A Woman of Paris (1923), a melodrama about the intricate psychology of sexual relationships, is rarely shown, yet at one point it determined the course of German director Ernst Lubitsch's career. And though The Tramp is vaguely known for a temperament of sweet melancholy, his creator was also responsible for a black comedy about mass murder (Verdoux).

Chaplin was born at the creation of the movies; he was one of the few early directors to grow with them into sound. But his most remarkable work was silent.. His image has carried over from a dimmer world; a fellow with a bowler hat, an abrupt moustache, twirling a cane. Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp has become an archetype of the modern era, always recognized. Remember the early IBM commericals.

His rise was startling. From the moment of  his first appearance in a halfreel short (Making a Living) in 1914 to the signature on his second contract one year later, Charlie Chaplin had become the most popular comedian in America. From 1914 to 1919 he produced shorts for four successive studios, while developing a persona and the unique combination of comedy and pathos which matured fully in his feature length masterpeices. It was this group of endlessly inventive two and three reelers that earned Chaplin his fame and reputation as a great director. 

He began at Keystone Studios as a $51.50-a week contract player, and participated in the hectic Keystone comedies cops, chasing robbers, robbers chasing cops, everyone chasing everyone and getting hit over the head.

To the audience he stood out among the rest. When he moved to Essanay Studios in 1915 his salary was raised to $650,000 a year and was given the power to direct his own shorts.

What Chaplin developed in this time was a kind of understated comedy within a particular situation. Unlike the Keystone movies which were mostly a series of unrelated and predictable gags, Chaplin's films began fleshing out plots intimately related to an enviroment. The gestures within them were both subtle and unexpected in:

The Bank (1915) he plays a janitor who, after much patient effort to open the vault safeguards only his coat there. When he stops work later in the day to take the pulse of a waiting customer, the prognosis is so alarmimg he asks the man to show his tongue, which he then uses to wet a stamp.

Coupled with Chaplin's attempts to increase the range and complexity of comedy was an effort to give it emotional depth and resonance. In The Immigrant made for Mutual Studios in 1917 passengers stare at their new world and the Statue of Liberty with hope and expectation, then are treated like criminals. This genuinely humorous episode, like the profoundly hilarious moments in true life, is both moving and regrettable. In The Immigrant, Chaplin exposed as much footage as Griffith used to shoot The Birth of a Nation and  The Immigrant, after all, was only a two-reeler. He was always trying to reach perfection.

By the time Chaplin came to shoot City Lights (1931), his greatest film, his method had become so painstaking that he spent 90 days building the brief moment in which the Tramp first sees his love the glimpse of a beautiful face an arm raised gently with a  flower. Whereas the Keystone short were made in two to three days, Chaplin spent up to three weeks on the two reelers he made at Essanay. By the tims he moved to Mutual it was stretched to five.

In 1919 Chaplin became his own producer signing a contract with First National which made him responsible for production costs, control over negatives, and eight shorts to be produced over a period of 18 months. But it was not to be. The 18 months stretched slowly and inexorably into five years. One can only estimate the emotional and financial strain the situation created in Chaplin's life, but the fact remains that this was the period in which he fully developed his persona.

The Tramp matured by gradual degrees into the infinitely resourceful, and essentially rootless character that would make Chaplin's later films haunting. Out of place, out of time, always longing, always quick, the Tramp became the perfect foil for the contradictions and emotional thrusts of human character because he was in society but not of it. This was also the period in which Chaplin almost by happenstance, began making features. Shoulder Arms (1918), his satire on the Kaiser and the trench battles of World War I was four reels long; The Child 1921), his hiltarious depiction of  the Tramp saddled with the responsibility of a child, was over an hour. After his contract with First National expired, he would never make a short again.