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World Tour Revisited: Pelote match in Saint-Jean-De-Luz, September 1931

September 5, 2013, 8:55 am
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Charlie and May (third from left) at the pelote match. 
Charlie holding one of the basket-shaped rackets used in the game.

Charlie & May's afternoon at the pelote match began on a sour note. May had been asked to pose that day for Russian painter, Sorine, but Charlie refused to allow her to do it because he thought the dress she chose to wear for the portrait  ("a blue and white checked sun suit, naturally very low-necked") was too revealing:
"But Charlie, Sorine himself asked your permission to paint me, and you gave it. His canvas is already prepared. I can't back out at the last minute."
"That's nothing to me. Besides, we're invited to a pelote match and you're supposed to accompany me."
"I was so happy that Sorine was going to paint my portrait...."
Charlie grew angry. One word led to another, and finally I began to cry.
On our way to the pelote match, it began to rain. I shivered in my sun suit. It didn't offend Charlie for me to show my back to the crowd, but a painter had no right to see it. I arrived with swollen eyes; people remarked that I had already been hit in the face with pelote balls. I was offered an immense basket of flowers. Charlie smiled to hide his bad humor. The game didn't interest him much. Occasionally he made signs and whispered with the most amiable expression, "Smile, people are looking at us," or "Look happy; they're taking our picture."
"Please, Charlie, now that I've obeyed you and presided over the match with you," I said to him as we returned, "let me pose for Sorine for just one little hour!"
"What, you dare to bring up this business again?"
"I am no longer a gamine, Charlie. One doesn't often have the chance to sit for a reputable artist."
"Reputable or not, you aren't going!"
"Look, I've put a bolero on my shoulders."
"Too easy to remove. I won't discuss it any further"
"And it was for a world exposition," I sobbed.
"Exhibition, in my eyes."
 --May Reeves, The Intimate Charlie Chaplin

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If you live in the Netherlands, there will be a screening of The Circus with a live orchestra, Sept. 6th & 7th

September 6, 2013, 5:41 am
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In the director's chair on the set of Modern Times

September 6, 2013, 6:36 am
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Cameraman Rollie Totheroh is in the background (in a sweater), as well as continuity secretary Della Steele. Charlie appears to be in street clothes except for his shoes.
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Outtake from The Adventurer

September 6, 2013, 12:27 pm
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From the documentary Unknown Chaplin (1983), narrated by James Mason.
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The "bench" photos

September 7, 2013, 9:18 am
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For some reason, this bench was often used as the background for photos at the Chaplin Studios.

with Kono, 1927
Also 1927--same day as above.
With Chuck Riesner (left) and Konrad Bercovici.
With Harry d'Arrast, 1923. Source: Dominique Dugros.
With ballerina Anna Pavlova, 1922
Betty Morrissey (left) and Merna Kennedy, c. 1926

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The Rounders, released September 7th, 1914

September 7, 2013, 10:26 am
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According to Minta Durfee, Roscoe Arbuckle's first wife (& also his wife in the film), the boat filling with water was Arbuckle's idea and was intended to be a practical joke on Charlie because of his aversion to it. In Kevin Brownlow's The Parade's Gone By, Minta is quoted as saying: "Charlie hated water...And later on, he and my husband did one of the most difficult things an actor can do: in the last scene they lay in a boat, pretending to be dead drunk, while it slowly sank in the middle of Echo Park Lake. For a man who hates water, that was pretty good.”
Charlie must have been a good sport because he appears to be unable to keep a straight face as they disappear beneath the surface.


However I find the notion that Charlie was afraid of water interesting because he enjoyed swimming most of his life and gets wet in several other films including A Film Johnnie, The Masquerader (which was released only a couple of weeks before this film), Shanghaied, A Night In The Show, The Cure, The Adventurer, City Lights, Modern Times, etc. Perhaps he didn't like to be surprised by water, which is understandable.

