Charlie Chaplin’s “little man” is one of the most famous icons in Western culture

This edited article about the silent cinema originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 405 published on 18 October 1969.

Charlie Chaplin in his most famous role as "the little man"

They were known as the Keystone Kops, and they were the most inefficient police force in the world. Summoned to give chase, they tumbled down steps, or fell out of windows in their haste to get into the waiting patrol wagon, which immediately took off at a hundred miles an hour. A nightmare chase followed, in which approaching cars, lorries and trains were constantly being missed by a hair’s breadth.

When their quarry was finally cornered, it was inevitably in a pastry shop which specialised in making custard pies, for the very good reason that they provided excellent ammunition for a wonderful free-for-all in which everyone on the screen received a pie in the face.

The Keystone Kops were the invention of a man named Mack Sennett, who had started his film career in 1908 as an actor and a scriptwriter for the director, D. W. Griffith. By 1912, he had his own studio and a collection of artists, the like of which the world has never seen since. Some of them came from the circus and vaudeville theatres, others from walks of life completely divorced from the world of entertainment. All were willing to risk their lives for the sake of raising a laugh. Ask them to throw themselves off a building and they would leap merrily into space; lead a lion into the room and they would hurl themselves at it in a flying tackle; give them a car and they would drive it through a house. Astonishingly, there was only one fatality ever recorded at the Sennett Studios.

In 1913, the Sennett comedians welcomed a new recruit, a young Englishman whom Sennett had seen in a touring show called Fred Karno’s Mumming Birds. His name was Charles Spencer Chaplin.

Chaplin was born in Walworth, London, in an area where row upon row of decaying houses harboured enormous families, struggling to keep out of the workhouse. Chaplin’s own childhood in those grim slums could not have been worse. Abandoned by his father, and forced to see his own mother enter the workhouse, he suddenly found himself alone in the world at an age when other children still had several years of schooling ahead of them. Forced to support himself as best he could, he took a number of jobs. He was, in turn, a newspaper boy, a printer, an assistant to a toy maker, a glass blower, and a general errand boy, but he really only ever had one ambition in his life – to become an actor.

In between all these jobs, Chaplin would put an extra polish on his shoes, and, wearing a clean collar would hurry hopefully towards the offices of a theatrical agent. After a great deal of persistence, he was offered a tiny role as a page boy in a play called Sherlock Holmes. He was then only twelve-and-a-half. Within four years, he had become an experienced performer who could do anything from straight acting to dancing in clogs.

Like many other great comedians, Chaplin had dreams of becoming a great romantic actor. The first part that Sennett gave him hardly fitted him into that category. He was given the role of a man with a limp and a backache who was trying to climb a greasy ladder, with a trunk in his arms and a coal scuttle on his head.

It was soon after this that Chaplin donned his famous tramp costume for a series of one-reel comedies which are still going the rounds more than fifty years after they were made. Their universal appeal, still as strong as ever, lies in the fact that his tramp character is easily identifiable by all of us. He is the common man, constantly at war with authority. The underdog, who has been battered to his knees so often that he knows that he can only fight to win with a horseshoe hidden in his boxing glove.

“The little fellow,” as Chaplin called him, continued to appear in films until the late thirties, when he made two sound films, City Lights and Modern Times. Although the talkies had arrived, Chaplin did not speak in them until he had abandoned his tramp character. The films he has made since, although often very funny, lack the inspired comic invention of his earlier films.

Two other comedians of that golden age of silent comedy deserve special mention. One of them is Buster Keaton, who always played the role of an endlessly resourceful little man, manfully struggling against impossible odds. In his most famous film The General, he is a Southerner, waging a successful single-handed war against the armies of the North. In another, The Navigator, we find him alone with a girl on board an ocean-going liner, which he is struggling to keep afloat. In all his films he never once smiles.

The other giant of that era was Harold Lloyd. Unlike Chaplin and Keaton, Lloyd always played a brash and breezy character, who wore horn-rimmed glasses. Lloyd is associated with the comedy of thrills, in which the fast pace of his films is maintained by a series of awe-inspiring acrobatic feats. The greatest of his films is Safety Last, in which Lloyd finds himself clinging to the side of a skyscraper forty storeys above the street. As a sequence of comic thrills it has never been equalled.

The arrival of the talkies ended the careers of most of the great comedians of the silent screen. The situation was a sad one. Some of the comedians had unsuitable voices, or else they found that they could no longer give full rein to their creative flights of mad fancy, because of the restrictions placed on them by the then limited range of the recording equipment. It was truly the end of an era.