Watch the Solely Time Charlie Chaplin & Buster Keaton Carried out Collectively On-Display screen (1952)
Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton had been the 2 greatest comedy stars of the silent period, however because it happened, they never shared the display till effectively into the reign of sound. In truth, their collaboration didn’t come about till 1952, the identical yr that Singin’ within the Rain dramatized the already distant-feeling introduction of speaking pictures. That hit musical offers with once-famous artists coping with a changing world, and so, in its personal manner, does Limemild, the movie that lastly introduced Chaplin and Keaton together, dealing because it does with a washed-up music-hall star within the London of 1914.
A specialist in downtrodden professionaltagonists, Chaplin — who happened to have made his personal transition from vaudeville to movement pictures in 1914 — naturally performs that starring position. Keaton seems solely late within the movie, as an previous halfner of Chaplin’s character who takes the stage with him to perkind a duet at a benematch concert that promises the salvation of their careers. In actuality, this scene had a few of that very same enchantment for Keaton himself, who had but to recover financially or professionalfessionally after a ruinous divorce within the mid-nineteen-thirties, and had been struggling for traction on the brand new medium of television.
Although Limemild could also be a sound movie, and Chaplin and Keaton’s scene could also be a musical number, what they execute together is, for all intents and purposes, a piece of silent comedy. Chaplin performs the violin and Keaton performs the piano, however earlier than both of them can get a be aware out of their instruments, they have to first take care of a collection of technical mishaps and wardrobe malfunctions. That is in maintaining with a theme each perkinders essayed again and again of their silent heyday: that of the human being made inept by the complications of an inhuman world.
However after all, Chaplin and Keaton’s characters usually discovered their methods to triumph at the very least temporarily over that world in the long run, and so it involves move in Limemild — moments earlier than the hapmuch less violinist himself movees on, the victim of an onstage coronary heart assault. In the true world, each of those two icons from a bygone age had at the very least another act forward of them, Chaplin with extra movies to direct again in his native England and Europe, and Keaton as a sort of living legfinish for rent, known as up whenever Hollywooden wanted a shot of what had been rediscovered — not least because of TV’s re-circulation of previous films — because the magazineic of silent pictures.
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Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His initiatives embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the ebook The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by way of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social internetwork formerly referred to as Twitter at @colinmarshall.