Auteur François Truffaut

Auteur François Truffaut was born 1932 in Paris and died 1984 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris. His mother and stepfather sent Truffaut when he was a young boy to live with various nannies as wll as an important loving grandmother, who nurtured his love of the arts. As a teenager, he was an enthusiastic moviegoer, often found in the front row of Henri Langlois et la Cinémathèque française, which was co-founded by Georges Franju and Jean Mitry. Langlois (1914-1977) was a French film archivist and cinephile. During the Second World War, Langlois and his colleagues helped save many films that were at risk of being destroyed during the Nazi occupation of France

As a pioneer of film preservation, Langlois was an influential figure in the history of cinema, where his film screenings in Paris in the 1950s are often credited with providing the ideals that led to the development of the politique des auteurs (auteur theory) on the generation of young cinephiles and critics who would later become the La Nouvelle Vague (French New Wave). Among the directors included were Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and Alain Resnais. The future filmmakers were called les enfants de la cinémathèque (children of the cinémathèque), as they could often be found in the front row of packed screenings.

When Truffaut first took a chair at the cinémathèque he spoke that when the screen lit up, it was the first time he could see films that had been banned, films that he had never been allowed to see, films that he didn’t know had existed, and films that ultimately changed his life – the effect was immense, overwhelming, transformative. Even more so, for Langlois would screen the films, back-to-back, without any breaks between them: westerns by John Ford, comedies by Chaplin, and Josef von Sternberg films with Marlene Dietrich; gangster films by Howard Hawks, musicals by Vincent Minnelli and crime dramas by Robert Bresson and Fritz Lang; and, most importantly, films by Jean Renoir and Alfred Hitchcock, who would become his idols. It was akin to seeing them all at once.

For Godard and Truffaut: In Defense of Henri Langlois et la Cinémathèque française scroll below to post script.

After starting his own film club in 1948, Truffaut met film critic, André Bazin, who had a great effect on his professional and personal life, ultimately becoming his spiritual father. Bazin was the head of another film society and became a personal friend and helped him out of various financial and criminal situations during his formative years. At 18, Truffaut joined the French Army in 1950, but spent the next two years trying to escape, and was arrested for attempting to desert the army and incarcerated in military prison. Bazin used his political contacts to get Truffaut released and set him up with a job at his new film magazine, Cahiers du cinéma (Notebook of Cinema), which allowed Truffaut a platform to echo Bazin’s critical film philosophy, the politique des auteurs, a theory which changed the landscape of film criticism and cinema forever.

For more Auteur, scroll below to post script and see the politique des auteurs.

Composer and conductor Maurice Jauber.

Maurice Jaubert (born 1900 in Nice) was a prolific French composer who scored some of the most important French films of the early sound era. Jaubert grew up in a musical household, and began playing the piano aged five. Jaubert left for Paris and studied law and literature at the Sorbonne, but became seduced by classical music. His music was written in a style of clarity, frankness and freedom, in which he did not seek novelty for the sake of it, where his spontaneity is not weighed down by pedantic formulas.

Maurice Jaubert was the second son of François Jaubert, a lawyer who would become the president of the Nice Bar Association. He followed in his father’s footsteps and upon graduation from the Sorbonne, became the youngest lawyer in his hometown.

After Jaubert was awarded the baccalaureat (a college bachelor’s degree), from the Lycée Masséna in Nice in 1916, he enrolled at the Nice Conservatory of Music, where he studied harmony, counterpoint and piano. He was awarded the first piano prize in 1916.

Although Maurice Jaubert understood and appreciated film composing and scoring, he also had other creative musical outlets. As music director of Pathé-Nathan studio, he conducted musical orchestrations of several other composers, including Arthur Honegger and Darius Milhaud.

Left to right: Maurice Jaubert, French writer Jean Giono, and Brazilian-French film director, Alberto Cavalcanti, courtesy of Underscore,fr/portraits.L

Jaubert was a French army officer in engineering during World War I, and was demobilized in 1922. The next year he completed his musical education in Paris with Albert Groz, while undertaking a variety of music related jobs such as proof correction and checking Pleyela rolls.

The compositions by Jaubert’s in the early 1920s included songs, piano pieces, chamber music and divertissements. He wrote his first stage music in 1925 for a play by Calderón, Le Magicien prodigieux, using the Pleyela, a revolutionary player piano at the time. He was then hired by Pleyel to record rolls on the Pleyela.

