The Comedy of Charlie Chaplin by Dan Kamin

Author:Dan Kamin [Kamin, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2010-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

The lunch wagon becomes a shooting gallery. A Dog’s Life.

The strong staccato rhythm of that brief exchange leads like a drum roll to the ninth and final sequence, in which Charlie and Sydney pop up alternately like ducks in a shooting gallery as the crooks fire at the lunch wagon. The gunshots punctuate the scene, until the last one shatters the plate Charlie holds up to shield himself. As the crooks rush the wagon and begin choking Charlie, Scraps saves the day by retrieving the wallet from him.

These nine sequences give A Dog’s Life a quality unique in the Chaplin canon. A different rhythm dominates each scene and provides its structural underpinning, just as the bass line in a musical piece underscores the more obvious melody line. Even the transitions between scenes make inventive use of visual rhythms. For example, when Charlie is bounced from the Green Lantern the first time, he angrily grabs a brick and winds up to throw it into the café before noticing that one of the omnipresent cops has come up beside him; without breaking his rhythm he tosses the brick offscreen instead, as if tossing a stick for Scraps—a familiar act of camouflage. Then, as Charlie and Scraps briskly exit the screen on the lower right, the scene cuts to show the two thugs entering quickly from the lower left; their action seems to pick up Charlie’s momentum.

The rhythm that percolates through A Dog’s Life also imposes a playful quality to what we’re actually witnessing in this film, a surprisingly grim and uncompromising depiction of the desperate fight for survival in the slums. It was a giant step in storytelling for Chaplin as he sought to infuse more serious content into his films. The ebullience of the comic sequences justifies the improbable storybook happy ending, in which Charlie and Edna buy a farm with the money in the wallet. In the last shot they look lovingly down into a bassinet, and the camera pans down to reveal—Scraps and her litter.

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