Chaplin would have to match his location footage to studio-made footage.
Mostly, The Gold Rush would be adored by critics and public.
But some reviewers struck a note that would resound more loudly in the future.
They said that Chaplin was old-fashioned...
...not keeping up with advances in film technique.
But the Tramp was unchanged, ever the optimist...
...ever the seeker after good fortune...
...and ever oblivious, at least at first...
...to whatever dangers might be stalking him.
It was the same with Chaplin, a devoted cinematic purist.
That's how you know he's a legend already by The Gold Rush...
...because, of course, the Little Tramp can be...
...on the side of an icy mountain with no coat.
The hope of shooting The Gold Rush on location...
...was buried in the snows of Truckee.
Chaplin became increasingly miserable there and would expensively...
...return to Los Angeles for most of the shoot.
Even the famous chicken gag had to be reshot there.
For one take they used a double. You could obviously put a double...
...into a chicken costume. I mean, one chicken looks like another.
Not true. Apparently the double... You could see it was a double.
It just didn't move like a chicken, like Charlie moves like a chicken.
The miners are starving.
They're so hungry that Mack Swain begins hallucinating.
Was ever there a more perfect animal imitation than Chaplin 's?
His ability silently to convey thought, even a bird's thought...
...inspired a young Richard Attenborough when he saw the film in rerelease.
He was able to convey the most extraordinary thoughts...
...and intricacy of thoughts, and debate and reaction...
...purely by physical, and not just facial...
...but physical reaction to things.
It was an experience I had never even considered...
...in that here was somebody who could not only hold...
...my attention absolutely, but deny me the choice of laughing or crying.
I mean, he dealt with me as this figure on the screen.
I thought it was the most magical thing I'd ever seen in my life.
And it was that occasion, no question, I want to be an actor.
If I could do what he could do in relation to an audience...
...I want to be an actor. That's how it started my love of him.
The Tramp was, as usual, the outsider, especially when it came to love.
It looked as if he would not get the girl.
Or maybe it was that the girl did not get him.
Georgia Hale had replaced Lita Grey in the film.
In real life, Chaplin naturally began having an affair with her.
The discontinuities between his Tramp character and Chaplin 's own...
...vast worldly success were not much remarked.
Except by Chaplin, who once rather bitterly noted the irony...
...that he had become rich by playing the poorest of men.
Johnny Depp had to duplicate one of The Gold Rush's...
...most famous moments in his movie Benny & Joon.
Approaching the roll dance, when you see the thing it's very simple.
It's so difficult. It's so difficult. I mean, the coordination.
It's something that Chaplin just did in an instant.
He just came up with it like that.
It took me about, I don't know, a good three weeks to a month...
...of really working on it.
It's not just in this. It's in this, you know. It's all in here.
Chaplin's head and, you know, the little glances, the side glances.
The Gold Rush is the one film in which the Tramp ends up a millionaire.
Maybe it's Chaplin 's acknowledgment of his own equally astonishing rise.
Six years after the company's founding, Chaplin had finally delivered a hit...
...to his United Artists partners.
Meanwhile, Lita, seen with him here at a premiere...
...had delivered their second son, Sydney.
But the marriage was not going well.
The Circus, maybe Chaplin 's most purely hilarious feature...
...was not going well either.
Its production was haunted by unimaginable problems.
It was in '28. I was 5 years old, and I went to see the film.
It must have been The Circus. I was amazed.
I laughed, and it moved me...
...even though I was a 6-year-old boy.
And then I started to imitate Chaplin.
I stole the bowler hat of my father, his trousers...
...and with the ink I put the moustache on, and I mimed Chaplin.
With this picture, self-consciousness enters Chaplin 's universe.
It's his first exploration of his own art, the art of being funny.
When he tries to be funny, he isn 't. When he doesn 't try to be funny, he is.
The scene also comments on his supposed old-fashioned qualities.
The bits that don 't work here in 1927, did work for him a decade earlier.
The clown in this scene is played by Henry Bergman...
...who worked with Chaplin for decades.
He represents classic, highly stylized, commedia dell'arte comic values.
Chaplin represents a more naturalistic variation.
He's going to exaggerate, of course...
...but there's also something real about him...
...something that works for the movies...
...that most seemingly realistic of all media.
And in the film, Chaplin had to play this pantomime...
...but when he saw the clown with a real arrow...
...he was frightened he could be killed.
Then he did this... I show you what he did.
That means, " I cannot do it, because there is a worm in the apple."
He was a master in pacing.
He knew exactly when after one gag...
...he has to top it with an even bigger gag...
...or if he suddenly has to go into total opposite.
It was never gag for the sake of the gag. It was always the gag for the sake of...
...revealing something about the character or something...
...about the story, or revealing something about the plot.
In The Circus, Chaplin 's plagued by an endless array of animals...
...all irrationally bent on assaulting his dignity.
