Charlie Chaplin and His Times
Lynn, Kenneth S.
Charlie Chaplin and His Times Kenneth S. Lynn Simon & Schuster / 604 pages / $35 REVIEWED BY John R. Dunlap I n his later years, Charlie Chaplin liked to say that The Gold Rush (1925) was the...
...He died in his sleep at his Manoir de Ban in Vevey on Christmas morning 1977...
...of nearly thirty times that length of raw film footage: a stunning gem in what Kenneth S. Lynn calls "its epic-comic revelations of avarice, cruelty, madness, and blind striving in a universe ruled by cosmic chance...
...It was issued on shaky legal grounds of moral turpitude (not his left-Wing politics, as the Chaplin mythology has it), and Lynn makes a strong case suggesting that Chaplin had not intended to return anyhow...
...On the way with his family to the London premier of Limelight in 1952, he received a cable informing him that the Attorney General had revoked his re-entry permit...
...Chaplin scholars of various persuasions agree to an odd symmetry in the comedian's life...
...As Lynn sees it, the marriage gave Oona the father she had lost when her playwright dad abandoned her, and Charlie got another very young beauty over whom to exercise imperious control—a familiar story for Chaplin, except this time it lasted...
...At age 42, Chaplin entered the third period of his life a fabulously rich and famous has-been...
...Though never a Communist himself, Chaplin stumped for the Red cause with his Second Front speeches in the early 194o's, and he made a colossal ass of himself during a grilling New York press conference after the unsuccessful premier of Monsieur Verdoux in 1947...
...Chaplin saw this development as a clear threat to the Tramp's universality: What kind of voice could do anything but narrow the appeal of the tramp character, whose global range depended on pantomime...
...In The Great Dictator (194o), Monsieur Verdoux (1947), and Limelight (1952), Chaplin fully incorporated sound, having retired the Tramp with the famous concluding road shot in Modem Times...
...But his frequent brushes with the law took in such lesser events as formal charges of plagiarism in parts of Modem Times and in the whole storyline of The Great Dictator...
...For the next twenty years, Chaplin's meager output of four movies showed a steady decline of his genius as he acquiesced in the sound revolution...
...The Klondike setting was achieved by hazardous location work in Truckee, Califomia, near the Donner Pass of the Sierras, and the final cut of 8,498 feet (with music and commentary added to Chaplin's 1942 reissue of the movie) is a meticulous editing JOHN R. DUNLAP teaches classics and English at Santa Clara University...
...Charles, Jr., died at age 43 midway through a sadly ineffectual life and after two failed marriages...
...At Vevey he was prone to quarrels and lawsuits with the locals, but in twenty-five years of leisured residence he never bothered to learn French...
...The last quartile of Chaplin's life is the weird "king's exile" in Vevey, Switzerland, where he assumed his new role of paterfamilias to the eight beautiful — and eventually troubled—children he sired by Oona...
...The American Spectator • August 1997 77 of them from time to time being caught up in reckless, extra-household sexual escapades—and then faked a divorce to preserve their public images...
...With coffers full at the Chaplin Studio, there was no stinting of resources in the two-year production schedule of The Gold Rush...
...There were the notorious morals charges involving Joan Barry, on which Chaplin was indicted in 194...
...He was speaking as director and actor, but the producer/businessman in Chaplin knew well the risk he was taking...
...In one melodramatic gesture, he put philistine America behind him, reclaimed abroad some portion of the idol-worship lost in America, secured a cozier treatment of his wealth in Swissbanks, and achieved martyr status among the world's overwrought progressives...
...He wrote an autobiography heavy with name-dropping, light on reflection, and "brutally inadequate" in its recollection of his professional associates...
...Oona, then 52, went off on a 14-year drinking and spending binge before she died of pancreatic cancer in September 1991...
...It may indeed have been his masterpiece, displaying the best possible consequences of Chaplin's fierce perfectionism...
...The final scene—in which the flower girl, her sight restored, discovers that her benefactor is the tattered Tramp and not the rich gallant she had imagined — resonates to Chaplin's life and career, Charlie Chaplin and the Sounds of Silence 76 August 1997 The American Spectator anticipating with eerie clairvoyance what was yet to be...
...Limelight, the most overtly autobiographical of his films, was a self-indulgent bomb.44 There were the notorious morals charges involving Joan Barry, on which Chaplin was indicted in 1944...
...He helped spur a revival of interest in his films during the 1960's, and he returned briefly to America in 1972 to accept a special Academy Award amidst accolades of celebrities whose names he didn't know...
...There were some memorable scenes, thanks to Chaplin's perfect chemistry with Jack Oakie in The Great Dictator and Martha Raye in Monsieur Verdoux (two performers, by the way, for whom Chaplin felt such personal affection as not to resent being upstaged...
...But the rib-tickling hilarity was less and less frequent as Chaplin's penchant for speechifying grew more insistent, until his left-wing utopianism and snooty bitterness trumped his artistic sense...
