It took a tremendous amount of will to complete and release the film, which is perhaps why, for the opening credits of its 1969 rerelease, Chaplin wrote an anthem of defiant optimism called “Swing Little Girl”: “Swing high to the sky / And don’t ever look at the ground.” Sung by the seventy-nine-year-old Chaplin, and accompanying shots of a dejected Merna Kennedy, however, the song is as pitiful as it is buoyant.

This duality of tone characterizes The Circus. The mercurial film contains thrill-comedy stunts with tightropes and caged lions as well as some of Chaplin’s greatest gags, from the magical automaton joke to first-rate slapstick in the circus ring. It’s an intellectual film, though, in which jokes are broken down and picked apart: witness the deconstruction of the William Tell and barbershop routines. Also, while it pivots on a story of abuse and its hero’s romantic defeat, it’s not as sentimental as, say, The Kid (1921). When Chaplin walks away at the end of the film, his rejection of the circus is as briskly philosophical as it is melancholic or defeatist—as he kicks a leg into the air and marches off with that distinctive waddle, surely he has a smile on his face. Without wishing to introduce too simplistic an analogy, here Chaplin is walking a fine line, in which failure and mortification are only ever a whisker away from success and laughter.

Small wonder that the germ of this film was an image encapsulating the angst of an anxiety dream. In 1925, as he concluded work on The Gold Rush, Chaplin was toying with making his long-dreamed-of Napoleon film, or an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Suicide Club. But as he told his colleague Henry Bergman, he suddenly had a better idea: “a gag placing me in a position I can’t get away from for some reason. I’m on a high place troubled by something else, monkeys or things that come to me and I can’t get away from them.” Bergman suggested that a circus tightrope would fit the bill, and Chaplin’s comedy cogs were set in motion—this would be The Circus’s faultlessly hilarious climax.

That nightmare scenario proved prophetic, with all the unforeseen headaches of the production as well as Chaplin’s own self-imposed challenges, such as learning to walk the tightrope and staging a scene inside a lion’s cage that required two hundred takes. After two years of ordeals, a test screening in October 1927 necessitated retakes of the tightrope scene, and when close-ups were matched in the edit, the stresses of the preceding two years were made uncomfortably obvious on Chaplin’s lined face, in his now dyed black hair.

Still, as Chaplin persevered, he must have known he was destined to make a clown film. Since his start in London’s music halls, he had admired and studied famous clowns such as Marceline, and after he became a film star he was flattered by comparisons to Grimaldi. A 1919 article in Picture-Play found Chaplin in a reflective mood after visiting a big top. “I enjoyed it immensely, you know,” he told nature and travel writer Emma-Lindsay Squier, “and yet—well, it seemed sort of pathetic to me . . . I couldn’t help thinking of the people as puppets dressed gaily for a little hour, to bend and nod and smile, to do their little stunt, then to be chucked back into their box.”

Chaplin was disturbed not just by the incongruous double life of the circus performers but by his own, in that setting. As the article explains, he had spent time with the troupe backstage. “I was a sort of shadow that had come off the screen for a while, and I’m afraid they were disappointed in me. They expected me to be funny and to crack jokes; they seemed awfully surprised to find that I was just human.” Despite or because of these ruminations, he told Squier: “I’d like to make a circus picture.”