Charlot #9: Cruel, Cruel Love

I showed [A Woman of the Sea] exactly once at one theater … and that was the end of that. The film was promptly returned to Mr Chaplin’s vaults and no one has ever seen it again.

Josef von Sternberg, Fun in a Chinese Laundry

Seems like someone’s moved up in the world. This week, Charlie plays a wealthy lord whose courtship falls apart due to the flimsiest of misunderstandings. Heartbroken, he tries to poison himself, but… well, I won’t spoil the twist.

Romantic melodramas are fertile ground for parody, especially in the silent era. The line between dramatic pantomime and comedic pantomime can be so thin. They sound the same, after all! This short was so effective at setting the mood that I started wondering if this was indeed a comedy. Charlie just tried to kill himself, that’s pretty heavy. This close-up feels a little too creepy to laugh at. We’ve sure read a lot of title cards, is the dialog so important that it can’t be expressed in movement? Will this not end in a chase? And then Charlie falls backwards over a chair. Thank goodness, it’s slapstick after all.

Regardless, for a studio where the guiding philosophy could be summarized as “ramp it up until there’s a chase,” this much irony and suicide is downright Shakespearean. It respects its own plot enough to attempt some intriguing filmmaking choices. I enjoyed the superimposed vision of hell. Another: Even after the reveal that the poison was substituted with water (whoops, I spoiled it after all), some notably discontinuous editing adds a dramatic punch to the plot. While the doctors go to work on Charlie, the camera finds time for some close-ups of his beloved racing to the scene by carriage. Perhaps this is the influence of D.W. Griffith. Arguably Hollywood’s first great auteur, Griffith had worked in film nearly a decade by 1914, surely influencing Chaplin. The two will become business partners in a few years’ time. Incidentally, as this short is hitting theaters, Griffith is about to begin shooting The Birth of a Nation, a significant piece of film history that will push cinematic storytelling further. And that’s all I’m gonna say about that movie!

That we can watch this film at all is something of an achievement. This was one of only a handful of Chaplin films that were considered lost for much of the 20th century. Another will come up later. A third, initially titled Sea Gulls and later A Woman of the Sea, was intentionally destroyed by Chaplin as a tax write-off. (Warner Bros. didn’t invent the practice!) Cruel, Cruel World is one of the lucky ones. After decades, a copy was found in storage halfway around the world. That tends to be how lost films are recovered. It’s just in a room somewhere far away from where it was produced, waiting, except nobody is even aware it exists. Tragic. But then it’s found, restored, digitized, and sold on DVD. Then some blog says it’s “not really” worth watching, so you don’t. But at least you can make that decision!

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