Left to right: Maurice Ravel, French Romantic composer and best man at Jaubert’s wedding; Georges Neveux, devenu secrétaire de La Comédie; and Jaubert as the new smiling husband, courtesy of Underscore,fr/portraits.

Jaubert as a young composer, was attracted by technical innovations that could serve his artistic aspirations. While working on the play, Le Magicien prodigieux, he met a young soprano, Marthe Bréga, who would later sing most of his vocal compositions. They married in 1926, with composer, Maurice Ravel as his best man.

In 1929, while pursuing his work for the concert hall and the stage, Maurice Jaubert began writing and conducting for the cinema. He collaborated with prominent directors such as Alberto Cavalcanti (Le Petit Chaperon Rouge), Jean Vigo (Zero for Conduct and L’Atalante), René Clair (Quatorze Juillet), Julien Duvivier (Carnet de bal and La Fin du Jour), and Marcel Carné’s Drôle de drame, Hôtel du Nord and Quai des brumes (Port of Shadows).

Maurice Jaubert and François Truffaut

Thirty years after Maurice Jaubert’s death, director François Truffaut, purchased the publishing rights to four of his orchestral compositions.

It is believed that Truffaut first discovered Jaubert’s compositional music scores on the radio, but it’s never been determined which score he first heard. Perhaps it was Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, where Jaubert in an early scene asked his musicians play the score backwards, similar to what George Martin would do in The Beatles’ recordings 35-years-later. Or, possibly from the film, Carnet de bal, where Jaubert enhanced director Julien Duvivier’s illusionary imagery with his own brillant use of lyrical imagery in his compositional music soundtrack.

Nevertheless, an emotional bond was set, when Truffaut used four of Jaubert’s orchestral compositions to four of his own films: Le Chambre Verte, L’Histoire d’Adèle, L’Homme qui aimait les femmes and L’Argent de poche.

Le Chambre Verte (The Green Room, 1978) was a deeply personal project for Truffaut, where he spent several years working on the film’s script, played the main character, Davenne, and felt a special connection to the theme of honoring and remembering the dead. In the film, he finds a forgotten, derelict altar, and rebuilds it and rechristens it as his own Altar of the Dead. The film is adapted from Henry James’ 1895 short story, Altar of the Dead and also two other works by James: The Beast in the Jungle and The Way It Came. Inside the chapel Davenne places portraits of people from his own life, which included composer Maurice Jaubert, writer Henry James and actor Oskar Werner, taken from footage of Jules and Jim, when Werner was an Austrian-German soldier during the Great War.

Cécilia, played by Nathalie Baye, then better known as the script girl in Truffaut’s1973 film, La Nuit américaine (Day for Night), plays the role of a young woman who helps him build his alter. Complications arise when Cécilia requests that one of the candles represent her former deceased lover, but is rebuffed by Davenne, due to a betrayal by the deceased man in the past.

Le Chambre Verte was one of Truffaut’s most critically praised films, and considered by some as his most personal, but also one of his least successful financially. From that point on, Truffaut’s films were never quite the same, making more popular mainstream films like the crowd pleasing Le Dernier Métro, a 1980 historical drama film, which won ten César Awards for best film, best actor (Depardieu), best actress (Deneuve), best cinematography, best director, best editing, best music, best production design, best sound and best writing. The box office and accolades were immense, but for many serious critics it spelled the kiss of death of Truffaut’s personal films. Truffaut followed with La Femme d’à côté, a film about adultry, and the detective film, Vivement dimanche!, where he did display his personal vision in his love of genre films. In a sense; one for Renoir and one for Hitchcock.

The 1975 film, L’Histoire d’Adèle (The Story of Adèle H.) is a historical drama directed by François Truffaut, and starring Isabelle Adjani, Bruce Robinson and Sylvia Marriott, based on Adèle Hugo’s diaries. The narrative is about Adèle Hugo, the daughter of writer Victor Hugo, once considered the most famous man in France. Victor Hugo was so famous that Adèle would only use the first initial of her surname to hide her identity. Adèle Hugo’s unrequited love for a military officer leads to her downfall. Throughout the film she is on a quest to find the military officer, but, as the film ends, she has become battered and weary to the point of destitution, that when she finally finds the officer, she passes by him without realizing who he is.

As in all four of Truffaut and Jaubert films, the images, sound and music are profound. But much notice was given to 20-year-old Isabelle Adjani, who justifiably received critical acclaim for her performance as Adele H., which led to her status as a legend on the French screen today.