It's true that he mastered the cinematic art...
...so well that you don't see it.
You don't see it. It just flows in the film and it goes.
It's just so natural, everything.
Chaplin 's routine with the magician 's table...
...is one of his most masterfully orchestrated gag sequences...
...yet he would go on to top it in this very film.
The Circus, it's just a wonderful good time.
The jokes and the execution of them are so brilliant...
...and so uncluttered by anything that can date it.
Social ideas and satire...
...on the mores of the time date all the time.
This stuff is so beautifully done, and it's as fresh as could be.
Another example, say, would be the movie Singin ' in the Rain.
That will be as fresh 500 years from now...
...as it was the day it came out.
Sometimes his gags were simple little throwaway moments.
Sometimes the gags were as familiar as this nightmare of entrapment.
Though perhaps only Chaplin would have thought of this awful logic;
A barking dog threatening to awaken a sleeping lion.
Surely the Tramp 's endless on-screen problems...
...reflect Chaplin 's off-screen problems as he struggled to finish The Circus.
The Circus isn't even mentioned in his autobiography.
It's a miracle that that film got made, for a start...
...because everything happened. All the disasters in the world happened with it.
The whole set was completely destroyed by fire...
...and then what the fire didn't destroy, the firemen destroyed.
Then he had the most messy and disastrous and horrible divorce.
The shooting had to stop for nine months...
...because his wife divorced him. And it was such an ugly divorce...
...that he was frightened that she would, in fact, kidnap the film.
And so he had to hide the film.
Lita 's 42-page divorce complaint was designed to ruin Chaplin.
It named the names of his lovers, discussed intimate sexual behavior...
...and in book form, became an underground bestseller.
The divorce was quite ugly, and she got quite a bit of money...
...my mother, and so they had nothing really to talk about.
Therefore, Chaplin did not appear in court. He threw money at Lita.
The divorce settlement was the largest in American history to date.
Such was his popularity that most of the mud she threw ended up on her.
Chaplin nearly collapsed under the strain.
He fled to New York, where these pictures were taken...
...and suffered a nervous breakdown.
He was having an affair with his leading lady...
...the best friend of his wife.
So maybe that's why he never mentioned it as one of his favorite films.
She was Merna Kennedy. In the movie, she loves Rex...
...the tightrope walker, played by Harry Crocker.
Trying to impress her, the Tramp decides to emulate Rex.
Though I always am so much in awe of and express my admiration...
...for his sense of story arc and of how he subordinated...
...everything to story, still I realize...
...my visceral memory and reaction are to individual chunks.
So when I think of The Circus, that sequence on the tightrope...
...with the monkey climbing on his head, that's the movie to me.
My father had an idea. He said, " I have an idea...
...of the Tramp being in a situation where he can't get out of."
Comedy is often a situation of a nightmare.
And this was a nightmare situation of a man on a tightrope.
Everything goes wrong. He's falling off. His pants fall down.
He's got a whole lot of monkeys around him who are biting his nose.
And the idea started off by that nightmare situation.
You'd have to say this is the best banana-peel joke in human history.
Also, the last scene in the film...
...this beautiful scene with the horses, all these wonderful wagons...
...and the dust and the light, and it's extraordinary.
He shot it and shot it and shot it, and looked at the rushes...
...at 3:00 in the morning and said, "No, it's not... His hat isn't quite right.
We've got to do it again."
And someone stole the wagons. They weren't there.
This whole freshman course of students...
...stole the wagons for their fire ceremony.
Chaplin rounded up the wagons and reshot.
The ending of The Circus is one of Chaplin 's most beautiful.
He could be, whatever his critics might say...
...a great pictorialist when he wanted to be.
But there's a larger symbolism to this sequence.
Chaplin finished work on The Circus just three days...
...after the premiere of The Jazz Singer.
Sound was about to revolutionize the movies...
...and everyone, Chaplin included, wondered if the Tramp...
...a figure it was impossible to imagine talking...
...would survive the revolution.
He, however, was already writing his next movie.
It was City Lights, Chaplin 's last fully realized, fully acknowledged masterpiece.
The Tramp 's introduction, unconcernedly snoozing...
...on the establishment's statuary, was the greatest of all his movie entrances.
The film had a score and a bit of gibberish talk...
...but it was essentially a silent movie.
I've often said that it's much harder being a talking comedian...
...on the screen than a silent comedian.
The example I always gave was the difference between chess and checkers.
It's like checkers to do it silently. You can figure out the gags...
...and painstakingly write them, and then execute them...
...but as soon as you have to speak, you're plunged into a different reality...
...that's much more complex and the demands become much different.
Even so, the demands of silent comedy were not that easily satisfied...
...especially by Chaplin.
For unlike his competitors, Keaton and Lloyd, he did it all himself.
He never employed gag-writing teams to help hone his humor.
