Tuesday, June 03, 2008
ONE MORE THOUGHT ABOUT "THE RINK"
There's more to say about "The Rink," if you're up for it! I thought it would be fun to talk about the story. I don't have much space, so I'll just talk about the first half.
You could almost have called the story "The Restaurant" because so much of the first half takes place there. Why the split locales? Shouldn't a story about a rink take place mostly in a rink? Maybe there was some practical reason. Anyway, I have a pragmatic view about it. Doing it this way resulted in a great film, end of argument.
The story in the restaurant sets up the conflict between Chaplin (the waiter) and Eric Cambell (the big, burly customer). Actually the conflict was Chaplin's fault because he tried to cheat Cambell out of his change, but it doesn't matter. We sympathize with Chaplin because he's cute. I guess the logic of the heart is what counts here, not the logic of the mind.
The writer could have written to heavily favor the main conflict between Chaplin and Cambell, instead there were constant digressions into funny subplots about secondary characters like the cook and the head waiter. In a way this sequence is about the zany life in the restaurant as much as it's about Chaplin. The action is fast and furious with people getting into fights, flirting, getting fired, etc. at a rapid pace. A modern writer would simplify the story to focus on the Chaplin/Cambell conflict...and he'd be wrong. Subtext means a lot.
The full name of the film is something like, "The Rink: The Story of an Amorous Waiter." That's odd because the first half of the story hardly ever puts Chaplin in a romantic situation. You get the feeling that Chaplin had trouble deciding what the film was about. The scene that starts the film sets up the girl in the story but it feels tacked on, as if it was added later as an afterthought. Amazingly, faults like this don't seem to harm the film at all. The pace, the acting, and the strong intuition of the director carries it.
According to the documentary Unknown Chaplin, he would often decide what the film was about as he was making it. For instance, for The Immigrant he made the restaurant scene first, and only later decided that he should meet the girl on a ship.
ReplyDeleteI don'r believe this was done by a writer at all; as aaron t. says Chaplin worked from a rough idea-sometimes a very small idea-and possibly an outline, that's it. No script.
ReplyDeleteI thought this was all about the roller skating. The restaurant is a setup & bonus.
Chaplin often improvised huge sections of his films; even when he had a basic idea he was constantly refining it and changing things around. the aforementioned UNKNOWN CHAPLIN shows multiple versions of various gags in several of his films (while make a movie set in a department store he thought it would be funny to add an escalator chase, so production shut down so an escalator could be added to the set then all the previously filmed scenes were redone so there wouldn't be a break in continuity).
ReplyDeletewow eddie i haven't been on your blog in a long time and now you put up the rink, its my favorite. I used to watch this multiple times when I was a kid. It amazed me how chaplin could skate so well. Anyways my dad a huge chaplin fan he always showed me his stuff, he even has an autograph of his, and my other fav thing chaplin has done is the circus. I love the scene in which he goes into a cage with a lion and the monkey tightrope scene.
ReplyDeleteAlso the fat guy in the chaplin movies is so freakin funny, you happen to know who he is? That fat guy always appeared to be the normal everyday guy who i related to and Chaplin was the sporadic nut case who was always unpredictable and that relationship always made the shorts hilarious for me. Anyways thanks again for posting this short.