This post was previously published on January 3rd, 2013.
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Francis X. Bushman, Chaplin, and "Broncho Billy" Anderson, 1915

September 8, 2013, 4:52 am
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Merna Kennedy (September 7, 1908 - December 20, 1944)

September 8, 2013, 8:20 am
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I'm sorry this is a day late.

Merna on the set of The Circus.

Merna was the childhood friend of Chaplin’s second wife Lita Grey. It was Lita who suggested her for the role of the equestrienne in The Circus, not only because she was pretty, but because she had the developed legs of a dancer. Merna made several more films after The Circus, but retired in 1934 when she married choreographer/director Busby Berkeley (the marriage only lasted a year). She died of a heart attack in 1944, shortly after her second marriage to Forrest Brayton, she was only 35.


Eating an egg on the lawn of the Chaplin Studios.

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Collage from Variety advertising supplement for the Warner/MK2 box sets, April 2003

September 8, 2013, 11:52 am
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World Tour Revisited: Tennis in Biarritz

September 9, 2013, 6:32 am
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Wherever Charlie traveled on his world tour (or any of his vacations for the rest of his life), he would always find a way to play tennis, a game he loved. Georgia Hale, Chaplin's leading lady in The Gold Rush, takes credit for introducing the game to Charlie, for it was during their relationship, which was in progress before he left for Europe, that he had a tennis court built on the grounds of his Hollywood home. According to Georgia, she was given run of the house while Charlie was on vacation & played tennis there during his absence.*

During Charlie's stay in Biarritz in 1931, he played a "match" against three French tennis champions:
After a tennis match in which Cochet, Lacoste, and Martin Plaa played, the audience asked for a game between Chaplin and the champions. Charlie soon complied, and since he was sure to lose, he chose to make a joke of it: he slipped deliberately, ran after balls out of bounds, turned several times around himself and gesticulated so comically with his racket that the audience couldn't help splitting their sides. This was one of the most successful and original matches the champions ever played. (May Reeves, The Intimate Charlie Chaplin)


Chaplin poses between Henri Cochet (on his right) and Martin Plaa.
With Rene Lacoste.
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*Georgia never heard from Charlie during the entire 18 months he was away from Hollywood. This neglect would mark the end of their relationship upon his return and they wouldn't see each other again for another ten years. 
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With Geraldine, c.1948

September 9, 2013, 1:29 pm
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Lots of silents tonight on TCM

September 9, 2013, 2:38 pm
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Chaplin's masterpieces The Kid& City Lights will be shown back to back beginning at 12:45AM (EST). Also on the schedule are films by Buster Keaton (inc. The General) and Harold Lloyd.

Click here for more info.
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Random Excerpt

September 10, 2013, 8:00 am
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 Actress Virginia Bradford recalls an evening she spent with Charlie:
(Note: the dashes & ellipses are hers)
I saw him one night at his home in a mad mood, stripping off his clothes and ruffling his curly hair until it looked like horns sprouting through -- stretching his arms and body as though he were going to spring into the woods out of sight, showing his protruding teeth in a grin as he said, “Down gods. My name is Pan -- And you are Daphne.  --I like you because you are a nut the same as I.”
And because I was just as mad as he, I took off my clothes, and we ran all over his grand mansion like something wild in the woods. He sprang upon the seat of his pipe organ and after a moment of silence, he played chords -- And I saw how sad and lonely he really was -- then his mood changed. -- He showed me his curiosities from the Emperor and Empress of China. They were in a glass case.  He danced around a Chinese mask. Then he was a child showing another child his toys. -- Later we got into a shower together and imagined it was raining in a woodland. The glass-enclosed shower bath with its elaborate fixtures prevented him from seeing trees dripping with rain. -- We held each others hands and danced around and around.
Surely, I should be envied by the rest of the world who have not seen him as “Pan”. For that is the very soul of his genius.
The next morning, he received word that his mother was dead [Hannah Chaplin died August 28, 1928 from an infected gall bladder.] The servant who brought me my breakfast told me. Later, I met him downstairs. He was only the famous man now who had lost his mother.  He took me home in his car -- All the way he talked about her -- disconnected sentences. -- How young she looked. -- Her eyes were blue -- “I hate funerals. I wish I didn’t have to go.  But I have to. Can’t send anyone else in my place. --Three weeks ago she was dancing the Charleston. -- Didn’t feel any grief when they told me. -- Just a pain in my stomach. --I wonder what the nurse thought yesterday when I was holding her hand. -- While my mother looked up at me I wondered what was…in the nurse’s mind as she watched. --This…dying mother. --Interesting to know."


