Charlie Chaplin & the Little Tramp Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Charlie Chaplin & the Little Tramp - Essay ExampleSusan Beegel has recently offered the intriguing speculation that the character f Manuel Garcia was based partially on the nineteenth-century matador Manuel Garcia El Espartero. (Beegel 12-23) Hemingways article in the Toronto Star Weekly (October 17, 1923) continues to suggest, however, that the character in question was inspired largely by Manuel Garcia Lopez, called Maera, and his chaotic bullfight at Pamplona in July 1923. Hemingway was a relatively inexperienced spectator when he wrote the article for the Toronto Star Weekly. In fact, he had never seen a bullfight until earlier that spring, and the title f the article, World Series f Bullfighting a Mad, Whirling Carnival, (White 99-108) characterizes his rather unsubtle response to what he saw. By contrast, in the so-called toy dog that he wrote about the fictionalized finish f Maera-shortly after seeing the fight-Hemingways tone is, despite the subject matter, coldly, if not grotesquely, ironic.Although he had completed a draft f the miniature by late July, he apparently revised it in response to Ezra Pounds comments, because he wrote Pound that he had redone the death f Maera altogether different.... The new death is good. (Baker 91)Although Hemingway is not, ... Indeed, the potential comedy f Maeras cinematic death was not lost on Scott Fitzgerald, who parodied the miniature in a letter to Hemingway in the fall f 1926, a year after the miniature appeared as Chapter XIV f In Our Time The King f Bulgaria began to whirl round and round.... Soon he was whirling faster and faster. Then he was dead. By the time Fitzgerald wrote him, however, Hemingway had long since moved from comparing Maeras death (in the miniature) to a sped-up film, to comparing Manuel Garcias bullfight (in The Undefeated) to a pratfall ballet which echoed not just Maeras bullfight at Pamplona in 1923 but the antics f Chaplins comic crumb, little Charlie. Comic bullfights featuring clo wns dressed like Chaplins little tramp were very popular in Spain and France in the Twenties and Thirties. (Campbell 42) And perhaps Hemingway was influenced solely by having seen a bullfight involving Charlie Chaplins, as he calls them in The Undefeated. But thither is a good possibility that he was inspired to employ the tramp as an analogue in The Undefeated by a conversation he had with Fitzgeralds close friend Edmund Wilson, who had written what he called a great super-ballet f New York for the Swedish Ballet--a pantomime explained by movie captions and with a section f movie film in the middle, for which Ornstein is composing the music and in which we hope to get Chaplin to act. (Wilson 117) Hemingway had first met Wilson in New York, in January 1924 (see Selected Letters, 103, Notes) and apparently learned about the projected ballet at this time. On October 18, 1924, a month before he completed The Undefeated (see Selected Letters, 133), originally entitled The Bullfighters,