Truffaut’s 1977 film, L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (The Man Who Loved Women) is billed as a romantic comedy about a man who loves women. The film stars Bertrand Morane, played by Charles Denner, a Truffaut regular who had appeared in his earlier films, 1968’s La Mariée était en noir (The Bride Wore Black) and 1972’s Une belle fille comme moi (Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me). The movie begins with one the most joyful funerals in film history, where in attendance are all the women with whom Morane loved in his life. The ensemble of female actors is too irresistible not to list, which features, Brigitte Fossey, the former child star of Clément’s1952 landmark film, Jeux Interdits (Forbidden Games), Leslie Caron, with no introduction required; Nelly Borgeaud as one of Bertrand’s emotionally unstable lovers; Geneviève as Hélène, a lingerie saleswoman; and Valérie Fabienne, one of Bertrand’s former lovers, who he regrets making her think that he wanted a serious relationship with her.

As noted above, Bertrand Morane loved women, as Truffaut did as well; so, let’s close with the opening of one of the cinema’s most euphoric funeral sequences in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes.

The cast also included, Roselyne Puyo as Nicole, in a bit part as an usherette, who in real life is deaf. Truffaut also served as a passionate voice for those who suffered from disabilities; reminding audiences that they too exist, and to also show those who suffer with disabilities, a pathway to live a relativity normal life and join or re-join “normal society.” This act of courage is best illustrated by T-Boy’s Brom Wikstrom. So take a trek to Machu Picchu in a mobile wheelchair with Brom and his bride, Anne’: Looking Back: Lima, Machu Picchu, Peru – Brom Wikstrom, Traveling Boy

In 1976’s L’Argent de poche, Truffaut mixes the story of his actors with childhood experiences and the challenges of a number of children. Scenes include life at school; a toddler and a cat, playing on an open windowsill but falling down unhurt; a young girl, played by Truffaut’s daughter, causing confusion with a bullhorn; Bruno showing his friends how speak to girls; a double date at a movie theater; a child telling a dirty joke; first love and a first kiss. The main character is the motherless Patrick, who lives alone with his father who uses a wheelchair for mobility and an automatic page turner to read books. His mysterious friend, Julien, lives in poverty, has long unwashed hair and cannot stay awake at school due to long nights without sleep, wandering the empty, dark city streets. Patrick notices Julien constantly refuses to change his clothes for gym class, and his curious why does not.

In the end, Julien and his classmates realize why he doesn’t remove his clothes for gym classes; to hide his bruises that cover his body, making it obvious that he was beaten by his parents. Once the criminal news of Julien’s parent’s cruel abuse becomes public, he is rescued from his family, who are arrested as angry mobs of citizens pound their fists on the police wagon, aware that abusing a child is the greatest crime ever commited by a parent.

L’Argent de poche ends with an important message by one of the schoolteachers, Jean-François Stévenin, in a stunning performance by Jean-François Richet, about child abuse, injustice, children’s rights, hope, love and resilience: Of all mankind’s injustices, injustice to children is the most despicable! Life isn’t always fair, but we can fight for justice… If kids had the right to vote, they would have better schools. Life isn’t easy. You must learn to be tough. I don’t mean ‘gangster-tough’. What I mean is having endurance and resilience… Time flies. Before long, you will have children of your own. If you love them, they will love you. If they don’t feel you love them, they will transfer their love and tenderness to other people. Or to things. That’s life! Each of us needs to be loved.”

François Truffaut’s first feature: Les quatre cents coups

Jean-Pierre Leoud plays a loose version of Truffaut in 1959’s “Les quatre cents coups” (“The 400 Blows”), a film highly influenced by Jean Vigo’s “Zero for Conduct” which paralleled tragic instances in Truffaut’s own childhood. Before the film was made, Truffaut dedicated it to his spiritual father, Andre Bazin, who succumbed to death prior to the film’s release. Photograph courtesy of In a Lonely Place Film, Growing-up is Still Difficult.

The narrative of Les quatre cents coup is taken from the point-of-view of Truffaut’s cinematic counterpart, Antoine Doinel, a reacurring character who appeared in four features and one short film, often referred to as the Antoine Doinel Cycle. The film re-creates the trials of Truffaut’s own childhood, unsentimentally portraying aloof parents, oppressive teachers, and petty crime, with Antoine Doinel played by actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, a veteran of six and a half of Truffaut’s films. Les quatre cents coup marked Truffaut’s passage from a leading film critic to trailblazing auteur of the La Nouvelle Vague. In the 2022 Sight & Sound Critics’ Poll, Les quatre cents coups was ranked 50th as one of the greatest films ever made.

