Recently, the mystery surrounding the biological father of Sydney Chaplin, Charlie’s older half-brother, has been solved. Researcher Barry Anthony has finally identified the apocryphal Sidney John Hawke, wealthy London businessman, as just this individual, lending credence to Sydney’s perpetual insistence that at some point, he had a legacy coming to him. That legacy took the form of a signet ring, presented to young Sydney by an anonymous stranger on a trip back home to London in 1919, but nothing else. What Sydney did inherit from his father, however, as suggested by Anthony’s description of the man, included a certain paranoia toward his fellow man and a misogyny toward his fellow woman, one that pervaded his relationships and abruptly ended his thirty-one film career in 1929. This misogyny was manifest not only in his persistent predatory behavior toward women and girls, but also in his on-screen female impersonations, of which Oh! What a Nurse! is essentially the last and arguably the best.
Syd Chaplin, as he came to be called by the onset of his five-picture contract with Warner Bros. in 1925, had been loath to come to the United States. When he finally did in 1915, it was to replace Charlie who had just left Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios for a contract with Essanay. Syd was loath because by 1913 he already had a lucrative music hall career as a noted headliner with Karno’s London Comedians, an outfit Charlie had left in 1910. Syd was the first brother to take up with Fred Karno, in 1906, but took a lot longer than Charlie to catch fire. When he did, it was probably because he started to participate in writing as well as performing in his shows, including one called Skating, which featured a young Minnie Gilbert, whom Syd brought to America as his common-law spouse and remained with, off and on, until her death in 1936.
Syd stayed with Keystone a year, ending his run with a huge hit, A Submarine Pirate, which featured actual American naval technology never before shown on film. No one could understand why Sennett would sever ties with Syd after this success, but their relationship had deteriorated long before, given Syd’s unpredictable behavior with both directors and stars. In his Keystone films Syd played a character based on his music hall persona, Archibald Binks, that came to be known as Gussle. Unfortunately, it was misinterpreted as a knock-off of his brother’s character, the Little Tramp, and was never really appreciated for its subtleties.
Finding himself at the Lone Star Studio as his brother’s business manager, Syd spent the next few years behind the scenes as Charlie was experiencing the peak of his popularity. By 1919, Syd made a move and launched himself into the inchoate aeronautics business with the Syd Chaplin Aircraft Corporation. Even though it initially flew only from San Pedro to Santa Catalina and back, it made the history books as the first ever domestic American airline. At the same time, Syd somehow achieved a promising five-picture deal with Paramount Artcraft that began with King, Queen, Joker, which wasn’t released until 1921. The ambitious period piece revealed Syd’s deficiencies in multitasking, as he was unable to competently wear the many hats—actor, producer, director, writer—that Charlie donned so effortlessly. Over budget, poorly edited, and negatively reviewed, King, Queen, Joker ended up the only film made under his Paramount contract. In addition, his airline had gone bankrupt in 1920, so it was back to the Chaplin Studios once again, where Charlie was battling through the First National contract Syd had negotiated for him.
Having regained some of his confidence in supporting parts in Charlie’s Pay Day (1922) and The Pilgrim (1923), Syd began to rebuild his reputation by taking other significant character roles in films such as Colleen Moore’s The Perfect Flapper (1924) and Mickey Neilan’s The Rendezvous (1923). But it was Charlie who worked to get Syd the role of a lifetime, as Sir Fancourt “Babs” Babberly in Charley’s Aunt (1925), the first film adaptation of a very successful stage play by Brandon Thomas and the first Anglo-American production, not only for producer Al Christie but for the film industry itself. Syd’s on-screen female impersonations began with this role.
With Charlie’s The Gold Rush coming out the same year, many critics took up the debate about which film was funnier, with Syd’s winning out. “Funnier” was the operative word, for Charley’s Aunt was no Gold Rush in terms of artistic mastery. Still, its great success led Syd to his deal with Warner Bros. as a leading man (complete with a new on-screen look), earning him both the money and notoriety he had always desired. A writer at Warner at this time, Darryl Zanuck later noted in his memoir that Syd was “better read and handsomer than his younger half-brother, and that “if a shrewd director had only taken him in hand, probed his real character, soothed his resentments, [and] calmed his phobias,” his career might have been different. Director Chuck Reisner filled that role for the contracted five films but was unable to take him any further.
His second Warner film, Oh! What a Nurse! is loosely based on a story by noted critic Robert E. Sherwood and playwright Bertram Bloch. The story was worked into shape by Syd, Zanuck, and director Chuck Reisner during July and August 1925 at Camp Curry in Yosemite. By the third week of September, filming began with Patsy Ruth Miller playing a damsel in distress named June Harrison. Syd plays Jerry Clark, a reporter who, after taking over a column for the lovelorn when a vacancy suddenly opened up, uncovers a plot in which June would be forced to marry a certain Clive Hunt who only wants her money, and he decides to act. His efforts to save her forces him to inhabit two female personae, a widow’s and a nurse’s, to great effect. Syd’s style of impersonation obliquely reveals his inherent disdain for women, even though his wife Minnie and his mother Hannah had inspired his performance. The type he embodied was a Victorian woman trying to appear as if she is well-versed in the modern fashions. She sashays about, hand on hip, batting her eyes and moving her body like she’s always on the make. Syd’s female characterizations are in keeping with something he once told Zanuck, that “all women are whores,” for seemingly every movement is made in hopes of winning some sexual conquest.
Critics’ responses to the film were overwhelmingly positive, although some urged Syd to stop impersonating women. Picture-Play’s Sally Benson wrote for the June 1926 review that “ever since Charley’s Aunt, Sydney Chaplin has found it difficult to keep out of skirts. Having provoked laughter once in them, he seems to feel that he will be three times as funny the third time he wears them. Unfortunately, this isn’t so.” Still, this opinion was in the minority. San Francisco’s new Pantages Theatre chose the film as its opening day feature and gushed about the wisdom of their choice shortly thereafter, noting that “the House completely sold out two days in advance of opening despite the fact that the opening night prices were $5 a seat.” C.S. Sewell in Moving Picture World argued the more frequently voiced opinion that “Syd’s the whole show” and that the film was a “hilarious, rapid-fire farce comedy, with a new laugh starting before the old one is hardly finished.”
With this film, Syd effectively burnished his growing reputation as a solid comedy actor, a status he hoped to strengthen with his next project, The Better ’Ole (1926), based on British cartoonist Bruce Bairnsfather’s strip Fragments from France about a World War I Tommy named Old Bill. Ever since Bairnsfather’s cartoons caught on during the war, Syd had wanted to play him. It marked the acme of his film career. His last two Warner pictures were not as successful and Syd appeared in his final film, A Little Bit of Fluff (1928), made at John Maxwell’s Elstree Studios in London with his other half-brother, Wheeler Dryden. That next year, the Female achieved a bit of revenge when bit player Molly Wright sued Syd, Maxwell, British International, and several other parties for an assault that sent the elder Chaplin into exile for the next ten years and effectively blacklisted him from the industry for life.
Presented at SFSFF 2024 with live musical accompaniment by Donald Sosin