Charlie Chaplin (1951)

cc 50 freeing the girl. As he embraces her, the dream fades, and he wakes up to find himself kissing his mop. Catching sight of the stenographer and her cashier sweetheart in affectionate embrace, he kicks away the wilted bouquet and ambles back to the vault. In later years Chaplin remarked, "I dislike tragedy. Life is sad enough. I only use pathos as a means of effecting beauty, for so much of the tragic is in all beauty." Another new note, introduced in this period, was the comic transposition. In "A Night Out" Charlie, undressing in drunken confusion, puts his cane to bed, tries to pour himself a glass of water out of the telephone, "hangs" his trousers out of the window, uses tooth-paste to polish his shoes, and so forth. In "The Tramp" he tries to milk a cow by "pumping" her tail and uses a small watering can on a row of orchard trees. In "Police" he approaches an oven door as if it were a safe and opens it by working the "combination" on the knob. The "Carmen" duel is successively transformed into a dance, a billiard game, and a wrestling match. These oblique transmutations of objects or movements were carried to a climax in the famous alarm-clock scene in "The Pawnshop" (1916); but perhaps the most famous example is the Thanksgiving dinner in "The Gold Rush" (1925), where Charlie sucks every last bit of nourishment from a boiled shoe. Closely related to the comic transpositions are the little notes of fantasy inserted into realistic scenes. In "A Night Out," as the drunken Charlie is being dragged along the sidewalk by Ben Turpin, his partner of the evening, he daintily plucks flowers in the bordering grass and inhales their fragrance as if he were floating dreamily in a boat among waterlilies. In "Work" the tilt of the camera exaggerates the slope of a hill up which Charlie drags his boss, seated on a heavily laden wagon