The Pawnshop and A Dog's Life

When you go back far enough into the history of popular art you reach a point where works get increasingly hard to talk about due to the almost alien cultural context within which they were created and initially seen. This is not to say that art can't be timeless, many paintings, music, books etc... are received in much the same way now as they were when they were created, but many popluar works lose or change their meaning over time and this can be alienating. This is very evident when viewing the cinema of the early 20th century today. The tools filmmakers had to work with were more restrictive and that certainly does have an alienating effect, but there were also vastly different cultural expectations as to what moving pictures were expected to accomplish.
The narratives of cinema in the very early 20th century tended to be backgrounded to string together set piece vignettes. This was brought to my attention in viewing 1910's the Wizard of Oz for my previous blog post. Take the intertitles explaining each scene out of that film and you have a series of temporally and geographically alienated events that fail to communicate narrative. I see this as a failing of that film and a perfect example of how not to structure a narrative silent film. The two films I saw for this post, The Pawnshop (1916) and A Dog's Life (1918) are narrative films structured in much the same way but executed in a far more compelling and coherent fashion.

It's really no surprise that both these films hold up far better than that initial adaptation of The Wizard of Oz as both were written and directed by the unparalleled Charlie Chaplin. For those who are not familiar with that name Charlie Chaplin an unbelievably talent and successful silent comedy star, world famous for his screen character: "The Tramp". His comedy skills lay firmly in physical and slapstick comedy and is unbelievably talented at that. If you haven't seen any of his films a solid portion of them are in the public domain including the two I'm going to talk about here. Slapstick may have a reputation for being base and simple it really is a carefully crafted and often surprisingly intelligent artform that Chaplin had a complete mastery of.

The Pawnshop is little more than a series of slapstick vignettes where Chaplin, playing an assistant at a pawnshop, goes about his job while generally causing problems destroying things and messing around. And it is unbelievably entertaining. Each setpiece flows into the next with a deft fluidity never breaking and never needing to do so. The only interruptions to the onscreen action being intertitles that exposite only the bare minimum of information when absolutely necessary (the right way to use intertitles is certainly as little as possible to communicate only what is necessary). The scenes themselves are indeed timelessly funny and skillfully accomplished in a way modern comedies, in their reliance on spoken jokes, fail to even attempt. The highlight of The Pawnshop being a bit where Chaplin is examining a clock a client has taken in to pawn. He appraises it like a physician checking for a pulse first with a stethoscope then attempting to feel a pulse with his fingers, before examining it as if he were a jeweler all the while taking it apart in such a way as to permanently destroy it and return it to the customer as a pile of gears and springs in the customer's hat. This is all just the tip of the iceburg with every scene bringing a new bit that is just as successful. Movies may not be made like this anymore as a series of vignettes unfettered by narrative contrivance, but it really is a style that holds up to modern scrutiny.

As for A Dog's Life we have a far more straightforward narrative as Chaplin's Tramp character pursues money and love with a trusty dog sidekick (adorably named Scraps). While the narrative is more foregrounded here the focus is still completely on the skillful and deft slapstick comedy. It really is amazing watching these classic films still be riotously funny today with far better execution than any modern imitation of the style. Farcical chases take center stage for most of the film with the Tramp getting chased about by the police, the owner of a cabaret and a couple of thieves. However the best setpiece of this film is a scene in which Chaplin knocks out one of the aforementioned pair of thieves as they are sitting and chatting over their stolen money at the cabaret, and proceeds to  place his arms through the armpits of the unconscious thief pretending to be him successfully conning his partner into giving him the unconscious thief's share. This film is less obviously a series of slapstick vignettes with a paper thin plot, but far more effort has gone into stringing these vignettes together in a complete fashion.

It seems a lot of people are unwilling to look at older films due to the limited tools available to filmmakers at the time of their production and the focus away from narrative and toward setpieces but really these films are not as hard to visit in 2019 as one might expect. The comedy is timeless in a way that modern comedy styling are incapable of achieving. There is a universality to actions that language cannot achieve.

Now the question is should I dive into a Symphony of Horror or hold off on that till the Halloween times.