_Shoulder Arms_ Again

External Since: Dec 21, 2004 Posts: 87

On Mar 29, 3:27 pm, "WaverBoy" <waver....TakeThisOut@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mar 29, 12:56 am, "constance.kuriy...@ttu.edu"
>
> <constance.kuriy....TakeThisOut@ttu.edu> wrote:
> > Two corrections of details in my first post:
>
> > 1. _Shoulder Arms_ was the first film that Chaplin worked on
> > with James, not the last, but it did arrive late, so that James
> > felt that Chaplin had little time in which to do much editing.
>
> > 2. Hooman did think that Chaplin might have done some minor
> > "tweaking" of the film, but made no substantial changes.
> > Therefore it was Rollie who removed the "third man on a match"
> > gag in the 1940s without Chaplin's knowledge.
>
> I never knew what was up with the three-on-a-match deal until I looked
> it up recently. I think that the Wikipedia entry might be mistaken
> however:
>
> "Three on a Match (also known as Third on a match) is a supposed
> superstition among soldiers during the First World War. The
> superstition goes that if three soldiers lit their cigarettes from the
> same match, one of the three would be killed or that the man who was
> third on the match would be shot. Since then it has been considered
> bad luck for three people to share a light from the same match.
>
> The idea was that when the first soldier lit his cigarette the enemy
> would see the light, when the second soldier lit his cigarette the
> enemy would take aim, and when the third soldier lit his cigarette the
> enemy would fire.
>
> There was in fact no such superstition during the First World War. The
> superstition was alleged to have been invented about a decade later by
> the Swedish match tycoon Ivar Kreuger in an attempt to get people to
> use more matches but it appears he merely made very shrewd use of the
> already existing belief which may date to the Boer War."
>
> If there wasn't any such superstition during WWI, why would Chaplin
> have bothered to put it in his WWI comedy?

Wikipedia is wrong, and certainly not for the first time. ;-)

External Since: Dec 21, 2004 Posts: 87

On Mar 29, 5:39 pm, "David Totheroh" <dtothe....TakeThisOut@aol.com> wrote:
> On Mar 29, 12:56 am, "constance.kuriy...@ttu.edu"
>
>
>
> <constance.kuriy....TakeThisOut@ttu.edu> wrote:
> > Two corrections of details in my first post:
>
> > 1. _Shoulder Arms_ was the first film that Chaplin worked on
> > with James, not the last, but it did arrive late, so that James
> > felt that Chaplin had little time in which to do much editing.
>
> > 2. Hooman did think that Chaplin might have done some minor
> > "tweaking" of the film, but made no substantial changes.
> > Therefore it was Rollie who removed the "third man on a match"
> > gag in the 1940s without Chaplin's knowledge.
>
> > And an addition:
>
> > According to Hooman, James recalled Chaplin saying that he had not
> > seen _Shoulder Arms_ for twenty years (since he had it screened while
> > working on _The Great Dictator_). Until the film arrived,
> > Chaplin worked with James on the music based solely on his memory, and
> > James was surprised at how accurate his memory was
> > and how well the music fit when the film did arrive.
>
> > Connie K.
>
> Unfortunately, *someone's* memory isn't all that accurate, unless for
> some reason David Robinson just made stuff up. From pg. 520 of
> Chaplin, His Life and Art: "The early part of 1943 passed pleasantly,
> without trouble. Oona and her mother spent a lot of time at the house;
> so did young Charles and Sydney, who were now approaching draft age.
> In the weeks after Christmas, Chaplin screened City Lights, The
> Circus, The Idle Class and Shoulder Arms at the studio for the
> O'Neills and other friends."
>
> And on pg.522: "They [Charlie and Oona] returned to Beverly Hills on
> 26 July [1943]... Brigadier-General Osborn, Director of the Special
> Services Division of the army, had requested that Chaplin might make
> prints of Shoulder Arms available to the Armed Forces Institute Film
> Services. Chaplin was delighted that his 25-year-old picture was still
> reckoned to have a value for morale, and Totheroh set about revising
> and restoring a perfect new negative. In January [1944] Chaplin saw
> the new print, as well as The Gold Rush, in the company of Oona and a
> party of friends, and decided that it would be a good idea to do the
> same for all his old films, in each case assembling the negatives to
> obtain a good protection print for special use if required at any
> time. The negatives, when placed in proper order, were to be deposited
> with Pathé's Hollywood laboratory. Totheroh spent most of the next
> year or so [1944-45] preparing these definitive negatives and library
> prints of the First National films."
>
> Knowing that Robinson had free access to all studio records, a couple
> of things become clear. 1) Of all the First National "library
> prints" (or so-called Rollie versions), the one film that we KNOW
> Chaplin saw (and, one can infer from the context, also approved of)
> was Shoulder Arms. 2) Either Chaplin's memory wasn't as good as James
> thought, or someone else misremembered what happened.
>
> It also means that Chaplin viewed a version of Shoulder Arms in 1943
> that predated Rollie's work on the new negatives, and almost exactly a
> year later, in January of 1944, he viewed the 'Army' version, and on
> that basis decided to create new negatives for the rest of the First
> Nationals. It would be pretty difficult for me to infer from those
> facts that Chaplin was dissatisfied with Rollie's work. Now, I guess
> it IS possible that Rollie duplicated his efforts, and re-revised the
> 'Army' version again, creating yet another version perhaps less than a
> year later [sometime in '44 or '45] that Chaplin didn't see until the
> mid 1950s, but somehow I doubt it.

Thanks for bringing this forward. I checked on the editing of _Revue_
and
confirmed my recollection that it was done in London with Epstein.
Surely it was done before finishing the music, which had to be added
to
a final cut. So I'm still wondering what Eric James knew about the
editing of the film, since as I recall he generally worked with
Chaplin
in Switzerland.

Connie K.