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ONE OF THE MAJOR INTERESTS OF CHAPLIN' S WORK IN FILM LIES
in its subjective nature. It is the direct and astonishing expression of himself, and that factor gives homogeneity to all his films. From the guttersnipe malice of the Charlie of the Keystone Films has evolved the suave and subtle malice of Monsieur Verdoux. Between lies the evolution of a genius in terms of film.
In the year he spent under Mack Sennett at the Keystone Studios (1914-15), Chaplin learned the rudiments of film making, and how to transpose his own music-hall acts into film terms.
Standing out in bold relief against the background of ordinary slapstick, the figure of Charlie the little tramp, with his dancer's control of movement, and his astonishing agility, began to touch the hearts of his audiences with his laugh-provoking silhouette — the small bowler perched on a curly mop of hair, the tight short jacket buttoned over several waistcoats, the baggy trousers falling over the huge outturned boots, the jaunty cane expressing every mood of its owner.
Gradually, Charlie was evolved. He emerges, at this stage, as an embodiment, in simple terms, of Chaplin's childhood. He is the Whitechapel gutter urchin, always alert and on the offensive, malicious, faintly vicious, and with guttersnipe gestures — as when, in Caught In A Cabaret (1914), in a fight with Chester Conklin, he metamorphoses the slum nose prod, several times repeated, into a marvel of comic movement; or in The Fatal Mallet (1914) approaches an opponent with his backside jutting out from the waist in the immemorial manner of the slum gamecock.
Even in so early a stage, the little tramp is out of step with society, as the young Chaplin was out of step with his world. And from the beginning, Charlie is fastidious, a quality shown in the ragged elegance of his clothes, and in scenes where the little tramp brushes his clothes and polishes his nails with a scrubbing-brush; or delicately dips his finger tips in water after a meal of broken bits and pieces.
The Keystone films, now museum pieces, give us the childhood of Charlie the tramp — a figure of potentiality and promise rather than of achievement, feeling his way into the fantastic world prepared for him by the framework of Keystone comedy, out of step with that world, frustrated but never quite conquered by it.
The original elements in his work, that are dimly perceptible in the 35 Keystone Comedies — satire, lyricism, the malevolent life of inanimate objects, the humour of incongruity (as when he wears the bowler and spats with a leopard-skin in His Prehistoric Past (1914), — go side by side with the originality of his cinematic approach. At a