Reluctant to engage with the war effort, Chaplin had finally given in to popular pressure and had done ‘his bit’ through his tour selling war bonds (see The Bond). Nevertheless, at about 46 minutes, Shoulder Arms was Chaplin’s longest movie to that point. All Rights Reserved.

Yet with this film he proved definitively that there is only the thinnest division between comedy and tragedy.

Sending his Little Tramp figure onto the battlefield seemed like a good idea to Chaplin, and Shoulder Arms had started out as a project called Camouflage, which he’d put to one side in order to deliver his promised ‘propaganda’ film, The Bond. That resulted in a hasty marriage that coincided almost exactly with the release of the film. It would not be until Monsieur Verdoux in 1947 that Charlie Chaplin would successfully play an entirely different character. It took Chaplin the better part of a month to shoot all this material, but unhappy with the way the film was progressing he dropped it all from the film—that’s not surprising as the scenes are unusually laboured for Chaplin.

Even Chaplin himself had momentary doubts about making comedy out of such a catastrophic event in human history. While this no doubt came as a relief to Chaplin, it effectively ruined the marriage as he now came to believe he had been trapped by a lie and that his matrimonial state was having a negative effect on his creativity. In filming Shoulder Arms, Chaplin followed his original, unusually detailed (for him) outline, by filming the scenes intended to convey the Tramp’s civilian life before he enters military service. In the event, Chaplin needed to have no concerns; among the most prominent supporters of Shoulder Arms, those who seemed to enjoy the picture the most, were the troops returning to civilian life from the front. Shoulder Arms publicity still with Edna Purviance and Charlie Chaplin. Trivia: Shoulder Arms signified a period of experimentation by Charlie Chaplin and an attempt to alter his signature Tramp figure. And no-one appreciated his comedy of the privations of life at the front more than the very men who had themselves endured it. Edna Purviance shines in this too, showing she could rise above her personal troubles with Chaplin and still act opposite him. The picture took a long time to make and I was not satisfied with it.

With each successive Chaplin picture the verdict is, the best thing he has ever done, which, I believe, can be said of no other actor on the screen.’—Motion Picture, January 1919, ‘Shoulder Arms is a perfect handling of a delicate subject, and in its treatment the comedian has shown, more completely than ever before, his faculty for getting inside a character and grasping, as if by intuition (but really by hard work) all that character’s salient points. Towards the end of filming on Shoulder Arms, Mildred Harris had announced to Chaplin that she was pregnant (see The Bond). Shoulder Arms was a smash hit and a great favourite with the soldiers during the war, but again the film had taken longer than I had anticipated besides costing more than A Dog’s Life.’—Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography, 1964, Contemporary Reviews: ‘We double up painfully with guffaws of mirthfulness when he camouflages himself as a tree and battles the bewildered Germans, but underneath all the farce of it, we are in close sympathy with the little man and conscious of a touch of true pathos which makes us realize that this Chaplin who calls himself a comedian is perhaps the greatest (a word I dislike to use but which seems necessary in this case) actor on the screen today. With great brilliance, Chaplin depicts the horrors of life in the trenches – mud, blood, hunger, vermin, longing for home, the waterlogged trenches and the ever-imminent danger of a lethal bullet or grenade – through the distorting mirror of comedy. In his biography of Chaplin, Peter Ackroyd notes an article that Harris later wrote in which she admitted: ‘I think he [Chaplin] was right, but he ought to have had a little more patience and consideration of youth.’ Despite the fact that they were largely leading separate lives—Mildred had her own chauffeur and credit line at all the top stores, while Chaplin went to the studio early and came home late (if at all)—Mildred did somehow contrive to actually become pregnant by November 1918. barely six months before his native country?

Reserved. I loathe working outside on location because of its distraction. Charlie Says: ‘Shoulder Arms was made in the middle of a sizzling heat wave.

Chaplin’s friends were nervous of his next project, a comedy about the war, which was to become Shoulder Arms.Even Chaplin himself had momentary doubts about making comedy out of such a catastrophic event in human history. An 80,000 word ebook chronicle of Chaplin’s early films from Keystone (1914) and Essanay (1915), based on the first year of blog postings at Chaplin: Film by Film with 20,000 words of supplemental biographical essays. One’s concentration and inspiration blow away with the wind. Announced in the trade press as a five-reel presentation, the film was expected to run almost an hour long and was planned to depict the Tramp’s experiences before, during, and after the war. Story: Following the progress of a US ‘doughboy’ from boot camp to the battlefields of France and beyond during the First World War. Fearing the Little Tramp had run its course, Chaplin attempted—through Shoulder Arms, A Day’s Pleasure, and Pay Day—to refresh his character by making him something of a family man. This tested Chaplin’s patience and resulted in a huge row between them. Great Britain (with France and Russia) went to war against Germany and Austria-Hungary. With: Edna Purviance, Sydney Chaplin, Jack Wilson, Henry Bergman, Albert Austin. At that point, Chaplin was suddenly overwhelmed with doubts about both the quality of the film he’d made and the wisdom of releasing a film that dealt in a humorous way with the serious topic of the war.

