Mr. Silent Films

“The only genius to come out of the movie industry.”
George Bernard Shaw (on Charlie Chaplin) 

“(Chaplin) is the only person to have gone down into cinematic history without any shadow of doubt. The films he left behind can never grow old.”
Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky

When most people think of silent movies they think of Charlie Chaplin. He’s kind of Mr. Silent Films because his movies were not only popular in his day, but they play well today, and will play well into the future. His 1931 film, City Lights (at #11) is the highest listed silent film on AFI’s list of The 100 Greatest American Movies. 

According to one website, some of the greatest directors ever listed City Lights in their personal 10 ten film list; Bernardo Bertolucci, Robert Bresson, David Lean, King Vidor, Milos Forman, and Stanley Kubrick. And to top it off—City Lights was Orson Welles’ #1 favorite film.

And while the actor Chaplin is well-known as The Tramp character from City Lights, fewer realize that he also produced and directed the film…and edited the film…and composed the music…and wrote the script. (How many people think of Charlie Chaplin as a screenwriter?)

Director Ella Kazan (On the Waterfront) actually lists two other films of Chaplin on his top ten: The Gold Rush and Shoulder Arms. And still favorites of others are Modern Times, The Great Dictator and The Kid—all written by Chaplin. But here’s a little known fact about Chaplin the writer—before he wrote all of those great feature films, over a period of five years (1914-1919) he wrote more than 65 short films.

So while Chaplin may have said, ”All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl”—that was also rooted in years of honing his writing skills working on those one and two-reelers that Hollywood was cranking out in its early years. 

P.S. In writing and directing The Artist (2011) Michel Hazanavicius while wanting to create a silent movie set in the 1920s wanted to avoid that long shadow of Chaplin. And in an interview with Ethan Alter said,  “When you speak of silent movies, everyone thinks of Charlie Chaplin first. And Chaplin was a genius, but he played a clown onscreen. I took the opposite tack — I wrote the script with a powerful man at the very beginning, but then the arc of the character has him becoming a kind of tramp at the end of the movie, like Chaplin. I showed Jean silent films like Sunrise and The Crowd and he understood quickly that he could act very naturally. I tried to tell the story with images and that way I didn’t have to ask the actors to pantomime. I wanted them to act as naturally as possible.”

Related post: Show Don’t Tell (Part 2)

Scott W. Smith