The opening gag is quintessential Chaplin. The camera pans across a row of soldiers standing ready to march, landing on the Tramp at the outer edge. The drill sergeant barks at the men to fall into formation, but the Tramp confuses each instruction. They turn to march, but the Tramp’s waddle keeps him at odds with the rest of the group—his large flat feet are not suited for goose-stepping. There are similar scenes of this sort throughout Charlie Chaplin’s films: the tyrannical ringmaster in The Circus (1928), who brutally directs the other clowns; the factory in Modern Times (1936) that compels the workers to act like automated labor. These scenes, among others, shed light on a theme close to Chaplin: human freedom, what it means, and the ways it’s cheapened by modern life.
Shoulder Arms (1918) was Chaplin’s second film produced for First National, the distribution company for which he later produced his first feature, The Kid (1921). His First National films are marked by a rise in technical ambition. They are both longer than the two-reelers he produced at Keystone (1914-15), Niles Essanay (1915-16), and Mutual (1916-17), but also more dramatically developed. A typical Chaplin two-reeler usually played out in a single location offering some architectural opportunity for gags—the escalator in The Floorwalker (1916), the skating rink in The Rink (1916), or the rocking boat in The Immigrant (1917)—and ended with a chase. His deal with First National allowed him to grow as a storyteller. With his contract at Mutual, Chaplin became the highest paid entertainer in the world. But at First National, he was able to build his own studio—featured in his unreleased short, How to Make Movies (1918)—that offered him more creative freedom than any other filmmaker, in Hollywood or elsewhere.
With this freedom came a slower and more methodical approach to film production. Shoulder Arms was, along with A Dog’s Life (1918), one of only two fiction films Chaplin completed in 1918, compared to four in 1917, nine in 1916, and 13 in 1915. In between these, he released The Bond, an abstract and highly theatrical advertising film commissioned to sell American war bonds. (It will also screen at today’s screening at The Museum of Modern Art.) In the release version, Shoulder Arms opens in France along the Western Front. But when it was first planned, under the working title “Camouflage,” the film was to open with the Tramp at home before his recruitment. Some of the discarded scenes, including a sequence of the Tramp receiving his physical, were shot and assembled, and can be viewed in the third part of Kevin Brownlow and David Gil’s documentary, Unknown Chaplin (1983). In fact, Chaplin was hesitant to release Shoulder Arms at all. Only at the encouragement of the actor Douglas Fairbanks did he decide to release it, a few weeks shy of the Armistice in November.
I have always been moved by Jonathan Rosenbaum’s observation that, of all the artists in any medium, Chaplin had the most to say about what it means to be poor. The Dardenne brothers, in their conversation for the series Chaplin Today (2003), similarly point out how much he had to say about what it means to hunger. Sure enough, food plays a major role in Shoulder Arms. One of the most poignant ways Chaplin depicts the misery of trench life is when the Tramp, both out of hunger and boredom, finally eats the cheese on the mouse trap sitting beside his bunk.
Shoulder Arms screens this evening, January 30, at the Museum of Modern Art as part of the series “To Save and Project.” It will be preceded by The Bond.
