Released in October 1918, three weeks before the Armistice, Shoulder Arms was the first comedy to treat the war as material for sustained burlesque. Chaplin’s colleagues warned him the timing was suicidal; they were wrong. The film became his biggest commercial success to date, and was especially popular with returning soldiers. Where contemporary propaganda films demonized the enemy, Chaplin approached the war from the perspective of the average enlisted man – a hapless doughboy navigating flooded bunks, mail call, and the long squalid holding pattern of trench life, before disguising himself as a tree and somehow capturing the Kaiser. Sydney Chaplin appears in several roles, including a lively turn as a German officer. The version audiences have watched for decades was reconstructed from backup camera angles and second-choice takes, assembled from degraded C and D negatives after the original A negative deteriorated beyond use. MoMA’s restoration, drawn primarily from surviving prints based on the original A-negative material, corrects the jittery motion caused by stretch-printing for sound-era projectors and returns the film to its original 20 frames per second. Subtle but consequential differences emerge: Chaplin’s performance carries different emotional inflections, and the film’s rhythm reflects his actual intentions rather than the compromises of a reconstruction.

Dave Kehr

At the beginning of Shoulder Arms: a tracking shot shows Charlie walking along the trench, oblivious of the occasional blast. The camera follows him to the end of the corridor, then draws backward through the audience, not along an aisle but as if he is walking between the theatre seats. As if he was inviting us to join him at boot camp with the tacit promise that he will, ultimately, succeed in making us laugh hard about the least funny subject of all: the war. Technically speaking, this was one of Chaplin’s most advanced films to date: split narrative, impressive sets, sophisticated camera work and brilliant mise-en-scène. It is packed with comic moments that explode as often as grenades with some memorable scenes, namely the hilarious, celebrated occasion when he camouflages himself as a tree (not really ‘camouflage’ – Bazin would argue – more like “one of those little Indian insects that can take on the appearance of leaves” or an insect playing dead, the only difference between them and Charlie being “the speed with which he returns from his condition of spatial dissolution, into the cosmos, to a state of instant readiness for action”).
Shoulder Arms is the first of many films that Chaplin will shoot against his colleagues’ and friends’ advice: “It’s dangerous, at this time, to make fun of the horrors of the war”, DeMille had warned him. He went ahead, initially planning to make it his first feature, shooting extensive footage of the Tramp as a family man prior to enlistment, then cut it and released it as a three-reeler. Shoulder Arms was one of Chaplin’s greatest commercial successes, and for a long time both audiences and critics would measure subsequent films by its standards. But there’s more to it. It hit the public at exactly the right time, making them laugh about the idiocy of it all, and thus becoming an essential part of the World War experience. “How did you capture thirteen German soldiers by yourself?” – Charlie is asked by his superior – “I surrounded them”, he explains.

Cecilia Cenciarelli