Source

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Photo by Lord Snowdon, c. 1957

September 10, 2013, 8:08 am
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Motion Picture magazine, October 1925

September 10, 2013, 2:49 pm
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Charlie in New York City, September 1923

September 11, 2013, 7:43 am
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Remembering the victims of 9/11/01 today.

“Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural.”

—The Barber (Charlie Chaplin), The Great Dictator, 1940



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Chaplin guest conducts the John Philip Sousa Band, February 1916

September 11, 2013, 9:40 am
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Charlie conducted the band in the Overture to The Poet and Peasant and in his own composition “The Peace Patrol” at the Hippodrome in New York.  Sousa described the event in his autobiography Marching Along:  
It was at the Hippodrome Sunday feature concerts in 1915 [sic] that I first met that public idol, Charles Chaplin.  We had been reveling in the vocal gifts of Melba, Culp, Garden and Fremstad.  Charlie was therefore quite a departure.
“I want to lead your band!”  said Charlie.
“In what number?”  I asked.
“The Poet and Peasant overture,” he confidently replied.
At the rehearsal he mounted the podium, took my baton and as the band started the stately measures of the opening, he proceeded to beat time fully four times too fast!  That well-known blank expression came over his face but this time it was involuntary.  “That isn’t it!” he exclaimed.  I smiled.  “But I’ve played it many years,” I reminded him.  Suddenly I realized that he remembered only the allegro and had forgotten all about the moderato, so I told the band to begin again, this time with the allegro, and we were off!  On the night of the performance, the audience, reading his name on the program and never having seen him in the flesh, suspected a trick—-some clever impersonator of Chaplin—but, as he came from the wings, he did his inimitably funny little step and slowly proceeded to the band platform.  The house, convinced, rang with applause.

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A King In New York, released September 12th, 1957*

September 12, 2013, 8:32 am
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Chaplin plays King Shahdov, a deposed monarch who seeks refuge in America.
Shahdov pantomimes an order for caviar in the loud nightclub.
 On the left is Oliver Johnston who is excellent as the long-suffering Ambassador Jaume.

After watching Dawn Addams (Ann Kay) taking a bath through a keyhole, Shahdov becomes so excited that he leaps into his own tub. Chaplin had filmed many takes of this scene but the gag wasn't coming off, according to associate producer Jerry Epstein.  Annoyed, Chaplin did one last take. This time he hit his head on the porcelain and it made a loud crack. Epstein recalled that you could have heard a pin drop on the set, but Charlie stood up, rubbed his head, and said, "Good or bad, it goes."

Chaplin directs Shani Wallis' nightclub scene which deleted from the film.
Charlie with son, Michael, who plays Rupert. 
Publicity shot of Dawn Addams, who played Ann Kay. Addams became friends with Charlie & Oona after she auditioned for the role of Terry in Limelight. She later recalled that Charlie's favorite acting instruction to her  was "break though.""Remember to be definite,," he said, "moving your head is indefinite. Only make a move when it means something." This was a lesson Chaplin learned 50 years earlier from H.A. Saintsbury who told him not to move his head too much while acting.

*This was the date of the UK release. The film wasn't released in the U.S. until 1972.
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Chaplin & others pose in a Coney Island photo booth, 1925

September 12, 2013, 1:09 pm
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L-R: CC, Frank Crowninshield, Helen Sardeau, Lois Long, & Harry d’Arrast.

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c. 1915

September 12, 2013, 1:39 pm
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