Charlie Chaplin And ‘talkies’

Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin, Jr., whom we know on the silver screen as Charlie Chaplin, was born in Walworth, London in 1889. He grew up in a family of entertainers, and began singing at a young age. His parents had separated when Charlie was three years old, and he moved around quite a bit while living under his mother’s care. The Chaplin family was plagued with demons, as his father became a reclusive alcoholic, and his mother had fallen mentally ill and was eventually placed in an insane asylum. After all of this, Charlie and his brother became very close, and relied heavily on their performing talents to survive.

Above all else, Charlie Chaplin was a true cinematic artist, and took the work he did very seriously, because he wanted to entertain the masses. After the invention of the ‘talkies’, or movies with sound, he felt that cinema began to decline in artistic value, and that actors relied too heavily on dialogue rather than movement and interaction. Chaplin firmly believed that “silent film's message reaches the entire spectrum of ‘intellectual and the rank and file’”(Durham, Handler, Racusin & Simonian 1999). The motivation behind his early silent films was the extensive use of imagination, both by the actors as well as the audience. He had almost complete control of his work because not only was he an actor, but a director and writer as well.


Much of Chaplin’s fame has come from the conception of his hilarious and offbeat character, the Tramp. He had explained that it was a sort of bold statement against the status quo. Prior to shooting the film Mabel’s Strange Predicament, he was feeling indecisive about the wardrobe for the main character. As a result, he decided to play it over the top, and choose a look that defied the status quo. He wanted the ultimate contradiction in appearance. Chaplin felt that by dressing in baggy pants, a derby hat, a tight coat, topped off with a tiny mustache, he could exaggerate the movements and characterization on screen. He had studied pantomime when he was much younger, and brought a great deal of this art form to his films. He communicated everything onscreen through his actions, because he truly felt that they spoke louder than words.

Over time, Charlie Chaplin eventually succumbed to the trend of using sound in his films. Many of his fans felt that he was a hypocrite because of his public scorn for sound in pictures. But, he more than made up for this by incorporating subtle statements of his political views into his films. The new medium allowed him the opportunity to “include a critique of industrial working conditions in the United States during the Depression, and a strong critique of the Fascist regime of Adolph Hitler” (Durham, et. Al 1999). After doing this, Chaplin’s popularity remained quite strong during the 1930s, yet he worried that this brashness was not quite the image he wanted to portray. Despite avoiding full-length dialogue in most of his ‘talkies’, he decided to break down and insert speaking interactions for the characters of his 1940 film, The Great Dictator. Eventually, because of the extended length of films, and because dialogue was such an integral part, “an actor needed to move beyond constant slapstick” (Charlie Chaplin 2007). Chaplin’s films had to take on a more serious tone that was not as over-the-top as people had been used to seeing him.

Because sound in film allowed Chaplin’s messages to be heard the world over, this caused quite a backlash, particularly from the United States government. Though born in England, Charlie Chaplin lived in the United States for an extensive period of time, producing nearly all of his works here. During the McCarthy era, Chaplin’s activities were closely monitored, as the FBI noticed several communist messages in his works being transmitted on screen. In 1952, J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI during this time, saw to it that Chaplin was not to be allowed to return to the U.S. after making a long trip back to London.

Charlie Chaplin was truly a genius that will go down as one of the most influential people in the history of cinema. He truly loved the art form, and stayed true to his craft throughout most of his career. Though he had to adapt eventually to the usage of sound in film, he was still able to allow his statements to be heard, while remaining a powerful force in Hollywood.