...Charlie Chaplin and His Times Kenneth S. Lynn Simon & Schuster / 604 pages / $35 REVIEWED BY John R. Dunlap I n his later years, Charlie Chaplin liked to say that The Gold Rush (1925) was the movie he wanted to be remembered by...
...Against reports still found in biographical surveys, Chaplin was almost certainly never married to Paulette Goddard, his co-star in Modem Times and The Great Dictator...
...Those very words apply to the Chaplin phenomenon, lurching between loss and recovery over a tumultuous eight decades...
...Modern Times (1936)—for all its legendary imagery in the history of cinema: Charlie being threaded through the sprocketed wheels of industrial machinery— is really a series of self-contained one-reelers, as Chaplin himself admitted...
...Sydney, who enjoyed some success as a film and stage actor, was among those interviewed by Lynn for this book...
...Its tension-riddled production, at a turning point in his life, brought down on cast and crew alike the least charming traits of Chaplin the man: his cruelty, his temper, his self-pity, his wayward sexuality, his overarching egotism, his impulse for total control—traits one might expect to encounter in, say, a troubled and frightened 4-year-old...
...It was the climax of an appallingly disordered childhood...
...And there is the recurring talisman of cut flowers recalled by Chaplin in My Autobiography (1964) as emblematic of intermittently good times with his disturbed mother, Hannah Chaplin, a failed music-hall singer who, after years of erratic behavior, was committed to a mental hospital in May 1903, when Charlie had just turned 14...
...City Lights was the capstone performance of his comic genius...
...Early in - the shooting of City Lights, when the other studios were scrambling to adjust to the expensive new sound I technology, Chaplin told an interviewer that his own studio would not budge except to feature synchronized music...
...He was knighted at Buckingham Palace in March 1975...
...yet Chaplin often suspended his concern for image when it came to his dilettante politics...
...Like all his other movies after the early crudities of his Keystone days, City Lights is deeply, not to say obsessively, autobiographical...
...It divides neatly into four periods of two decades each...
...Chaplin, who had never taken citizenship during his forty years in America, could easily have challenged the excluding order...
...Influenced by the Red sympathies of friends like Max Eastman and Rob Wagner, he became an early exponent of radical chic...
...The mild annoyance caused by his pro-Bolshevik views at the end of World War I, when Americans vaguely resented Russia's separate peace with Germany, ripened into vociferous public hostility after World War II and the start of the Cold War...
...The Jazz Singer had opened in New York the year before, and the talkies were catching on quickly...
...The second period —from his 19io and 1912 Karno tours of America, to his meteoric rise through the American film companies of Keystone, Essanay, Mutual, First National, to the construction of his own studio and his five feature-length films of the 192(3's—ended with the release of City Lights in 1931...
...He could thus shuffle the various parts of the film into whatever sequence he pleased, but the result was a flimsiness in narrative coherence, and the "broken quality" of the film was not helped by its thematic contradictions and its on-again, off-again toying with sound...
...Lynn regards the "poisonous wound" in Charlie's early adolescence —the discovery that his mother's insanity was irremediable and the consequent "sense of defeat and solitariness" — as the motive that shaped Chaplin's creative energy...
...The personal turmoil of those two decades from 1932 to 1952, during which occurred the most controverted events of Chaplin's life, is untangled by Lynn with admirable patience and learning, against the social and cultural backdrop of an America coming through depression and war into affluence, leisure, and reluctant status as world power...
...they lived with each other for several years in Chaplin's Hollywood mansion on Summit Drive—each 'Chaplin had two sons by Lita Grey, who rebuffed his demands that she abort her pregnancies...
...Yet City Lights (1931), Chaplin's last silent film, seems a better reference point for his life and career...
...In Lynn's words, the scene presents a "double vision of miraculous recovery and devastating loss...
...Earlier scandals of the 1920's —Chaplin's compulsive womanizing (or girlizing: his taste ran to nubile adolescents) and the bruising successive divorces from Mildred Harris and Lita Grey' —seem in retrospect mere warm-ups for the troubles that followed...
...With little schooling and shallow reading—and with an intellect, according to his acquaintance Alistair Cooke, "less impressive to anyone used to thinking"—Chaplin nonetheless fancied himself an intellectual...
...York...
...As if America's bluenoses weren't shocked enough by the headline-grabbing mess with Joan Barry, Chaplin married 18year-old Oona O'Neill in 1943, when he was 54...
...Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin was wrong about many things, but dead right about this: he should best be remembered for The Gold Rush...
...He was 88...
...Who could forget the dance of the dinner rolls or the chicken hallucinations or the cabin teetering on the cliff's edge...
...When production began in December 1928, Chaplin had reason to be fearful...
...He made two bad movies in London studios...
...Both strands of the film's storyline — the Tramp's relations with the blind flower girl (Virginia Cherrill) and with the schizoid millionaire (Harry Myers)—are shadowed by images and events from Chaplin's London childhood: paternal desertion, financial setback, emotional turmoil...
Vol. 30 • August 1997 • No. 8
