“Gesture Man”: Chaplin’s Restraint

In Moments with Chaplin (1980), Lillian Ross recounts how, in 1950, Chaplin was volunteering his services at the Circle, Hollywood's leading noncommercial theatre, directing a production of James Barrie's play What Every Woman Knows that starred his second son Sydney, cofounder of the Circle.At 1:00 a.m., as others wearied of rehearsing, "Keep it simple!" he cried."Too many gestures are creeping in.I don't like that.If the audience notices a gesture, you're gone.Gestures are not to be seen.And I'm a gesture man.It's hard for me to keep them down."Says Ross, "As he spoke, he made a small, delicate gesture of restraint." 1 In this essay I want to dwell a little on this double attitude to gestures: as the unavoidable language of "pantomime," as Chaplin called the form of art he had refined for film from his vaudeville beginnings, yet as something always in danger of becoming too broad, crude, conscious or unnatural.And I'll consider how these issues emerge in one of the peaks of Chaplin's art, City Lights (1931).From the first days of his fame, Chaplin's characteristic gestures were instantly recognizable.A 1915 article in Motion Picture Magazine describes "Chaplinitis" as found equally among "the happy youths of the slums, or the dandies of clubdom or college": for both "an imitation of a Chaplin flirt of the coat, or the funny waddle of the comedian, is considered the last word in humour.To be Chaplinesque is to be funny; to waddle a few steps and then look naïvely at your audience." 2 Taken together, the Tramp's gestures amount to a worldview and a modus operandi in a complex ongoing struggle for survival, food, love, status.Raymond Durgnat in The Crazy Mirror (1969) eloquently evokes the figure of the Tramp in his appetites and aversions, his pretensions and vulnerability, his defeats and survival, referring to "the delicacy and finickiness of his gestures": "He is at once a tramp trying to be a dandy, and a child trying to be an adult," Durgnat says."Despite his incessant failure, 1 Lillian Ross, Moments with Chaplin (New York: Dodds, Mead & Co., 1980), 19.