Venice, Los Angeles, California, USA, 10 January 1914, 1:30 p.m.

Summary

A spectator wearing a fake toothbrush moustache, baggy pants, large shoes, a tight coat, a cane and a bowler hat gets in the way of the camera at the Junior Vanderbilt Cup and ostensibly interferes with the race. He will be later known as the Tramp and this happens in Venice, California, on 10 January 1914.

Harry Lehrman's Keystone comedy Kid Auto Races at Venice was filmed on location in the afternoon of 10 January 1914, two days after the making of Mabel's Strange Predicament (Mabel Normand). Charlie Chaplin had worn the costume of the Tramp for the first time in Normand's comedy, but that film would only be released on 9 February and so the improvised comic antics of Kid Auto Races at Venice, which came out on 7 February, offered cinema audi-ences a first glimpse of Chaplin's creation. The screening of Lehrman's film also marked the beginning of a process which, as Hobsbawm puts it, turned ‘one figure from the entertainment world of the British poor [the music hall] into the most universally admired artist of the first half of the twentieth century.’ Twenty-six years later, the former vaudeville actor would play the role of Adenoid Hynkel, a parody of Adolf Hitler, in The Great Dictator (Charlie Chaplin, 1940), a film where the staging of military parades in the fictional state of Tomania is reminiscent of the newsreels produced in Nazi Germany. A photograph from the iconic sequence of Hynkel dancing with a large globe appears on the cover of most editions of Hobsbawm's The Age of Extremes. The juxtaposition of Chaplin's performance as the Tramp in Kid Auto Races at Venice and his presence on the cover of Hobsbawm's book performing a parody of one of the century's most murderous dictators captures the development of the Age of Catastrophe from the First World War to the collapse of ideals and the carnage of the Second World War. This historical narrative, which I introduced at the beginning of this book and which has underpinned all of its chapters, also talks of the Cold War which emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War and which was the result of the tumultuous years of hot wars unfolding between the shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in 1914 and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.