Charlie Chaplin (1951)

cc 236 Griffith also composed some musical themes for his pictures. But perhaps of no other one man can it be said that he wrote, directed, acted, and scored a motion picture. Incidentally, Chaplin even conducted the orchestra, himself, during recordings, an added reason for the satisfying impression of wholeness in the Chaplin films. Although musically untrained, Chaplin nevertheless had the advantages of a musical inheritance from his ballad-singer father, the natural endowment of a quick ear, and a superb sense of rhythm, a taste for the art, experience with it on the stage, and an amateur performer's devotion to it. In "My Trip Abroad" there is a passage describing his first consciousness of music. As a boy, in Kennington Cross, he was enraptured by a weird duet on clarinet and harmonica, to a tune he later identified as the popular song, "The Honeysuckle and the Bee." "It was played with such feeling that I became conscious, for the first time, of what melody really was." According to Fred Karno's biography, young Chaplin spent much of his leisure time between shows picking out tunes on an old cello. When Chaplin was signed by the Essanay Company, he bought a violin on which he scraped for hours at night, to the annoyance of less wakeful actors when they all lived next to the studio at Niles, California. While he was being feted during the negotiations with the Mutual Company in New York, Chaplin, appearing at a benefit concert at the old Hippodrome (February 20, 1916), led Sousa's band in the "Poet and Peasant" overture and his own composition, "The Peace Patrol." That same year Chaplin published two songs, "Oh that Cello" and "There's Always Someone You Can't Forget," which was a musical tribute to his first romance. In the twenties he made records of his "Sing a Song" and "With You, Dear, in Bombay," both later used in