The most un-put-downable movie book of the season is also the most un-pick-uppable one: “The Charlie Chaplin Archives” (Taschen), which is the size of a small suitcase and weighs in at fourteen pounds, packed tightly with five hundred and sixty pages’ worth of thick and glossy paper bearing a treasure trove of superbly printed images alongside a relentlessly fascinating collage-like textual biography of Chaplin. It’s an apt tribute to the filmmaker, whose artistry transcends the cinema and spans world-historical dimensions.
The book’s editor, Paul Duncan, who also wrote or co-wrote ten of its fifteen chapters, states his aim in the first line of his introduction—“to show you how Charlie Chaplin made his films”—and he has access to an extraordinary trove of documents for the reconstruction, “preserved thanks to Charlie’s half brothers Sydney Chaplin and Wheeler Dryden.” The Chaplin family made these materials available to Duncan and his collaborators, but their involvement doesn’t seem to have inflected the substance of the book, which also ranges widely through Chaplin’s private life, including its lurid, scandalous, and criminal byways.
Even if the book were published without its images, solely as a collection of its wide-ranging texts, it would still provide crucial visions of Chaplin’s artistry and its inescapable coalescence with his life. He was born in 1889. His childhood in London was burdened with desperate poverty; the son of a struggling actress, he got his first acting job at fourteen, enjoyed success in the music halls, and, in 1910, sailed with the Fred Karno troupe for a three-year gig in the United States. Another member of the company, Stan Laurel (later of Laurel and Hardy), reported on Chaplin’s antics aboard ship:
The rodomontade was, Laurel saw, a gag, but the essence of its truth was soon realized. In 1913, in Philadelphia, the company manager received a fateful telegram from representatives of Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios: “Is there a man named Chaffin in your company or something like that.”
Chaplin was overjoyed by Keystone’s salary of one hundred and fifty dollars a week, but less happy with movies themselves. He wrote to his brother Sydney: “Just think Sid, £35 per week is not to be laugh[ed] at and I only want to work about five years at that and then we are independent for life. I shall save like a son of a gun.” Chaplin told his Keystone colleague Chester Conklin, “I’m going to get out of this business. … I figure the cinema is little more than a fad.” But a month into his contract, after an unsteady beginning with Keystone, he spontaneously, accidentally adopted a costume consisting of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s large trousers, a smaller actor’s tight jacket, and Arbuckle’s father-in-law’s derby. Then Chaplin decided to add, as he put it, “a small moustache, which, I reasoned, would add age”—he was only twenty-four—“without hiding my expression.”
Charles Chaplin, Jr., said of the Tramp: “It was just released whole from somewhere deep within my father, it was really my father’s alter ego, the little boy who never grew up: ragged, cold, hungry, but still thumbing his nose at the world.” The Tramp, Chaplin also said, “is always quick to do things for his own protection and he is clever in dodging brickbats and rebuffs of others and sliding adverse conditions off on some other fellow. He does not care who falls so long as he gets out safe and sound.” Buster Keaton, meanwhile, was careful to distinguish his own screen persona from Chaplin’s: “Charlie’s tramp was a bum with the bum’s philosophy. Lovable as he was, he would steal if he got the chance. My little fellow was a working man and honest.”
But a philosophy it was, and with it, Chaplin’s ambitions and ideas took flight. He sought to invent gags and routines for his character, but he also became keenly aware that performance in movies doesn’t exist in isolation from framings, rhythms—the entire compositional aspect of cinema. He took control of the stories and the production of his films over all; he became a director and screenwriter, and also edited his movies.
As the Tramp, Chaplin became a nearly instant celebrity: his fame and fortune rose meteorically. So did his artistry, along with critical recognition of it. In 1915, one critic wrote, “He was born to laughter as much as Edison was born to invention, and Tolstoy was born to world literature.” Another added, “Sitting in a house of a thousand persons the other night one could feel the stillness that settled over the gathering as the realization sunk deeper that the player was more than a comedian.”
Chaplin, on that boat in 1910, may have been joking about the triumphant destiny that awaited him in the United States, but once he had realized his basic dream of financial independence, he expanded the boundaries of what independence could mean. His self-realization involved an unprecedented artistic freedom that was bound up with his expansion of the burgeoning, still incipient art of the cinema. As Chaplin developed his on-screen persona, he also made explicit his sense of an artistic calling, through the increased refinement and scope of his films, through the audacious and socially critical subject matter, the anarchic tone, and the exacting craft by which he realized them.
Chaplin became fabulously wealthy, and he made his wealth a tool of his art. Already in 1918 he knew that he couldn’t make films on “a schedule,” so he became the owner of his own studio, free to build and undo sets, develop stories improvisationally (including film sequences that he’d never use), reshoot relentlessly, and seek his cinematic ideal through unremitting labor (as with the two hundred takes that went into the famed feeding-machine sequence in “Modern Times”). He could dispose of money as he saw fit and was answerable to no studio boss in his decisions; he said that he sought to create “a new form, a sort of visual music.”
In 1922 he undertook, with conspicuous intent, an art film: “A Woman of Paris,” based loosely on the real-life scandal of a former chorus girl, now high-society grande dame, on whose account a man killed himself. It would be a drama akin in tone to that of a serious novel, and Chaplin, the writer and director, didn’t star in it, but took only a brief cameo. One of its stars, Adolphe Menjou, said that, though it was a silent film, Chaplin “insisted on our learning dialogue and saying it exactly as it was written, something that none of us had ever done before in pictures. This was because he felt that certain words registered on the face and could be easily grasped by the audience.”