Truffaut and Fatherhood

In both of Truffaut’s public and private life, the concept of fatherhood was an endearing theme; a biological father who abandoned him in his early childhood; Andrea Bazin, his spiritual father; Jean Renoir and Alfred Hitchcock, fathers who mentored his own love and art in cinema; and Jean-Pierre Léaud, who referred to Truffaut as his cinematic father.  Later, after Léaud appeared in Antonie and Collete, he played in a number of Jean-Luc Godard films, and was quoted as saying: If Truffaut is my father, then Godard is my uncle. As Truffaut became older he became obsessed with finding the name of his own biologicall father to the point of hiring private detectives. Eventually the name of his real father was found, a successful French dentist of Jewish ancestry.

François Truffaut: film critic, now director, received the award for Best Director at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival.

In 1958, François Truffaut was regarded as the enfant terrible of film critics, due to the politique des auteurs, and was banned from the Cannes Film Festival. The next year, he submitted his directorial debut to the festival, Les quatre cents coups and received the award for Best Director and a Palme d’Or nomination. From that year onward, Truffaut’s life dramatically changed forever. 

Truffaut as Actor

English language film director Alfred Hitchcock made cameo appearances in 40 of his 53 surviving major films. Truffaut was also fond of appearing in his own films, but often as a lead character. He also appeared in films made by other directors, such as the playing the role of Claude Lacombe, a French scientist with a bad command of English, in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Later, Truffaut spoke of his own first encounter on the film’s set: When I first arrived on the set of the Spielberg film, I quickly put my book by Stanislawski back into my suitcase.

Jaubert as Composer

As music director of Pathé-Nathan studio, Jaubert conducted the film scores of several other composers, including Arthur Honegger and Darious Milhaud. In the 1930s he gained a reputation as a conductor in France and abroad, most notably for the final season of Marguerite Bériza’s opera company and the season of opéras-bouffes for the 1937 exposition. At the Comédie des Champs-Élysées, in 1937, he conducted the premiere of Philippine, an opérette, by Marcel Delannoy with libretto by Henri Lyon and Jean Limozin.

Maurice Jaubert (1900-1940)

Jaubert enlisted in a French army engineering company during World War II which he would command as a reserve captain. When his company mobilized in September 1939, he was fatally wounded after having successfully blown up a bridge. He died at age 45 a few hours later at the Baccarat Hospital on June 1940. His letters to his wife reflected a spirit of sacrifice tinged with deep humanism. Jaubert did not live to hear his last two compositions, written at his base camp. Jaubert’s gravesite rests in Montmartre Cemetery in Paris.

Maurice Jaubert left a legacy of written articles about lectures, his musical tastes and political opinions, which included a passionate support of German-born American composer Kurt Weill, who created a revolutionary kind of opera of sharp social satire in collaboration with the writer Bertolt Brecht.

François Truffaut, (1932-1984)

Truffaut suffered from a brain tumor and underwent an operation at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine on September 12. He died just over a year later in the hospital on October 21, 1984 at the age of 56-years-old. At his bedside were Madeleine Morgenstern, film producer and ex-wife; their two children, Laura and Eva; and actress Fanny Ardant, with wholm he lived with from 1981 to 1984 and had a daughter, Joséphine Truffaut (born September 1983). Ardant apeared in Truffaut’s final two films, La Femme d’à côté and Vivement dimanche! As he had requested, his body was cremated and his ashes were buried also in the Montmartre Cemetery in Paris. Truffaut was an atheisit, but chose to have a Mass celebrated for him at the church of Saint-Roche, believed to be in the honor of the Roman Catholic Church.

At the time of Truffaut’s death, he was considered by many critics and moviegoers as the most popular French film director of his era. Film audiences flocked to his films, whose main themes were passion, women, childhood and awareness of the disabled, which struck a chord with both critics and moviegoers alike.

To hear more about François Truffaut and Maurice Jaubert, consider purchasing the album, Bandes Sonores Originales Des Films, which includes the scores, L’Argent de poche, L’Histoire d’Adèle, L ‘Homme qui aimait les femmes and Le Chambre Verte, available on vinyl and CD.

