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Book Review A fearless rebel whose work mirrored troubled times

The sumptuous The Chaplin Archive provides the patient reader an opportunity to assess the complex personality of an undoubted genius, writes GORDON PARSONS

The Charlie Chaplin Archive
Edited by Paul Duncan
Taschen £60.00

“A LITTLE Englishman, quiet, unassuming, but surcharged with dynamite, is influencing the world right now … the world has Chaplinitis … but, for the life of you, you can’t analyse the reason.”

Since this 1915 journalistic assessment, a myriad books have attempted to understand the phenomenal achievement of a man whose name was, through the first quarter of the last century, better known internationally than that of Jesus Christ.

At first, what appears to be an imposing coffee table book from the Cologne art publisher Taschen, “the home of beautiful books,” priced well beyond an Everyman Pocket, might appear superfluous to even the most devoted Charlie Chaplin fan.
 
However, while this comprehensive record of Chaplin’s life and work may not have unearthed unknown facts, it will provide an invaluable research tool as it tracks through, describing and illustrating every film with a kaleidoscopic commentary from colleagues, critics, friends, enemies, fellow actors, wives, children and Chaplin himself.

The biography being familiar, all that is needed is a brief recap. Born to music hall performer parents in poverty-stricken south London, in 1889, singularly the same week, month and year as Adolf Hitler, a figure later to feature significantly in his life, by the age of 10 Charlie was treading the late Victorian boards in comic sketches and pantomime.

Then, in Fred Karno’s Circus, a company which included Stan Laurel, he established a reputation touring US, where in 1913 he moved from stage to screen with Max Sennet’s famous Keystone “Cops” Company.

Within a year of appearing in dozens of fast-moving, speedily produced short silent films in which he developed the persona of his trademark Little Tramp, his popularity and earning power grew.

He was able to demand more control over his own work until, after moves to Essenay Studios and Mutual First National, he created United Artists in 1919 with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, finally achieving total independence over his output.

No longer dependent on outside finance, owning the studio and controlling every artistic and technical aspect of his film-making, Chaplin could make films like City Lights, The Gold Rush and Modern Times, which established his name in film history and, as one critic has maintained, “did as much, if not more, than anyone to make cinema not only accepted as an art form but the dominant art form of its era.”

Reluctantly forced to bow to the advent of sound, Chaplin turned to the “talkies, with his first speaking role in The Great Dictator, which not only marked a key moment in his professional career but also his engagement with the febrile atmosphere of pre-war world politics.

The Tramp figure had always been the anarchic outsider, but, despite his repeated denials of socialist propagandising — “I don’t like the idea of an individual or a system kicking around a lot of small helpless people” — since his hilarious 1936 demolition of capitalism’s new machine man in Modern Times, inspired by a visit to a Ford factory, he had been seen as politically subversive.

His comic lampooning of Hitler in The Great Dictator sparked media attacks for his “immorality,” having married two of his early stars both at 16 years old, his lack of patriotism in not volunteering for the British forces now at war, but primarily for his “communistic” film messages, specifically his final speech at the end of the film. This was no inoffensive barber-Hitler double calling for world peace but Chaplin himself.

His response was Monsieur Verdoux made in 1947. Based on a French serial murderer,  Chaplin plays a long-serving bank clerk who loses his job owing to the economic collapse of the Depression. To support his wife and child, he turns with elegant confidence to befriending before murdering rich widows.

He claimed later that his theme had been to show how “all the weaknesses of society … with all its attending upheavals, wars and depressions … bring out the latent, evil tendencies in weak characters.”

Condemned to execution, Verdoux again steps out of role, answering the court and an inhuman society — “As for being a mass murderer, does not the world encourage it? Is it not building weapons of destruction for the sole purpose of mass killing? Has it not blown unsuspecting women and children to pieces, and done it very scientifically? As a mass killer, I am an amateur by comparison.”  

Under a constant harassment campaign led by J Edward Hoover’s FBI, Chaplin was chased out of US in 1952 while his film, Limelight, a lament for a lost world and a return to the Pagliacci sad clown figure, was banned in the US.

Exiled in Switzerland, Charlie had his final revenge in 1957 with A King in New York, his scaldingly comic satire on the McCarthyite witch-hunt and the commercial mayhem of the Land of the Free.

Sadly, instead of walking off into the sunset as Charlie did in his silent days, in his final 1967 film, A Countess from Hong Kong, he succumbed to employing seasoned Hollywood stars, Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren, instead of his customary shaping newly discovered talent. The stars’ whole approach to film, was inimical to the Chaplin process.
 
That “process” had evolved over 55 years, first as a brilliant comic mime with athletic skills whose silent film acting was a poetic portrayal of knockabout slapstick, defiantly responding to bullies — gassing the threatening bruiser with a bent street lamp in Easy Street (1917) — then the pathos of The Kid (1921) with the six-year-old Jackie Coogan.

There were two Chaplins — Charlie the baggy-trousered tramp and Charles, later Sir Charles, the actor-director.

The former spoke a universal language to an audience who recognised everlasting truths of the human condition.

With the latter they saw a talented human being through the lense of a media construct whose work ages with time and context. Chaplin often acknowledged this duality.

Sumptuously The Chaplin Archive provides the patient reader an opportunity to assess  the complex personality of an undoubted genius whose work mirrored troubled times.

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