He always built up his routines on his feet...
...in endless rehearsals like this one.
Later, in retake after retake, he would elaborate or simplify them.
In feature-length things...
...you can't just do them alone with comedy.
So he brings in romance and sentiment.
When I saw City Lights, I realized what a deep filmmaker he was...
...because I felt that that film said more about love...
...than so many purportedly serious investigations of the subject.
Emotionally, it lives out feelings of real love.
You see what he feels for the girl...
...and to what lengths he's willing to go.
If she can't see him, she's able to feel that love...
...and she has no idea that it's some scruffy little tramp...
...that's making her life beautiful.
The production was strained, particularly in Chaplin 's relationship...
...with his inexperienced leading lady Virginia Cherrill.
As he grew, he started having to...
...construct stories. He started having to involve, also...
...his own emotional feelings with women...
...and get deeper into himself.
And I think that must have made it a lot harder for him.
It must have been a greater struggle then to construct something...
...because he tried to put another dimension into it.
And I think that's when he would have moments...
...of struggling to find ideas.
He's always thinking, " What is logical? Is the gag logical?
Is it right for it to happen?" And the stories about City Lights...
...how he spent months trying to work out one little bit of business...
...to make it plausible, to make it logical.
This is that bit of business.
How to make the blind girl misidentify her benefactor as a rich man.
It's the noises of a limousine door slamming, its motor purring off...
...sounds resonant of wealth, that do the trick.
This is one instance where a soundtrack would have made Chaplin 's job easier.
But he and Cherrill have to convey her misunderstanding...
...and his all too clear understanding of what happened...
...by brilliantly mimed thought.
Chaplin, whose mood at the time was erratic and angry...
...shot on this picture for over a year.
I love the toying with the sentimentality, the way he makes you feel sentimental...
...and particularly the scene where he's watching her...
...he's in love with her, and she's at the fountain.
He had me going with the sentimentality...
...and yet the moment happens when she sprays the water...
...in his face and breaks it. I thought, "This guy's the best."
The movie's brilliant subplot;
Henry Myers is a millionaire who 's benign when sober...
...but madly suicidal when he's drunk.
And then, of course, the guy with all the money...
...who's got all the possessions and all the money in the world...
...and is on the verge of suicide all the time...
...because his feelings are unrequited in love.
It's such an interesting exploration of all those feelings in a nonverbal way.
It's one step removed from music.
For me, it's his best picture.
The intertitle says it all. The job, as what was once called a "white wing"...
...cleaning up after animals on the street, is demeaning.
But it tells us Chaplin will do anything to help the girl.
And it leads to what may be one of Chaplin 's greatest sight gags.
I began to be impressed with the fact that he was such a good actor as well...
...because the serious side of that movie...
...he handled with legendary brilliance.
Well, my favorite picture of all time, I guess, is City Lights.
I've seen it 40 times or more.
I think it's very funny, incredibly touching...
...and the end is just hard to...
I get choked up now even thinking about it.
When she recognizes it's him that's helped her regain her sight...
...and everything, it's murder. Beautiful picture.
The Tramp has secretly paid for the operation that restores the girl's sight.
Three days after City Lights premiered, an exhausted Chaplin...
...embarked on a world tour. As usual, the crowds were enormous.
As usual, no door was closed to him. In London, he met George Bernard Shaw.
More important to him, he met Gandhi.
As the world-wide depression deepened...
...Chaplin made the Mahatma 's political and spiritual concerns his own.
Chaplin moved on to Berlin in what many have said...
...was his most enormous popular reception ever.
Yet it was tainted.
The Nazis, just two years before taking power...
...issued vicious anti-Semitic attacks against him.
Chaplin was not a Jew, but he was reluctant to say so.
He thought that would implicitly support the anti-Semites.
Immediately on his return to America...
...he met Paulette Goddard, the second of his great loves.
Even now, the grapevine is enough alive so that people say:
"He could be a difficult man to work for or be married to...
...and he often confused the two statuses."
As he did with Goddard, planning to star her in his next picture.
A former showgirl, she was a lively, lovely companion.
Among her accomplishments, she effected a reconciliation...
...between Chaplin and his two sons.
Oh, she was absolutely adorable.
I used to sleep with her until I was about 8.
And my father said, " You can't sleep with Paulette anymore."
I said, " Why can't we sleep with Paulette?"
Chaplin 's great recreational passion was tennis.
Here he's about to play a charity match against Groucho Marx, among others.
He played almost daily on his court at home.
It was after those matches, drinking Cokes, sharing a snack...
...that his friends thought him most relaxed, reminiscent...
...and expansive, especially about politics.
Mankind, he thought, was being turned into animals...
...blindly serving the factories, the machinery...
...that were supposed to serve it.
In its most aspiring moments, Modern Times...
...was about a Marxist concept; the dehumanization...
...and the alienation of labor.