And don’t miss film critic Walt Mundkowsky’s film review of François Truffaut’s “Stolen Kisses” – A Look Back – Traveling Boy

Also, if you wish to revisit The Film Soundtracks in Our Lives, Part I, see Ennio Morricone and Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Western, Once Upon a Time in the West. You can buy, but not on our site, Morricone’s Complete Spaghetti Western Compilation, also available on vinyl or in three-discs or a five-box set on CD.

POST SCRIPT:

Godard and Truffaut: In Defense of Henri Langlois et la Cinémathèque française

In 1968, French culture minister Andre Malraux tried to fire Henri Langlois by stopping funding of la Cinémathèque française, allegedly due to Langlois’ arrogance and iron-fisted rule. Local and international uproar ensued, and even the prestigious Cannes Film Festival was halted in protest that year. Malraux eventually backtracked. Below is an announcement made in 1968 by Jean-Luc Godard and They were once soliders-in-arms in the art of cinema, but as their careers’ progressed, Godard’s films became increasingly political, specifically Marxist, and dismissed Truffaut as a bourgeoisie film director. Truffaut replied, I make personal films, and I can’t remember the last time I took a bus.

READ More: the politique des auteurs – The policy or politics of auteurs: In his 1954 journal, Une certaine tendance du cinéma français (A certain trend in French cinema) Truffaut wrote as a critic for the French film publication, Cahiers du Cinéma (Cinéma Notebook) and introduced the concept that directors should be considered the real creators of the films they create. When translated literally, the French word auteur means author in English. The term is applied to a film director with complete creative control over their work, often defined as a director who has a recognizable personal style, signature and vision which is evident in each film they make. When applied to the other arts, a painting by van Gogh or a symphony by Mahler is instantly recognizable to audiences. When film critic and director, Jean-Luc Godard wrote that Hitchcock was as profround an artist as Dostoevsky, traditional film critics thought he had gone mad. They failed to recognize that Hitchcock was just as profound in his own medium of film as Dostoevsky was in his medium of literature.

Truffaut referred French directors, Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson and Jacque Tatil as auteurs. He contrasted auteurs with directors of commercial studio films, whom he called, merely “metteur en scène” or stagers of a script created by someone else.

In the US, The Auteur Theory was coined and expanded by New York film critic, Andrew Sarris, the Father of American Auteurism. After Truffaut first introduced this new theory, which was based on film critic, Andre Bazin’s earlier work, it eventually spread to the US in 1963 through the writings of Sarris and film critic/director, Peter Bogdanovich.

But, many US film critics thought the concept was preposterous to the point that a film director should even be called an artist. This applied, in particular, to the highly influential San Franciso based film critic, Pauline Kael, who attacked both the theory and Sarris. The battles between them were legendary, and still discussed today, even though Kael finally embraced the theory and championed her own favorite directions, Robert Altman, Sam Peckinpah, Bernardo Bertolucci and even Truffaut. In the end, Sarris said that Kael was not anti-auteur, but anti-genre, and recognized the director as an artist, but still not necessarily the sole artists in a collaborate medium which included cinematographers, edits, art directors, etc. Sarris counter with, who is in charge of all the collaborators who helps the director create their personal vision of a film?

Truffaut on Cinephiles: But the cinephile is… a neurotic! (That’s not a pejorative term.) The Bronte sisters were neurotic, and it’s because they were neurotic that they read all those books and became writers. The famous French advertising slogan that says, “When you love life, you go to the movies,” it’s false! It’s exactly the opposite: when you don’t love life, or when life doesn’t give you satisfaction, you go to the movies.

Art is not scientific; why should criticism be? The main complaint against some critics, and a certain type of criticism, is that too seldom do they speak about cinema as such.

Every critic should take to heart Jean Renoir’s remark: All great art is abstract. He should learn to be aware of form, and to understand that certain artists, for example Dreyer or Von Sternberg, never sought to make a picture that resembled reality.

The post The Film Soundtracks in Our Lives, Part II: Composer Maurice Jaubert and Auteur François Truffaut appeared first on Traveling Archive.

This is a continuation of a three part series about Charlie Chaplin. For Part 1, visit Charlie Chaplin: The Man and the Genius.

