Charlie (Sir Charles Chaplin) Chaplin Films | Charlie (Sir Charles Chaplin) Chaplin Filmography | Charlie (Sir Charles Chaplin) Chaplin Biography | Charlie (Sir Charles Chaplin) Chaplin Career | Charlie (Sir Charles Chaplin) Chaplin Awards

Charles Chaplin was the first and the greatest international star of the American silent comic cinema. He was also the twentieth century's first media ?superstar,? the first artistic creator and popularized creature of our global culture. His face, onscreen antics, and offscreen scandals were disseminated around the globe by new media which knew no geographical or linguistic boundaries. But more than this, Chaplin was the first acknowledged artistic genius of the cinema, recognized as such by a young and influential generation of writers and artists including George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Bertolt Brecht, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and the surrealist painters and poets of both Paris and Berlin. Chaplin may be the one cinema artist who might truly be called a seminal figure of the century-if only because of his influence on virtually every other recognized seminal figure of the century.

Chaplin was born in London into a theatrical family; his mother and father alternated between periods of separation and union, activities onstage and difficulties offstage (his father was an alcoholic, his mother fell victim to insanity). The young Chaplin spent his early life on the London streets and in a London workhouse, but by the age of eight he was earning his living on the stage.

Chaplin's career, like that of Buster Keaton and Stan Laurel, indicates that gifted physical comedians often develop their talents as children (as do concert pianists and ballet dancers) or never really develop them at all. By the time he was twenty years old, Chaplin had become the star attraction of the Fred Karno Pantomime Troupe, an internationally acclaimed English music-hall act, and it was on his second tour of America that a representative of the Keystone comedy film company (either Mack Sennett, comedienne Mabel Normand, or co-owner Charles Bauman) saw Chaplin. In 1913 he was offered a job at Keystone. Chaplin went to work at the Keystone lot in Burbank, California, in January 1914.

To some extent, the story of Chaplin's popular success and artistic evolution is evident from even a cursory examination of the sheer volume of Chaplin's works (and the compensation he received). In 1914 at Keystone, Chaplin appeared in thirty-five one- and two-reel films (as well as the six-reeler Tillie's Punctured Romance), about half of which he directed himself, for the yearly salary of $7,800. The following year, Chaplin made fourteen one- and two-reel films for the Essanay Film Company-all of which he wrote and directed himself-for a salary of $67,000. In 1916-17, Chaplin wrote, directed and starred in twelve two-reel films for the Mutual Film company, and then signed a million-dollar contract with First National Corporation to write, direct, produce, and star in twelve more two-reel films. The contract allowed him to build his own studio, which he alone used until 1952 (it is now the studio for A&M Records), but his developing artistic consciousness kept him from completing the contract until 1923 with nine films of lengths ranging from two to six reels. Finally, in 1919, Chaplin became one of the founders of United Artists (along with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith), through which Chaplin released eight feature films, made between 1923-52, after which he sold his interest in the company.

In his early one- and two-reel films Chaplin evolved the comic tools and means that would lead to his future success. His character of the Tramp, the ?little fellow,? a figure invariably garbed with derby, cane, floppy shoes, baggy pants, and tight jacket, debuted in his second Keystone film, Kid Auto Races at Venice. Because the tramp was a little guy, he made an easy target for the larger and tougher characters who loomed over him, but his quick thinking, agile body, and surprising ingenuity in converting ordinary objects into extraordinary physical allies helped him more than hold his own in a big, mean world. Although he was capable of lechery (The Masquerader, Dough and Dynamite) he could also selflessly aid the innocent woman under attack (The New Janitor, The Tramp, The Bank). Although he deserved her affection as a reward, he was frequently rejected for his social or sexual inadequacies (The Tramp, The Bank, The Vagabond, The Adventurer). Many of his early films combined his dexterous games with physical objects with deliberate attempts at emotional pathos (The Tramp, The Vagabond, The Pawnshop) or with social commentary on the corruption of the police, the brutality of the slums, or the selfishness of the rich (Police, Easy Street, The Adventurer).

