One hundred years ago this week, cinema’s most iconic and enduring character, Charlie Chaplin’s the Little Tramp, was born. On February 7, 1914 theatregoers were given their first taste of the lovable, laughable vagabond as he wrought havoc in Kid Auto Races in Venice. Two days later saw the release of Mabel’s Strange Predicament, a short that was filmed prior to Kid Auto Races and is therefore the actual first performance of the Tramp. Both are available in the box set Chaplin at Keystone.
Watching the evolution of Chaplin as an artist is one of cinema’s greatest delights. Those early Keystone comedies were about as anarchic and crude as they come. However, in just a few short years Chaplin was injecting his comedies with genuine pathos and a professional’s obsession with craft. The best combination of all these elements comes in the short film The Immigrant from 1917, which is available on the Chaplin Mutual Comedies collection.
After further expanding his scope with longer narrative films like Shoulder Arms and The Kid, Chaplin left the studio system, co-founded United Artists with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D.W. Griffith, and began releasing feature-length films. These films are not only Chaplin’s greatest achievements but some of the very best movies ever made. The two masterpieces towering over his other filmography are The Gold Rush from 1925 and City Lights, a silent anomaly released three years after sound had revolutionized the medium. Chaplin stars as the Tramp in both films and the mixture of gut-busting hilarity and soul-wrenching sadness has never been equaled.
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