To cineastes, Chaplin is more than the man who created the iconic Little Tramp, but one of the greatest filmmakers of all-time. Legendary film critic and father of American auteurism, Andrew Sarris, places Chaplin in his pantheon of the 14 most influential American film directors in his still ground breaking book, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968,’ which changed the course of film criticism. As head of his own studio, Chaplin had a unique approach in translating his ideas into visual form, virtually never shooting from a working script. Often times he would simply sit on the set, surrounding by his cast, waiting for an idea to come. Occasionally the idea would not come, and he would dismiss the cast for the day, still with full payment. This resulted in long periods of absence on the silver screen. In his autobiography, the only mention of his shooting style was long-shot for comedy, close-up for tragedy, in which he embraced both in his stylistic signature; the essence of the duality of the Little Tramps films.

(Read more about auteurism, and Richard Brody’s stunning memorial to Andrew Sarris.)

In June 1917, Chaplin signed up with First National Studios, and then built Chaplin Studios in Hollywood.  He formed United Artists in  1919 along with the world’s first movie star, Mary Pickford (often times simply referred to as “Little Mary,” or ‘’America’s Sweetheart”), popular Hollywood swashbuckling actor Douglas Fairbanks (who was married to Pickford), and film director, D.W. Griffith (who created the very visual language of film used today). They were the leading filmmakers of their day and wanted complete freedom in producing and distributing their films. Chaplin worshipped Griffith, later commenting, ‘We owe our very existence to him. ’

(Read more about D.W. Griffith’s innovations here.)

Chaplin’s Films

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.
– Charles Chaplin

Features

1921 The Kid (Feature): The Little Tramp cares for an abandoned child, but events put that relationship in jeopardy. Chaplin’s first feature at 60 minutes in length, with regular Chaplin player Edna Purviance, star of many of his shorts, and a young, endearing Jackie Coogan, who would grow up to be Uncle Festus in the Adam’s Family TV series. Coogan was discovered in 1919 by Chaplin, and soon after the release of The Kid, Coogan-mania was in full force, spawning a wave of Jackie merchandising. It wasn’t until his 21st birthday, after his father’s death, he found he was virtually broke, with no money left from his work as a child actor. Under California law at the time, the earnings of the minor belonged solely to the parent. Coogan sued his mother and former manager, and, in 1939, the Coogan Law was established to protect future young actors from the same terrible situation.  By modern day stands, the The Kid borders on the maudlin, pulling on all heart strings, but the overall result is remarkably emotionally effecting.

1923 A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate (Feature): A kept woman runs into her former fiancé and finds herself torn between love and comfort. After seventy films in which he had appeared in every scene, Chaplin is unbilled and unrecognizable as a porter at a railroad station. His first break from comedy, the film is a valentine to Edna Purviance, to whom he promised that one day he would make a feature film with her in the lead role. Still ahead of its time, the dark drama with its stark, groundbreaking sexual overtones, flopped with the general audience. It was, however, highly influential for film directors; in particular, the German-Hollywood director, Ernst Lubitsch.  The film initially feels like conventional melodramatic, but with a closer look you see how Chaplin has overturned all the stereotypes of the time. The heroine is a courtesan. The hero is a mother-dominated weakling. And the seductive bad guy is charming, considerate and amusing. After Purviance’s retirement, Chaplin continued paying her salary until her death. Chaplin, at 86, worked on the film again, composing a new musical score. Some critics felt it was a kind of reconciliation with a film which the public had rejected, though he himself remained intensely proud of it.

1925 The Gold Rush (Feature): The Little Tramp is a lonely prospector who ventures to the Klondike looking for gold. He gets mixed up with some burly characters and falls in love with the beautiful Georgia Hale, playing a rather hardened, dance-hall girl. He tries to win her heart with his kindness, but with no success. According to David Robinson, the idea came to him when viewing stereoscope pictures of the 1896 Klondike gold rush, and was struck by the image of an endless line of prospectors snaking up the 2300 feet Chilkoot Pass, the gateway to the gold fields. For two weeks Chaplin and his unit worked on location in the snow country of California’s Sierra Nevada, recreating the historic image of the prospectors struggling up the pass through mountain snow. Six hundred extras were used, with many vagrants and derelicts from Sacramento. The film was an important box office success after A Woman of Paris had bombed with audiences. In a revised version in 1942, Chaplin composed an orchestral score, edited the film a bit and replaced the title cards with a commentary which he spoke himself. In this clip, The Little Tramp has fallen asleep while waiting for the dance-hall girl and her lady friends to arrive for a New Year dinner in his little cabin. The ladies had forgotten about the party and never arrive. The Little Tramp dreams about how the party could have been, and does perhaps his most famous bit: ‘the dance of the rolls,’ with just forks and rolls. Audiences were so thrilled by the scene that often times they demanded theatres to stop the film, roll it back and perform an encore:

