How Charlie Chaplin put the little guy on the big screen

By Fiammetta Rocco

In its infancy, cinema often turned to history for inspiration. For the first decade of the 20th century, the screens were filled with stories such as the life of Jesus, the escape of the Kelly Gang and the assassination of the Duke of Guise. Then, just months before the start of the first world war in 1914, a British stage actor and comedian arrived in Los Angeles to try his hand at the movies. His name was Charlie Chaplin.

As he prepared to play his first and most famous part, the Little Tramp, in “Kid Auto Races at Venice”, Chaplin wanted “everything to be a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large”. In “Mabel’s Strange Predicament”, which was shot two days later, he pretends to be a posh hotel guest but is again really a tramp in need of shelter. He stumbles over a woman’s foot. He turns and raises his hat apologetically, then trips over a bowl, before raising his hat to the bowl. Though he looks scruffy he has a noble soul. He’s just a little guy who wants a break.

Chaplin’s character was unfamiliar to Americans and at first his studio, Keystone Comedy Film Company, didn’t quite know what to make of it. The company was on the brink of letting Chaplin go when a telegram arrived from the firm’s New York office asking the west-coast studio to “hurry up with more Chaplin pictures as there was a terrific demand for them”. Audiences saw what Chaplin had felt instinctively: that, with a vagrant’s clothes on, he was someone everyone could identify with, an Everyman who tries and tries and never gives up.

“You know this fellow is many-sided,” Chaplin later wrote in his autobiography. He is “a tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure”. Over the years, that lonely fellow has continued to inspire. From Charlie Brown to Forrest Gump, he is now a staple in our books and on our screens. A century after the creation of the Little Tramp, the triumph of the little guy is one of cinema’s most enduring tropes.■

The Chaplin’s World museum in Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland, reopened on June 13th

Image: Getty