Episode 2 | August 4, 2014 |
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I began this series by hopping forward to 1930’s All Quiet on the Western Front in order to examine the root causes of World War I. Now we’re returning to the start, with one of the earliest movies about the war. The first films made about World War I began to appear at the tail end of the conflict, after the United States ended its neutrality and entered the fight on April 6, 1917. As with the Second World War, the initial efforts came, not from the dramatists, but from the genres generally considered "low brow." A French comedy from 1916, Paris During the War, depicted short vignettes of life humorously carrying on. In 1918, animation pioneer Winsor McCay created a propaganda film, The Sinking of the Lusitania, condemning the U. S. stance on neutrality. Both approached the war very differently and neither did so by creating a traditional, dramatized war story. Another early production was headed by America's funnyman, Charlie Chaplin. His star had risen quickly, only beginning his acting career with Keystone in 1914, moving to Essenay in 1915, to Mutual for '16 and '17, before finally breaking away to create his own studio in 1918. By the time he filmed Shoulder Arms, Chaplin's films were no longer the mindless slapstick he had been restricted to at Keystone, but were often examinations of social issues, told with sensitivity and humor. Shoulder Arms is a comedy about the war as it is a critical examination of it. There isn’t really a plot here so much as a series of comic episodes featuring Chaplin’s Little Tramp facing off against German troops on the Western Front. The first part of the film details life in the trenches. Nothing here is idealized. Torrential rain makes life miserable while Charlie’s gradually flooding quarters provide over-the-top comic relief. The pain and loneliness of not receiving mail from home turns into an unwelcome package of Limburger, which subsequently turns into a foul-smelling surprise for a German soldier in a neighboring trench. Throughout the war Chaplin faced criticism on both sides of the Atlantic, from his home country of England and from his new home in the United States, for not fighting. He had filmed a short propaganda film promoting Liberty Bonds, in which he bludgeons Kaiser Wilhelm with a sledgehammer, and had even gone on tour to sell them. Possibly the criticisms lobbied toward him shaped the development of Shoulder Arms, in which the Little Recruit sets out to prove his mettle, singlehandedly capturing thirteen Germans, along with their diminutive colonel. The Little Recruit then goes deep undercover to infiltrate the German lines and even succeeds in kidnapping the Kaiser and delivering him into waiting allied hands. Unfortunately, it all winds up being an elaborate dream by the Little Recruit, and it meant the Kaiser and his forces were still out there to be dealt with. A Chaplin film often has a straight woman for Charlie to play off, being grounded in the real world while the Little Tramp skips along on its surface. Early on she was unobtainable, a person for the tramp to pursue against her better judgment. Later, once Chaplin cast Edna Purviance as his leading lady, she became a kindred spirit for the Tramp to connect with, if only temporarily, on his travels. In Shoulder Arms, Purviance appears as a French woman who provides the Little Recruit shelter in her destroyed home. The two connect despite the language barrier, Charlie miming his nationality by referencing his Keystone roots, throwing bricks at other people. Chaplin had left that sort of comedy behind in favor of more nuanced, clever comedic setups, so mimicking Keystone is two jokes in one: wryly noting how his critics still viewed him and cutely suggesting that Keystone comedy is the universal language for “America.” Sadly, Puviance’s romantic interest was also part of the soldier’s dream. Shoulder Arms clocks in at a mere forty-six minutes and plays like a handful of Chaplin’s earlier shorts strung together into a feature-length package. Clearly Chaplin is still getting the hang of the longer format, though, as a comical propaganda effort, Shoulder Arms does exactly what it set out to do: lift spirits during an extremely difficult time. Mark Twain once wrote that, “against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.” Comedy is a tool for fighting back against oppressors and hardships. Being released less than a month before the Armistice, Shoulder Arms came a little too late to have a great impact but, all the same, it remained the most commercially successful film of Chaplin’s entire five-decade career. Twenty-one years later, when World War II kicked off, Hollywood again held back during the nation's isolationist neutrality, not wanting to offend the Nazi government. Once again, it was the comedians who took the lead. The first were The Three Stooges, not typically remembered for being political, who released You Nazty Spy in January 1940, making them the first U. S. filmmakers to go after Hitler, nearly four months after the German invasion of Poland, two years before the U. S. entered the war and Hollywood began depicting the conflict. Later in 1940, Chaplin was again ahead of the curve, releasing The Great Dictator, which used the coincidental similarity of the Little Tramp to the Führer to deliver both a blistering parody of Hitler and a powerful appeal for peace and sensibility. In addressing critics of The Great Dictator, he wrote: As to Hitler being funny, I can only say that if we can't sometimes laugh at Hitler, then we are further gone than we think. There is a healthy thing in laughter, laughter at the grimmest things in life, laughter at death, even. Shoulder Arms was funny. It had to do with men marching off to war. The Gold Rush was first suggested by the Donner tragedy. Laughter is the tonic, the relief, the surcease of pain. It is healthy, the healthiest thing in the world – and it is health-giving.Mel Brooks later adopted this same angle, that the best way to attack your enemies is with humor in order to reduce them to a pathetic laughing stock. Chaplin's Adenoid Hynkel went for Hitler's jugular and prevailed with humor and mocking, lifting audiences' hopes with laughter in 1940, just as he had in 1918.
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