"Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains," said the English social reformer Jane Ellice Hopkins. An easy sentiment if you are an artist whose materials consist of nothing more than a pen and a blank page or paints and canvas. However, when your medium is motion pictures, taking pains can mean thousands of dollars a minute and studio heads breathing down your neck while you wait for that drop of inspiration.

Charles Chaplin was a genius, a genius of movie comedy. In episode 2 of Kevin Brownlow's and David Gill's documentary Unknown Chaplin (1983), we see just how painful it sometimes was to bring that genius to the screen.

The first example is The Kid (1921), the first feature film Chaplin directed. By this point, Chaplin was so popular he not only had total artistic control over his films, he had even built his own studio just to create them. Here Chaplin would continue to make features in much the same way he had made his shorts, building sets around his unfinished ideas and shooting take after take as he devised comic bits of business. Meanwhile a crew on full salary would stand around, waiting for the moment when Chaplin would need their services.

This process was not fast enough for those who had hired him and were paying for all this. First National, later to be absorbed into Warner Brothers a few years after the coming of sound, were a loose confederation of movie theater exhibitors who had the idea of forming their own studio to supply them with films. Snagging Chaplin was quite a coup for the young company, but a steady engine of motion picture production Chaplin was not. Meanwhile, features were taking over from shorts as the primary content of an evening at the cinema and Chaplin realized he had to take the plunge that lessened his already paltry output of short comedies. The shooting of The Kid took a year and a half but when he was finished, Chaplin had created a masterpiece that enthralled audiences and set a new benchmark that other comedians strove to reach in vain.

The next feature in this episode is Chaplin's first starring movie for the film company he formed with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith, United Artists. The Gold Rush (1925) would be Chaplin's biggest hit of the silent era but, as Unknown Chaplin shows, his attempt to film the comedy under the snowbound conditions of Truckee, California, site of the Donner Party disaster of the 19th Century, were bound to fail given Chaplin's slow and meticulous methods. He quickly returned to his studio.

The last is City Lights, released in 1931. Shooting, however, began over two years before and in a different film world. On December 27, 1928, the first day of shooting, talkies dominated the movie world but had not yet pushed silent movies out of the running. All the major studios were still producing them. By the time Chaplin finished however, his silent comedy was an anachronism. Nevertheless, it was a very successful film, a testament to Chaplin's talent and star power. As rare home movie footage shot behind the scenes shows in this episode of Unknown Chaplin, it was not the coming of sound that caused the long shooting schedule, but rather one small detail of the story; how does a blind flower girl mistake a tramp for a rich man?

Only a star and director of Chaplin's greatness could have combined these incredibly high standards of film making with the time and money necessary for perfection. Unknown Chaplin details the slow and painful process sometimes required to create the illusion of effortless storytelling.

Writers/producers: Kevin Brownlow, David Gill
Narrator: James Mason
Music: Charles Chaplin, Carl Davis
Cinematography: Ted Adcock
Film Editor: Trevor Waite
Video Editor: Tom Kavanagh
BW & C-53 min.

by Brian Cady