People tend to think of popularity in contemporary terms, like YouTube likes or TikTok shares. But Pittsburgh-based mime performer and author Dan Kamin believes the particular subject of his expertise set a very high bar for celebrity more than a century ago.
Kamin is a student of the life and work of Charlie Chaplin. Kamin’s skills are renowned enough that he was hired to coach Robert Downey, Jr., for his starring role as the great screen comedian in the 1992 biopic “Chaplin.”
But Kamin, 74, is up for promoting Chaplin’s legacy whenever he can. On Thu., Sept. 29, he’ll premiere a program called “Charlie Chaplin’s Red Letter Days,” at the Harris Theater. The highlight is the debut of a newly restored version of Chaplin’s 1918 war comedy “Shoulder Arms.” But Kamin will set up the film with an interactive presentation that maps the extent of Chaplin’s fame at the time the film premiered.
Chaplin’s film career began, ironically, on the very eve of World War I, in 1914. He surely would have become famous anyway, but the fact that Hollywood kept cranking out films during the war, while many countries had to stop, helped – as did the fact that Chaplin’s iconic physical comedy, and silent film’s indifference to language barriers, made his work almost universally accessible.
“He became not just the most famous person in the world, but he became the most famous person that had ever lived in the world,” said Kamin.
In the thick of the war, Kamin said, “Soldiers would take cutouts of him from movies theaters, bring them to the trenches. They were showing Charlie Chaplin films on the ceilings of hospitals for soldiers who were recovering and couldn’t sit up in bed.”
Kamin is the author of the book “The Comedy of Charlie Chaplin: Artistry in Motion.” He credits a viewing of Chaplin’s “The Gold Rush” while he was attending Carnegie Mellon University as one of the factors that convinced him to give up industrial design for performance (a career that has taken him to concert halls around the world).
He likes to say that in Chaplin’s heyday, the actor was bigger than The Beatles in theirs.
Though the British-born Chaplin sold American war bonds, his relationship to the war effort was complex. Kamin said some Britons viewed him negatively for not enlisting. He even received death threats. And then Chaplin himself conscripted his craft into the war effort.
At a time when “war films” were mostly propaganda, Kamin said, Chaplin “did something unbelievable and unprecedented – he made a comedy about the war while the bloody conflict and the bombs were still exploding.”
“Shoulder Arms” stars Chaplin as a comically hapless American doughboy. With his mustache and oversized footwear, he evokes his Little Tramp character without explicitly playing him. One famous sequence depicts him trying to survive behind enemy lines while disguised as a tree.
Like most films at the time, “Shoulder Arms” was much shorter than feature length. But at 40 minutes, it was at least twice as long as most comedies of the day. While Chaplin himself agonized over whether to release what some consider the first-ever film comedy about war – “Shoulder Arms” proved both a critical and commercial success. Kamin adds that as a film that referenced the hardships of trench warfare, made by the world’s biggest movie star, it was a cinematic landmark.
“It helped establish movies as an art form that had not only the means but the responsibility to address what was happening in the world. It literally brought movies up to a higher stature,” said Kamin.
Kamin’s “Red Letter Days” features rare photos, films clip, popular songs of the era, and other memorabilia.
