp to be our opinion of him, the hard-working underdog with millions of dollars and multiple barely legal love slaves. Thus, to regain our trust, the Tramp ends The Circus as aimless as he began, sans success or love or even an apple. (Oh, and he steals from a small child, which I trust was “relatable” to the average American in 1928.)
What little effect assorted scandals had upon Chaplin’s art or public reputation, all things considered! Many of his greatest masterpieces are yet to come, as proof that certain child-impregnating artists (see also Roman Polanski) can somehow remain forever divorced (as it were) from their scandalous real lives. The fictional Tramp, if separated from Chaplin, still has value.
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