It’s 1918 all over again at NECOM.
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After the success of A Dog’s Life in July, NECOM is bringing Charlie Chaplin’s silent classic Shoulder Arms to a modern audience on Saturday, November 3 to celebrate its 100th anniversary. (Book online here.)
NECOM director Russell Bauer will accompany the movie on the piano – evoking those long gone days of the mighty Wurlitzer and the steam-powered calliope.
And Chaplin himself will usher the audience to their seats.
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While the film is a century old, modern flick fans will still enjoy it, Mr Bauer predicts.
“It’s still very watchable, and what audiences will take away is the humour. Chaplin – like Buster Keaton around the same time – was really spot-on with the elements of humour and, of course, slapstick.”
As early as 1918, a decade before the first talkie (The Jazz Singer, 1927), Chaplin was producing quality comedy feature films.
“While these early films of Chaplin don’t rate as classics,” Mr Bauer said – not, at least, in the sense of The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), or The Great Dictator (1940) – “these were nevertheless groundbreaking short films in their own right.”
Shoulder Arms was Chaplin’s response to World War I. The little tramp – that baggy-trousered, moustachioed, idealistic everyman – is a soldier in the trenches, enlisted in the “awkward squad”.
“He was most definitely poking fun at the harshness and tragedy of the war,” Mr Bauer said.
Chaplin put the film together quickly towards the end of the war.
“He wanted a film to be ready in theatres for when the Allied troops returned home,” Mr Bauer said. “He wanted them to be able to somewhat laugh at themselves, at the hardships they’d been through.”
And they loved it.
“Shoulder Arms was a smash hit and a great favourite with the soldiers during the war,” Chaplin remembered in his Autobiography (1964).
Chaplin – an “artistic control freak”, in Mr Bauer’s words – was writer, director, actor, stuntman, and composer.
“He wrote some really outstanding music,” Mr Bauer said.
While Chaplin doesn’t seem to have written a score for this film (or, if it has, it’s long since disappeared), Mr Bauer has sourced as much of Chaplin’s music from the 1910s as he can, and worked it in.
He will fill in the gaps with Joseph Breil, who published a silent movie music bible. Example: molto agitato for storms, battles, fires, explosions, and consequent mob excitement followed by victory or rescue.
(Yes, he penned scores for D.W. Griffith's epics, with their cast of thousands, gargantuan sets, and massacres.)
Mr Bauer will pay tribute to the silent movie style by improvising, as pianists and organists of the day used to.
After A Dog’s Life, people told him they came along for the curiosity factor of seeing a silent movie – and were surprised at how humorous the film was.
“The technology might be dated,” Mr Bauer said, “but slapstick really speaks to an audience that has become tired of the manufactured, pre-fabricated productions we get now, like reality TV cooking, makeover, and construction shows.
“If that’s entertainment, I think audiences are screaming out for that different approach."
He expects audiences tired of the “abundance of absolute garbage entertainment served up at the moment” to return to the classic Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and MGM musicals from the golden age of cinema.
Over the next few years, Mr Bauer will bring back more Chaplin films when they reach their centenary: Sunnyside and A Day’s Pleasure next year.
The Kid, one of the great silent movies, turns 100 in 2021; Mr Bauer plans to mark its birthday with a theatre organ and and small orchestral ensemble.
Chaplin returns!
Alastair Tomkins, Australia’s leading Chaplin impersonator, will be the special guest for the evening. He was the first to assume the role of Chaplin at Movie World on the Gold Coast, then was hand-picked to be Chaplin at Universal Studios in Japan.
“We are delighted to invite Alastair to Armidale,” Mr Bauer said.
Brisbane-based Tomkins has played Charlie Chaplin’s “little tramp” character since 1993 when he was hired to warm up the crowds at Movieworld’s Police Academy Stunt Show.
He performed the role to millions of visitors to the Gold Coast over the next 8 years, before being hired by Universal Studios Japan for their new theme park in Osaka.
He played to tens of thousands of guests there every day, and loved keeping the great actor’s legacy alive to a new generation of audiences.
Alastair Tomkins had previously made a television commercial as Chaplin for the Japanese Government, and was approved by the Chaplin Estate as part of this casting process.
He was also part of the large ensemble who were Guinness World Record holders for the “The World’s Largest Busk” at Brisbane’s South Bank in 2015.
Now approaching 25 years in the role, Alastair Tomkins continues to play Charlie for festivals and corporate events. He has performed extensively throughout Australia as well as New Zealand, Japan, the UAE, and Singapore.