Charlie Chaplin: Lord of mute Laughter

100 years before Charlie Chaplin was first seen in his tramp character at Bristol's Slapstick festival.

A centennial is more than plea enough for a party, even if the centenary boy is a work of fiction – a tramp, even, with ill-fitting shoes, an aggressive streak and bow legs. This is the year of the Tramp. 2014 marks 100 years since Charlie Chaplin was first appeared on a film screen as a strange fellow with a toothbrush moustache and a derby hat along with a stick in his hand, walking with splayed feet and carrying a cane. Due to the global fame of Charlie Chaplin, every year around the world there are many events held to mark the anniversary, but this time, the corks were popped in Bristol. The city's pleasantry festival, itself rejoicing a decade on the job, kicked up its heels with a luxurious gala showing of Chaplin's late silent masterpiece City Lights, and some searching questions about who exactly we were commemorating.

As the Tramp arrived, so the story goes, on a routine day at Keystone studios in January 1914. Studio chief Mack Sennett worried that the film they were making, Mabel's Strange Predicament, was missing a few killer gags, so he sent Chaplin, who had just joined the company, to get adorned in a "comedy makeup", come back to the set and inject some laughs. According to Chaplin's much-quoted recollection of the day, the whole idea for the outfit, and the character of the Tramp, came to him just after a moment's thought: “while going towards the wardrobe I thought I would wear baggy pants, big shoes, a derby hat and a cane. I wanted all stuff a contradiction: the pants baggy and the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large." According to Chaplin’s autobiography the moustache was added to age his 24-year-old face without masking his expressions. "The outfit and the makeup realized me the person he was. I started to know and understand him, and by the time I walked on to the stage he was fully born."

David Robinson Chaplin biographer argued that it was not so easy birth. The "little fellow" character was an immediate hit with audiences, yielding his creator an unparallel stage of fame; he had a more ongoing evolution than that story proposed. The character Chaplin plays in that early Keystone the Tramp of The Kid or City Lights. He's meaner, tougher and certainly not a rough sleeper. He often remains employed as a piano mover, a waiter, a property man at a film studio, and sometimes he appear with a home, a wife and child. 

By this time, Chaplin was a worldwide success; he had moved to the Essanay studio for $1,250-a-week salary and take on Edna Purviance as a leading lady. The Tramp was a smart film that folds tragedy tidily into the humor, with our hero playing a caring wanderer down on his luck who finds welcome and work at a farm. There is abundance of unruly fun with pitchforks and ladders, but at the film's bittersweet end, thinking he has been cast off by Purviance, Chaplin waddles off down a dirty road, at 1st dejectedly and then with a recognizable spring in his step.

The mastermind of the Tramp's long development is that Chaplin produced a character who was an everyman before he was known as an outsider – which is partially how he finally came to win the viewers’ sympathy for an unlikely leading man. If you look at American movies from around the time of Chaplin's screen entrance, tramps are the villains: house thief, street assaulter and train robbers. It was not profitable to present a tramp as a hero, or a lover. And it's no accident either that all the while that Chaplin was cleansing his onscreen individuality; his own standing was under attack. Actually, the Tramp was far more popular than he was. At the occurrence of the 1st World War, Chaplin was already a huge success, but his reputation made him a target. As film historian Kevin Brownlow detailed at the carnival, even before the beginning of recruitment in 1916 there were calls in the British print media for Chaplin to return home from the US and join in the British army. Press baron Lord Northcliffe joined the throng of "slacker" allegations and Chaplin was teased in popular songs and cartoons. "I really felt that they were coming to get me," he later said. At other side, Chaplin was using his celebrity rank to sell freedom bonds in the States, and shifting large amounts of his considerable income to the British government. Cutouts of the Tramp were support up by soldiers in British ditch "so the Germans would die laughingly" and his movies were anticipated on the ceilings of military hospitals so injured soldiers could enjoy a morale-raising chuckle from their beds.

Chaplin had to beat a delicate balance. His main defense against the bombardment of white feathers was that his wealth and pressure cause to be him more valuable to his country in Los Angeles than at the front – which was placing him at a far cry from the loser he played on screen. No doubt the bad name was the part of his motivation for depiction the character more sympathetic, more horizontal to sweetness than petty theft and fighting. It would be a generalization to say that Chaplin solved these tensions at a blow by making his war comedy Shoulder Arms, but the Tramp's manifestation in the ditches was certainly well-timed. The war was almost over, but the viewers who (literally) about to tear down cinema doors to see the film, were delighted to see their beloved Tramp in military uniform, and capturing the Kaiser too.

While Chaplin's source story for the Tramp is a beautiful piece of movie sense-making, the truth is unavoidably more complex and more interesting – it took much time for the little fellow to grow into the Tramp, and longer still for the Tramp to become a hero. What's charming is that even while the over-romanticizing swelled, the Tramp never lost his edge. The Slapstick festival arranged the occasion to watch Chaplin both in City Lights, which took years to make and was finally released in 1931

The first movie ends with Chaplin gunning grotesquely at the camera, a final conflict to give the audience a joggle and a giggle. City Lights also ends on a close-up of the Tramp, smiling apprehensively at the woman he loves, who is seeing him for the first time – a question hovering in the air as to whether she will come back his love now she knows his low-rent personality. This centenary is the just right to time to return that stare, and appreciate Chaplin's genius in making cinema viewers fall in love with someone they never wish for.