The Little Tramp on Campus : A Reseda film collector explores Chaplin’s humor and humanity in a UCLA Extension class

Murray Glass went to the movies every weekend in the Bronx, sitting through a drama, a Laurel and Hardy picture, or whatever else might be at the neighborhood theater. At 11, Glass preferred Westerns, but a new Charlie Chaplin movie called “Modern Times” seemed a good enough way to spend an afternoon in 1936.

By then, the Little Tramp, in his rumpled suit, bowler hat and twitching mustache, had already been around for a generation. And here he was, at least five years after talking pictures had become the norm, with another mostly silent comedy. For a youngster grown accustomed to the exciting sounds of gunfire and shouted dialogue on screen, this Chaplin movie could easily have come off as passe.

“I laughed myself sick,” Glass recalled recently. He is now a 66-year-old film collector and distributor, and “Modern Times” has remained among his favorite films. He makes a point of watching it at least once a year. “It still holds up. It has a message, and it’s funny.”

Glass, who owns one of the largest private collections of Chaplin films in the country, will teach a UCLA Extension class called “The Humor and Humanity of Charlie Chaplin.” The six-week course, beginning Tuesday, surveys the life and career of the pioneering actor-writer-director-composer through extensive weekly film screenings and lectures.

“Of all the actors and performers who ever came down the pike in the cinema industry, Chaplin is probably the one who has most shown the little man, the person who is fighting the world to survive, to exist,” Glass said.

Contemporary filmmakers owe much to Chaplin’s legacy, suggested Ronnie Rubin, who heads the UCLA Extension arts program. And the course was scheduled with the local creative community in mind, she said.

“What I hope filmmakers will learn is the humanity of humor, the physical grace of humor, and the simplicity and timelessness of filmmaking,” Rubin said. “Charlie Chaplin was a very sophisticated individual, but his most popular works are the simplest ones.”

Still, she said: “It’s very hard in this town to bring people out for anything that is historical. There is something about the raw energy here, they want instantaneous success. They’re focused on where we’re headed rather than where we’ve been.”

Much of the course material will be culled from Glass’ Em Gee Film Library, which boasts a collection of more than 3,000 titles.

Such names as D. W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, Boris Karloff, and even Count Basie and Duke Ellington were affixed to rows and rows of film canisters at the rear of Glass’ crowded Reseda office.

Above his own desk were framed and unframed pictures: “King Kong” and cartoon character Wile E. Coyote, for example, and an autographed shot of actress Joan Collins in lingerie. Taped to a wooden bookcase was a short strip of rare 28mm film, with its irregular perforation, made in the early, non-standardized days of cinema. And nearby was the 16mm projector Glass often uses to examine films after they’re returned from rental.

It’s a film collection that began when Glass’ father bought his son a toy projector for his 13th birthday. From then on, whenever he could save $2 or $3, Glass would run down to the local drugstore to buy another short strip of film. His first piece of celluloid featured Chaplin.

“The man was a genius, there’s no getting away from it,” said Glass, who worked as a chemist for Columbia Pictures and other industries before devoting himself to film distribution. “Yet I could talk to people nowadays and mention names like Greta Garbo, and they say back to me, ‘Greta who?’ If they’re not Rambo, they’re passe.”

Glass shrugged and said, “I’m doing my bit.” He keeps his collection of entertainment and educational films and videos available for rental to colleges and others across the country.

He recently taught a course on the career of the pioneering director Griffith for Columbia College in Hollywood. But it was always Chaplin, who died in 1977, that fascinated him the most.

“He saw himself at the beginning as a worker,” Glass said. “He had a job to do, to put out X number of films, as his contracts required. Then, when he became his own boss, he became more conscious of his position in the world of the arts, he slowed down considerably and made each picture a finely polished gem.”

Many times in his career, Glass said, Chaplin would keep cast and crew on salary while he paused for weeks in the middle of making a film, waiting for the proper inspiration.

His experimentation and insistence on broadening the messages in his work would ultimately lead Chaplin to abandon the Little Tramp character that had brought him his greatest success. That persona would last appear in 1940 as a Jewish barber in “The Great Dictator,” his first complete sound picture and a biting satire on Adolph Hitler.

“People saw him in a certain niche,” Glass said. “When he started to get away from the Little Tramp in his later pictures, the critics came down on him. He was more interested in philosophy and psychology instead of what they considered to have been his humor. As a consequence, he kind of lost his popularity.”

Added to this was a perception by the American Legion and a variety of superpatriots that Chaplin was a communist because of his liberal leanings and his urging that a second front to aid the Soviet Union during World War II be opened. Subsequently, the 1947 film “Monsieur Verdoux” was the subject of a boycott that limited its release. And during an ocean voyage to his native England, Chaplin was informed that the U.S. attorney general would block his re-entry to the United States.

The strong social messages in his films stemmed mostly from his Dickensian childhood, insisted Glass, rather than any political agenda.

“He had a very unfortunate childhood,” Glass said. “His mother was in and out of mental institutions and poor houses, and he and his half-brother, Syd, really had to scramble to just barely exist.”

The Chaplin brothers escaped this life by playing small parts on the stage, where their mother had worked successfully before suffering a nervous breakdown. With the Fred Karno company, they traveled on two tours of America, where the young Chaplin was finally discovered in 1912 by Mack Sennett, head of the Keystone film company.

“At first he was very reluctant to give up his stage work because he didn’t know anything about the movies,” Glass said. “And it took considerable persuasion, plus doubling his salary, to get him into films.”

Chaplin’s later years were largely inactive. He directed only three films after 1950 and wrote an autobiography in 1964.

Chaplin directed the 1967 “A Countess From Hong Kong,” which starred Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren and featured a brief cameo by the famed director as a seasick ship steward. The film was met with almost universally negative reviews, which were difficult to ignore even for a fan such as Glass, who had waited nine years since Chaplin’s last release. He went to see it anyway.

“I was very disappointed in it. . . . There was a constant hum of talk throughout the entire picture,” Glass said. “And I came in there wanting to enjoy the film, and I kept thinking, ‘It must get better, it must get better.’ And it never did.”

Like other fans, Glass had hoped for a return to form by the pioneering filmmaker. But Chaplin never made another film.

In the years leading up to his death at age 88, Chaplin was given a special award from the Motion Picture Academy in 1972, and in early 1975 he returned to England to be knighted Sir Charles. All of it was in recognition of what the Academy had noted was an “incalculable” contribution to the development of movie-making, and for a body of work that has remained influential on such later-day “Chaplinesque” performers as Steve Martin.

Still, Glass was uncertain as to how far Chaplin would have gone in modern Hollywood.

“I don’t know if he would be able to get started,” Glass said. “His humor is too small, and it was human. Nowadays you’ve got guys like this Andrew Dice Clay, whose shtick is to destroy. Chaplin was more of a builder than a destroyer.”