His original plan was to show the little hero’s life before and after the war. Luckily, the footage survived and has been incorporated into the Unknown Chaplin (1983) television documentary series and as ‘deleted scenes’ on The Chaplin Revue DVD release. In the end, though, he simplified the structure, discarding reels of wonderful comic material he had shot.

Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out / 

Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. In filming Shoulder Arms, Chaplin followed his original, unusually detailed (for him) outline, by filming the scenes intended to convey the Tramp’s civilian life before he enters military service. Production on Shoulder Arms was shut down so the cast and crew could spend a week filming on The Bond. Shoulder Arms is Charlie Chaplin's second film for First National Pictures.Released in 1918, it is a silent comedy set in France during World War I.It co-starred Edna Purviance and Sydney Chaplin, Chaplin's elder brother.It is Chaplin's shortest feature film as well as the first feature film that he directed. Although only 46 minutes, Shoulder Arms was too long to be classified as a short, so is often regarded as Chaplin’s first feature film. The film seemed to realistically capture their experience, and they were both amused and relieved to have survived it. The film turned out, as David Robinson put it, to be ‘one of the greatest successes of his career’.

From the moment he entered movies, Charles Chaplin knew that he needed total creative autonomy in order to make the kind of comedy of which he alone was capable... A gentle satire on small-town life and religion, with Chaplin as an escaped convict mistaken for the new pastor of a rural community... All photographs from Chaplin films made from 1918 onwards © Roy Export S.A.S. ( Log Out /  By the time Chaplin had shot the scenes in which the soldier Tramp meets Edna Purviance’s French peasant in her wrecked home in mid-August, Chaplin realised he was running out of time to supply the propaganda film he’d promised the Liberty Bonds organisation (see The Bond).

It would be the middle of September 1918 before Shoulder Arms would be completed, edited, and prepared for distribution. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. Truly, with each release does he prove the value of his policy of making only a few pictures a year. Almost as soon as the ink was dry on the marriage certificate she had begun negotiating with Louis B. Mayer at MGM for a lucrative film contract. During July 1918, Chaplin devised a new story and had new sets built—this was all a costly process, as was the discarding of so much material, but it was a cost he was prepared to shoulder. When he returns home to find the postman has delivered his draft papers, the Tramp is overjoyed, seeing the Army as an opportunity to escape his unhappy life. By the time of Pay Day, he’d dropped the idea of children but was still attempting to portray a figure other than his iconic Tramp. In the event, Chaplin chose to focus on only the middle section of the planned triptych, and other editing meant that the movie came in under the promised length.

[Douglas Fairbanks] was my greatest audience. Chaplin's films are trademarks and/or service marks of Roy Export and/or Bubbles Inc. S.A. All Rights Buoyed by his enormously successful comedies for Keystone and Essanay, he was offered the largest salary ever extended to a motion picture star.

( Log Out /  Verdict: The ‘it was all a dream’ ending may be a cop out, but Shoulder Arms is an exquisitely crafted film; the split-screen contrasting life in the trenches with the Tramp’s recollections of Broadway is genius, as is the sequence where he is disguised as a tree. Shoulder Arms Movie critical analysis Charlie Chaplin as the emergence of the world's favorite movie actor almost coincided with the First World War. It was timely intervention, as he’d been on the cusp of cancelling the release and would no doubt have destroyed all the footage he’d shot.

Chaplin knew the dangers of playing the war for laughs—many of his friends and professional acquaintances had warned him off the putative project—so he approached Camouflage carefully. Chaplin getting into his tree costume on the set of Shoulder Arms.

Working inside a camouflaged tree was anything but comfortable. The best thing about this film is that the rookie sees his own little weaknesses, his hardships, his hopes, his glories, his quaint vanities and small fears—he sees himself. For four weeks Chaplin shot on these sets, finding comedy material in the harshness of the conditions that the troops had to endure. Being completely funny on a background of completely terrible war is not only difficult, but dangerous. Few directors exerted such discipline upon themselves. Also available at Kobo, Nook, Apple, Scribd and other ebook outlets. Change ). ( Log Out /  It was all worth it, however, as audiences acclaimed the sequence as one of the funniest Chaplin had yet committed to film. As far as we can see, Chaplin has been wholly successful.’—Photoplay, January 1919. He was finally ready to put down the Tramp’s cane and instead pick up a rifle. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. The Armistice may have been declared and Shoulder Arms a bona fide success, but things were not about to become quiet on the home front chez Chaplin.