1928 The Circus (Feature):  The Little Tramp finds work and the girl of his dreams at a circus. When speaking with Chaplin’s son, the most gracious Eugene Chaplin, I asked him what was his father’s favorite of all his films. Eugene replied, he never really said, but it wouldn’t be The Circus for it’s his only feature that he doesn’t mention in his autobiography. I put on a brave face, as The Circus is one of my favorites of his films. Perhaps sandwiched between the enduring masterpieces, The Gold Rush and 1931’s City Lights, it felt light upon comparison. Nevertheless, it too is a masterpiece which Chaplin wrote, directed, produced, acted in and edited. Later he composed the musical soundtrack, along with an opening song, “Swing little girl” where he actually sings.

The film subsides with the Little Tramp’s trademark closing:

1931 City Lights (Feature): The Little Tramp falls in love with a sightless flower girl and desperately accumulates money to help her medically regain here sight. In the middle of City Lights’ production, the advent of sound recording blew through Hollywood like a storm. Initially this induced a disturbing stylistic turn-around in the medium. The silent film was at its zenith; German director F.W. Murnau, famous for his fluid (‘unchained camera’), had already made The Last Laugh in 1924, a film so visually expressive that there was not one single title card used throughout the entire movie. The new sound equipment was primitive, where the camera was placed by a clunky recording apparatus, leading to many static shots. Broadway actors and stage directors poured into Hollywood for the new opportunity. For many of the silent era stars, though, this proved to be tragic, in particular for foreign language speakers unable to continue with their careers in English.  Plus, the quality of the sound recording was so substandard that the voices of major stars, such as heartthrob John Gilbert, produced laughter from the audience. Gilbert already had a high-pitched voice, in contrast to his leading man image, and the primitive sound recording made his voice seem even higher. Chapin faced a dilemma, should he shut down City Lights’ production or continue making it a silent film? Lucky for us, he chose to march on with the silent film revision. City Lights was a stunning success with both critics and the movie going audience. The flower girl is played by Virginia Cherrill, a Chaplin discovery, who semi-retired from acting when she married Cary Grant; a union that would last for barely a year. The ending close-up, along with the final close-up in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, is among the cinema’s most moving endings:

1936 Modern Times (Feature) The Little Tramp struggles to live in a modern industrial society with the help of a young homeless woman. Chaplin’s last ‘silent’ film, filled with sound effects, an orchestral music score, and the milestone of the Little Tramp speaking for the first time (actually singing), was made when everyone else was making talkies. The Little Tramp turns against modern society, the machine age and progress. He first appears on the screen, frantically trying to keep up with a production line. He is selected for an experiment with an automatic feeding machine, but various mishaps leads his boss to believe he has gone mad, and Charlie is sent to a mental hospital. When he gets out, he is mistaken for a communist, sent to jail a second time, but foils a jailbreak, and is let out again. Chaplin co-stars with Paulette Goddard, with whom he later secretly married. Controversy struck when Films Sonores Tobis accused Chaplin of stealing the factory scene from French director René Clair‘s À Nous la Liberté, and filed a plagiarism lawsuit. Clair was  against the lawsuit, and mainstream audiences didn’t notice or seem to mind:

Audiences hear Chaplin speak, or sing rather, for the first time in this bit:

The film ends with Chaplin’s classic ending, but with a twist due to being with Goddard:

https://youtu.be/J3aQkfIvx6k

1940 The Great Dictator (Feature) Dictator Adenoid Hynkel tries to expand his empire while a poor Jewish barber tries to avoid persecution from Hynkel’s regime. Chaplin’s first full “talkie” stirred controversy where he plays a humorous caricature of Adolf Hitler, with many thinking that it was in bad taste. Truth be told, the release of the film was held back by long delays in production (primarily due to building innovative miniature sets), and by completion, Hitler was no longer considered a joking matter. Chaplin played two roles, Hinkel, a parody of Hitler, and the Little Tramp as a Jewish barber. Paulette Goddard is cast again as his co-star, and the underrated Jack Oakie, in a supporting role as Napaloni (a parody of Mussolini). The film was a smash hit. It has been said that Chaplin’s character was ballet, while Buster Keaton’s acrobatic. I regard them equally as the greatest comic silent film directors. In this clip Chaplin’s character performs balletic magic:

