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aroused compassion; and the jauntiness with which he faced up to the shattering blows of fate, his smallness in a world of mighty toughs and burly policemen, aroused something like admiration.
The Mutual films show clearly that Charlie is the doppelganger of Chaplin himself, and that his films are not only subjective, but in addition offer the lyrical and romantic presentation of his life. The films he had made to date were not simply a series of comedies different in kind and quality from any that had been made before. They were unique in that they were all linked, and traced the first cycle of the little Tramp's saga, an epic that covered the life of Chaplin himself. This gives them an homogeneity different from any other series of films made by the same man.
In 1917, at the end of his third year in films, and with the closing of the Mutual contract, all the elements of Chaplin's future work had been discovered and laid down. Every film afterwards with very few exceptions, will be a development of those elements, a contribution to the saga of Charlie, and evidence of Chaplin's mastery of the medium he made peculiarly his own.
t@, Development
IN 1918, CHAPLIN ACCEPTED THE CONTRACT OFFERED HIM BY THE
First National Film Company, on terms that gave him complete freedom in his work. The films he made for this company have unhappily been withdrawn.
Among them, the trilogy — A Dog's Life, Shoulder Arms and Sunnyside — offer the fullest representation yet of the complex facets of Charlie's character, and therefore the most complete projection of Chaplin's essential self. A Dog's Life is primarily autobiography. The decor of the film reaches new heights, even for Chaplin, with its slum outskirts of an anonymous town, a no-man's-land of streets ending nowhere, or in vaguely defined waste spaces; a place of broken fences, melancholy, hopeless, despairing, with the miasma of abject poverty hanging over it. Here again is the adult Chaplin commenting on his own unhappy childhood, and this time taking it to the universal plane of the misery of all mankind. Though the film is a comedy, filled with side-splitting moments, the tragic undertones make themselves heard.
Shoulder Arms was made in the middle of 1918, and released shortly before the Armistice. In releasing it then, Chaplin gave proof of his own form of moral courage, that impelled him later, in sadly similar circumstances, to make and issue The Great Dictator in 1940, a year after England's declaration of war on Fascism.