Prior to Chaplin, no one had demonstrated that physical comedy could be simultaneously hilariously funny, emotionally passionate, and pointedly intellectual. While his cinema technique tended to be invisible-emphasizing the actor and his actions-he gradually evolved a principle of cinema based on framing: finding the exact way to frame a shot to reveal its motion and meaning completely, thus avoiding disturbing cuts.

Chaplin's later films evolved and featured increasingly complicated or ironic situations in which to explore the Tramp's character and the moral paradoxes of his existence. His friend and ally is a mongrel dog in A Dog's Life, he becomes a doughboy in Shoulder Arms; acquires a child in The Kid; becomes a preacher in The Pilgrim; and explores the decadent Parisian high life in A Woman of Paris, a comedy-melodrama of subtle visual techniques in which the Tramp does not appear.

Chaplin's four feature films between 1925-36 might be called his ?marriage group,? in which he explores the circumstances by which the tramp might acquire a sexual-romantic mate. In The Gold Rush the Tramp succeeds in winning the dance-hall gal who previously rejected him, because she now appreciates his kindness and his new-found wealth. The happy ending is as improbable as the Tramp's sudden riches-perhaps a comment that kindness helps but money gets the girl. But in The Circus, Charlie turns his beloved over to the romantic high-wire daredevil Rex; the girl rejects him not because of Charlie's kindness or poverty but because he cannot fulfill the woman's image of male sexual attractiveness. City Lights builds upon this problem as it rises to a final question, deliberately and poignantly left unanswered: can the blind flower seller, whose vision has been restored by Charlie's kindness, love him for his kindness alone since her vision now reveals him to look so painfully different from the rich and handsome man she imagined and expected? And in Modern Times, Charlie successfully finds a mate, a social outcast and child of nature like himself; unfortunately, their marriage can find no sanctification or existence within contemporary industrial society. So the two of them take to the road together, walking away from society toward who knows where-the Tramp's final departure from the Chaplin world.

Although both City Lights and Modern Times used orchestral music and cleverly comic sound effects (especially Modern Times), Chaplin's final three American films were talking films-The Great Dictator, in which Chaplin burlesques Hitler and Nazism, Monsieur Verdoux, in which Chaplin portrays a dapper mass murderer, and Limelight, Chaplin's nostalgic farewell to the silent art of pantomime which nurtured him. In this film, in which Buster Keaton also plays a major role, Chaplin bids farewell not only to a dead movie tradition-silent comedy-but to a two-hundred-year tradition of physical comedy on both stage and screen, the tradition out of which both Keaton and Chaplin came, which would produce no clowns of the future.

Chaplin's later years were scarred by personal and political difficulties produced by his many marriages and divorces, his supposed sexual philanderings, his difficulties with the Internal Revenue Service, his outspoken defence of liberal political causes, and his refusal to become an American citizen. Although he was never called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Chaplin's films were picketed and boycotted by right-wing activist groups. When Chaplin left for a trip abroad in 1952, the State Department summarily revoked his automatic re-entry permit. Chaplin sent his young wife Oona O'Neill, daughter of the playwright Eugene O'Neill, back to America to settle their business affairs.

Chaplin established his family in Switzerland and conveyed his outrage against his former country by not returning to America for twenty years and by refusing to let any of his films circulate in America for two decades. In 1957 he made a very uneven, often embarrassing satire of American democracy, A King in New York. This film, like A Countess from Hong Kong, made ten years later, was a commercial and artistic disappointment, perhaps in part because Chaplin was cut off from the familiar studio, the experienced production team, and the painstakingly slow production methods he had been using for over three decades. In 1971 he enjoyed a triumphant return to Hollywood to accept an honorary Academy Award for a lifetime of cinematic achievement.-GERALD MAST