The Surcease of Anxiety: Watching "The Kid"

I am anxious of leisure, don't feel I do all that well with it, never quite do it justice. I'm a sedentary sort and enjoy nothing so much as time spent sitting on my ass, but I don't know that I would survive being without employment of some kind. Perhaps that explains my disinterest in lotteries. Left to myself, I read, of course, and watch television and doze. All excellent activities, if a little passive. So to get my heart-rate up, for a bit of stimulation, I worry. I worry that I ought to be thinking about dinner soon, though I can't be bothered to go and make something. Eventually, I eat crackers and cheese. I worry that I ought to call my sister soon, then worry that she'll be busy seeing to her family. I worry that I ought to be paying bills, weeding, writing, getting dressed sometime soon. I worry I've made the wrong choices in a Facebook quiz. I worried away countless hours of my brief vacation week counting syllables and trying to find rhymes for clerihews. And then, exhausted, I nap.

(Dear A. and I had a particularly invigorating doze this afternoon.)

This morning, the last of my vacation, I was spared all anxiety. Knew exactly what I intended to do and did it. Thanks to the good people at Turner Classic Movies, and my local cable provider, which offers a marvelous recording option, I woke up early and then did not budge from bed until well past noon.

Charles Chaplin was born April 16th, 1889. His birthday was celebrated on TCM with the usual fanfare, starting at some unnatural hour in the dark before the dawn, with a selection of his movies, including a number of his best. I recorded the lot. This morning I watched them. I don't know that I'd ever watched the whole of "Tillie's Punctured Romance" before. Marie Dressler I know and love from her sentimental comedies of the 30s, but here she was playing a comic ingenue in 1914, with Charlie as her swain. Bits of famous knockabout from this early film feature in most Chaplin tributes, but watching the whole surviving film, I was struck -- just the word -- by the Krazy Kat frequency with which people in those far off days seemed to knock each other down with, among other things, bricks, trips, fruit, smacks, and kicks. The most amazing clowning from Dressler, whose mugging was at its most volcanic here, but who managed, as does Chaplin, always, moments of brilliant pantomime and even subtle emotion. When confronting Charlie's "other woman," Mabel Normand, in the party scene, Dressler's face, even without a proper close-up, falls in an achingly blunt way -- before gun-play sends the whole thing spinning back into frenzy. And I liked the end of the picture, with the two women deciding to jilt the gigolo and walk off together.

I watched "A Dog's Life" and "Shoulder Arms" and "The Pilgrim" again, enjoying them enormously, particularly the first, in which Edna Purviance has, perhaps her one truly funny bit as Charlie's leading lady, when, as an innocent girl forced to flirt with the customers of the bar in which she sings, she winks and wriggles so awkwardly that Charlie offers to get the cinder out of her eye with a knotted handkerchief.

Okay. If "City Lights" is Chaplin's greatest film, and "The Circus" has my favorite long routine: Charlie on the hire-wire with monkeys, the film that I have to say is simply my favorite, perhaps sentimentally, but also for the pure pleasure of watching it again and again, is "The Kid" from 1921. Nothing ever filmed has so consistently amused and moved me. Like the best of Chaplin's three reel comedies, there is still an element of mayhem in his Little Fellow; finding an abandoned baby, and being unable to ditch the kid, after multiple attempts, he finally sits down, defeated, on the curb, and eyes the sewer-grate, going so far as to lift it, before deciding... no. But it is when Jackie Coogan, as The Kid, now all of five years old, enters the picture, that this becomes, for me, the best of Chaplin. Coogan was an amazing mimic, doing Chaplin in miniature, even to the signature, coltish little kicks of nervous anticipation before he runs from the Cop who's caught him about to toss a rock at a window that Chaplin will then happen by and offer to repair, conveniently being, a very bad, glassier. I've read that Chaplin saw the little boy performing a shimmy in Vaudeville and was later delighted by Coogan's imitation of himself, thus conceiving the film. But nothing can quite prepare for how very good Coogan is in the later scenes, the film's most famous, when the authorities come to take The Kid from Chaplin. Yanked from Chaplin's arms and loaded into the back of a truck, to be taken to the orphanage, Coogan's distress is heartbreakingly real, as is Chaplin's furious struggle to get him back. Their reunion is one of the most genuine and moving moments in the history of cinema. No lie. And Chaplin's music, often overdone, here is perfect. I can not hear his theme for "The Kid" without seeing that close-up with Coogan, I can't hear that music without tears.

While I enjoyed Richard Attenborough's "Chaplin," and was, like everybody else, astonished by Robert Downey's portrayal, there is only one moment in that film that destroys me. Chaplin comes to America to accept a belated Oscar for his lifetime achievement. America, and The Academy, had not been kind to Chaplin. He was an old, sick man when he finally, for "financial reasons," he claimed, though he was indisputably rich, decided to come back to Hollywood from his long exile. Robert Downey, in heavy age-makeup, largely in silhouette, listens backstage, in shock, to the audience at the ceremony laughing. Attenborough used actual footage from Chaplin's movies in just this scene, and then, very near the end of the tribute, there it is, the reunion from "The Kid." The music swells, and Downey's Chaplin cries.

Chaplin's own infant son had died suddenly not long before he filmed "The Kid." It is generally understood that his recent loss informed the plot and direction of the film. How could it not have done? And in "The Kid," Chaplin captured indelibly all the joy and heartbreak of love.

But nothing I can say can really add to Chaplin's film. "I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose." said Chaplin. Here, I agree.

"Laughter is the tonic, the relief, the surcease for pain" Charlie Chaplin also said.

Having watched "The Kid" again this morning, I wonder now, what on earth was I on about earlier?