Syd Chaplin — A Case of Suppressed Villainy (1924) 🇺🇸

Charlie Chaplin’s brother, Syd, has been shyly flitting in and out of pictures for a number of years, but now he is in to stay.

You may already have seen him in “The Rendezvous,” in which he made a boisterous bow under the direction of Marshall Neilan, and he’s followed this with two other exhibitions — and they are exhibitions truly — of his comedy in Her Temporary Husband and “The Galloping Fish.”

Relatives of the famous always have their troubles. Any success they attain is likely to be attributed to the prestige already belonging to their families. It is always a question whether they should hover in the background, or attempt to strike out on their own.

You know, of course, that for several years he was generally known as the manager of Charlie’s affairs. He also dallied with other business enterprises, among them the manufacture of Sassy Jane Frocks, an undertaking that proved very successful. Charlie and he had been together more or less since childhood, with Syd [Syd Chaplin], as a rule, looking after the financial affairs.

I don’t know how the arrangement worked out. No one does in fact, for in some matters the Chaplin family maintains an eloquent silence. There have lately been rumors of a complete split up between the two, supposed to have occurred about the time that Charlie started directing A Woman of Paris. At one time, it was thought that Syd would direct this him, but the plan failed to mature because he himself was anxious to try acting. His hopes had been, awakened, it seems, by the chance that he had playing the bourgeois Englishman in “The Pilgrim.”

The day that I met him he was doing a light comedy rôle in The Galloping Fish, and he looked quite dapper in a tuxedo and horn-rim glasses, with his upper lip adorned with a mustache about as large as a cat’s eyebrow.

“I’m giving myself a sort of schooling in the pictures,” said Syd, “and playing a rôle in support of a seal is probably part of the game. What I want to do is all sorts of types and parts that permit of characterization.

“What I would like to do is villains. I would like to do the sort of parts that a certain actor used to play, but who rarely plays them any more, because he is busy with other things. I mean Von Stroheim [Erich von Stroheim].”

I raised my eyebrows sceptically at this, in view of his slight build, and the fact that his name has always been linked with comedy, but he went on to explain:

“It is to my mind much more satisfactory to play a character that the audience will remember because they hate him than to do heroic stuff. I haven’t the least desire to play that sort of lead. Of course. I have a natural liking for comedy, but even in these funny parts, such as I have been getting lately. I want the chance to add a note of characterization.”

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Collection: Picture Play Magazine, May 1924