1947 Monsieur Verdoux (Feature) A suave Bluebird-like man supports his family by marrying and murdering rich women for their money, but has some occupational hazards when he seduces comedic legend, Martha Raye.  Verdoux  goes to the gallows with a supreme contempt for the laws and norms of the society which he blames drove him to such desperate extremes. Monsieur Verdoux bombed with audiences. According to Richard Brody, ‘Chaplin had lost his popularity, quickly, between 1940, when the “The Great Dictator” was released and ranked among the highest-grossing films ever, and 1947, with the release Monsieur Verdoux.  What had changed were Chaplin and the United States.’ Further controversy was fueled when Chaplin bought the premise of Monsieur Verdoux from Orson Welles.  (The film’s credits list ‘original story written by Charles Chaplin, ‘based on an idea by Orson Welles.’)  Welles was incensed that he did not receive a more prominent credit, and that Chaplin froze him out of the creative process. Sadly, Monsieur Verdoux flopped with the audience, nearly sinking United Artists. Today the film is considered a towering masterpiece.

1952 Limelight (Feature; UK) A fading comedian and a suicidal ballet dancer look to each other to find purpose and hope in their lives. Chaplin cast the unknown Claire Bloom as his leading lady, which propelled her to stardom. He aimed for a more serious tone, regularly using the word “melancholy” when speaking about the film. Stylistically, the final product felt a little dated with facile physiological depth, but today the sentimental drama is considered a major Chaplin film and a great pleasure to watch. Limelight featured a short appearance by Buster Keaton, whom Chaplin cast as his stage partner in the famous dressing room scene. This marked the only time the comedians worked together. Keaton called Chaplin “the greatest silent comedian of all time.” Orson Welles, no stranger to big personalities, commented that for Chaplin to imagine his own death on stage was a supreme act of egotism. Limelight was heavily autobiographical, alluding to Chaplin’s childhood, but also to his loss of popularity in the U.S. It was a family affair which included in the cast his five oldest children and his half-brother, Wheeler Dryden:

1957 A King in New York (Feature; UK) A recently-deposed European monarch seeks shelter in New York City, where he becomes an accidental television celebrity and is later wrongly accused of being a Communist. By this time Chaplin was disappearing from the public eye and A King in New York was not even released in the United States at that time. Those who did eventually see it, dismissed the narrative as preachy and self serving. It’s a movie still worth a look, and a real treat for auteurists.

1959 A Countess from Hong Kong (Feature; UK):  A Russian countess illegally climbs aboard a luxury liner to reach America for a better life. She hides in the cab of a diplomat billionaire. Perhaps the most bizarre threesome to ever work on the same film together: Chaplin, the iron clad director, Marlon Brando,  the temperamental method actor who could improvise on the spot, and Sophia Loren, the world-famous actress, who did not get along with Brando, especially when doing a love scene and commented, “Did you know you have black hairs up your nostrils?” Chaplin’s style was to act out each of the different roles, and then instruct the players with “OK, do this.” Brando bristled and threatened to quit. But he found in the 76 year old Chaplin a man whose ego was actually greater than his own, and eventually succumbed to his will.  “I agreed to be a marionette in his hands. I figured he must know something I didn’t.” Chaplin had written part of the script 34 years earlier, and composed the theme song, ‘This is My Song.” Audiences were disappointed to find that Chaplin only played a cameo role as the ship’s steward. In many respects the buildup to the release of the film was more exciting than the movie itself. See the trailer here.

It was his first and only foray in shooting in color and widescreen. It was also his final film. The reviews ranged from dismissive to savage. Chaplin was happy to return to the harmony of family life in Corsier-sur-Vevey.

Shorts

1921 The Idle Class (Short): Chaplin plays two roles, the little Little Tramp and an upper-class, unrepentant drunk.  In this clip the upper-class drunk forgets to wear his pants and tries not to be seen by any one:

https://youtu.be/zxavuHxun0s

Later, he learns his wife is leaving him due to his drinking; where shot from behind he appears to be sobbing:

1917 The Immigrant (Short): The Little Tramp is an immigrant who endures a challenging voyage and gets into trouble as soon as he arrives in America. Chaplin used the similar shot from the ‘behind gag’ in The Idle Class; this time appearing to be vomiting over the side of the vessel:

Special thanks to Chaplin’s World for their assistance in this article, and to My Switzerland for making my journey to Vevey possible.

Stay tuned for Part 3 where Ed Boitano addresses Chaplin’s private life.

The post In Search of Charlie Chaplin: The Man and His Movies, Part 2 appeared first on Traveling Archive.