Woody Allen on CC and CITY LIGHTS

I agree with you. I prefer Chaplin over everybody. It's just that I
like Lloyd too and feel he gets unfairly dismissed sometimes, along the
lines of "He was just an actor pretending to be a comedian."
--Shush--


I felt very fortunate to be able to sit through the Lloyd films,
properly restored, on Turner Classic Movies last year. In watching them
(over and over, incidentally), I could not help but marvel at the
quality of the films as *motion pictures*. Technically, the films
(especially his last two silents) rank with the best-made silent films
I've ever seen.
However, this is not to detract from Lloyd's performances. I was most
impressed with his ability to play believable romantic scenes, and make
them funny at the same time. His comic humiliation was so genuine as to
almost be painful to watch. I also admired his ability to use gags
that, regardless of which different writers conceived them, are almost
always consistent with his character and the situations in which they
occur. In other words, his gags blended very naturally into the
surrounding film, as opposed to being "gags for gags' sake", which I
feel hurts the films of less thoughtful comedians. With the combination
of Lloyd's performance, the writers' gags, and the technical
achievements of the cinematographer (more often than not the brilliant
but overlooked Walter Lundin), Lloyd's films are remarkable
achievements in screen comedy.

The greatest of the "great" comedians (Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, amongst
others) were very unique in one particular sense: they all had the
ability to make a gag their own. I borrow this idea from Walter Kerr,
author of "The Silent Clowns", perhaps the silent film comedy bible. I
borrow the idea because I think it sums up perfectly why I can enjoy
Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd without ever having to feel the need to rank
one as "better" than the other. Regardless of the gag itself, each
three of these men could make the gag unique to their comedy style when
they were performing it. Their strong characterizations transcended the
jokes themselves. A gag done by Harold Lloyd seems perfectly
appropriate for his character as it does when Buster Keaton borrows the
same idea and does his take on it. I think that for this reason, it
makes sense to compare and contrast the major comedians of this
particularly creatively-fertile period in screen comedy, as opposed to
"ranking" them as if one was "better" than the others.

Matt

"Matt Barry" (mbarry1@towson.edu) writes:
> Constance Kuriyama Dec 23, 2:40 pm show options
>
> Newsgroups: alt.movies.chaplin
> From: d... RemoveThis @FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Constance Kuriyama) - Find messages by
> this author
> Date: 23 Dec 2004 22:40:44 GMT
> Local: Thurs, Dec 23 2004 2:40 pm
> Subject: Re: Woody Allen on CC and CITY LIGHTS
> Reply | Reply to Author | Forward | Print | Individual Message | Show
> original | Report Abuse
>
>
> Doug Sulpy (dsu...@ptd.net) writes:
>
>
>
>> In article <cqdrc6$4d...@theodyn.ncf.ca>, Constance Kuriyama
>> <d... RemoveThis @FreeNet.Carleton.CA> wrote:
>>> Chaplin was not primarily a comedian; he was a creator of great
> comic films.
>
>
>> What?! I think this can be said of Harold Lloyd, perhaps, but not of
>> Chaplin.
>>I think of a comedian as someone whose primary talent is to make
> people
>>laugh. Chaplin was primarily an actor/artist who wanted to move his
> audience,
>>either to laugh or to experience some other response, and to achieve
> that
>>goal he developed other abilities besides acting.
>
> The difference to me is that Chaplin could make anything funny just by
> the way he goes about it. Watching him eat something, for instance, is
> one of the funniest things I've ever seen. Or the way he handles props
> in a film like "The Pawnshop." Or my favorite bit (which no one has
> ever mentioned): How he pretends to be slightly hard of hearing when
> someone tells him something he doesn't want to hear, such as when the
> circus owner tells him his act is "awful" in THE CIRCUS, or when his
> wife in PAY DAY asks him to hand over his paycheck.
> He's naturally funny, and has an ingrained idea of what is funny. His
> ability to conceive dozens and dozens of gags for a single film is
> amazing. On top of all this, he was also one of the best storytellers
> in cinema (e.g. THE KID, CITY LIGHTS).
> Harold Lloyd, on the other hand, needed the aid of a strong team of gag
> writers. I am not degrading him for this fact. His films are hilarious
> and remain extremely fresh and clever today. But there is simply a
> difference between the approach that Chaplin took, and the approach
> Lloyd took. It took Lloyd many, many films before he finally found his
> *character*, and his character was usually second to the gags in his
> films, most of which were conceived by other writers.
> There was once a review of "Speedy" that summed it up well. It went on
> to say that as funny as Harold Lloyd's film was, there is no doubt that
> if you were to just put Chaplin and Lloyd up on a stage with no script
> or props, it would be Chaplin who would get 90% of the laughs.
>
> Matt

Yes, Chaplin has a distinctive style of humor. His character is inherently
funny, which is not true of Lloyd's relatively normal young man in glasses,
or of Keaton's earnest if often clueless lower middle-to-upper class
characters. The Tramp is a manifest eccentric, but his emotional
reactions to situations are completely understandable. Chaplin's humor is
profoundly psychological and remorselessly truthful; much of the humor in
the first part of _The Gold Rush_ depends on how three sharply distinct
personalities react to the situation of being snowbound and hungry, and how
they interact with each other. Chaplin knows that there must be a pecking o
rder, so Big Jim quickly establishes his physical dominance. Charlie, on the
other hand, who can't compete physically with these two behemoths, cannily
takes the role of the adaptable submissive and allies himself with Big Jim.
The audience laughs at this partly because it is the naked truth about human
nature, and pretty much what they'd do themselves in a similar situation.

Keaton and Lloyd, on the other hand, are more or less recognizable characters
who come up with bizarre and unpredictable solutions to problems. This relies
heavily on the element of surprise and is quite funny when it's well done,
but it doesn't require any deep insight into human natuare. One might say
that Keaton's and Lloyd's humor is situation and gag oriented, whereas
Chaplin's is story and character oriented. This distinction is not categorical
and absolute, but a matter of relative emphasis.

Connie K.
--
"Our century is inconceivable without its . . . inconclusive mob of isms."