Chaplin, a master of pantomime, long rejected talking pictures, which were launched with “The Jazz Singer” in 1927. He made the silents “City Lights” (released in 1931) and “Modern Times” (1936); in the latter, the Tramp sings—in a language of Chaplin’s own invention—but Chaplin vowed that, though he might need to make talkies, the Tramp would never talk (and he never did). Not wanting to be behind the times, Chaplin turned to talking pictures and made a film very much of its moment: “The Great Dictator,” his burlesque of Adolf Hitler. Though he never played the Tramp again, he gave himself other roles of a distorted majesty: in “The Great Dictator,” the dual role of the Hitler-like dictator and the Tramp-like Jewish barber; in his first postwar film, “Monsieur Verdoux,” a hyperrefined Bluebeard (based on the real-life murderer Henri Désiré Landru, a story idea suggested to him by Orson Welles).
“The Charlie Chaplin Archives” also details the predatory aspects of Chaplin’s private life: his sexual relations and marriages with young women under the age of consent; his efforts to avoid prosecution and to prevent scandal (as when he paid a doctor twenty-five thousand dollars to falsify the date of the birth certificate of one of his children); the details of divorce proceedings that were fodder for the press; and the paternity suit, in the mid-nineteen-forties, that led to his denunciation in the Senate. In 1945, the film historian F. X. Feeney writes, “Senator William Langer put forward bill S.536 calling for the Attorney General to investigate and determine whether the ‘alien’ Chaplin should be deported because of ‘his unsavory record of law breaking, of rape, or the debauching of American girls 16 and 17 years of age.’ ” Feeney adds that Langer may have had an ulterior motive—he was associated with pro-Nazi groups. But the accusations in question were based in fact.
The charges against Chaplin’s sexual conduct were soon followed by allegations about his political sympathies. Chaplin, though still a British subject, was active politically in the United States, giving speeches to sell war bonds in 1918, giving radio broadcasts in 1933 in favor of New Deal programs, advocating alliance with the Soviet Union during the Second World War. He was accused of harboring Communist sympathies; he was denounced in 1947 by the House Un-American Activities Committee; and he went virtually overnight from hero to pariah. “Monsieur Verdoux” was the subject of critical attacks (though it was famously and magnificently praised by James Agee) and was a box-office failure.
Chaplin followed it with a film set in Great Britain, “Limelight,” in which he plays Calvero, an elderly, once-celebrated, now fallen music-hall performer in London on the eve of the First World War—exactly the time that the real-life Chaplin made the leap from the stage to movies. Though based loosely on the experience of another actor, Calvero is also a counterfactual self-portrait of a Chaplin who was untouched by the cinema and left to squander his uniquely dynamic character in an art form that was itself in its senescence. The actor Norman Lloyd—who was in “Limelight” and, now a centenarian, is in “Trainwreck”—saw “Limelight” as Chaplin’s way of “saying, ‘I, Charlie Chaplin, doubt that I can make people laugh any longer.’ ” It’s as if, in the wake of scandal, persecution, and failure, as well as the inevitable changes of age and shifts in public taste, he dramatized the feeling that he had lost his touch.
In 1952, in the midst of McCarthy-era paranoia, when Chaplin sought to travel to London for the première of “Limelight,” his reëntry permit was revoked; needing to reapply for entry as an immigrant and thus to give accounts of his political activities and personal life, he stayed away, moving to Switzerland.
In Great Britain, he made the loftily furious comedy “A King in New York,” with its raging satire on urban modernity, advertising, television, Hollywood, plastic surgery, rock and roll, and—above all—McCarthyite investigations and persecutions. Though he was politically free, he faced difficulties in a British studio, where the working methods were constrained by sedimented traditions and stringent union regulations. Chaplin’s assistant Jerry Epstein reports that crew members called a strike when Chaplin dared to move a chair on the set; the film historian Jamie Russell adds that the vice-president of United Artists “advised Epstein to have his name removed from the credits to save his career.” It’s one of his greatest films—and it went unseen in the United States until 1973, because Chaplin refused to release it here.
In 1959, federal officials hoped to entrap Chaplin at an immigration office with a question about a girlfriend’s abortion—he’d have been forced either to admit it, rendering himself “mandatorily excludable,” or to perjure himself.
His last film, “A Countess from Hong Kong,” shot in 1966, stars Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren. The book reveals that, though the substance of the story derived from his reminiscences of a 1936 visit to China with the actress Paulette Goddard, the spark of the story was Chaplin’s admiration for John F. Kennedy, on whom Brando’s role was to be based. Chaplin and Brando, however, worked poorly together; Brando was miserable, but said, with an ironic admiration, “Charlie doesn’t direct as much as he conducts. You feel as if you were part of a musical score.” Chaplin was more blunt:
“The Charlie Chaplin Archives” is a virtual oral history of Chaplin, with Chaplin’s own voice at the center of it. The copious selection of quotes is so evocative that a reading of the book veers toward a recitation, or even a singing, of it. Duncan’s book comes very close to fulfilling the vastness of its ambition—a revelation of Chaplin’s creative process, even to the furious core of energy, passion, lust, and sheer will that fuelled it—and to the evocation of its victims. The collage of archival texts proves its efficacy from the start, with the book’s foreword, by Chaplin himself, an excerpt from an unpublished preface to his 1964 autobiography; it’s a text of such incendiary power that Chaplin could obviously not publish it; its introduction to the artist’s life is brazenly self-revealing, painfully accurate, and tragic:
Chaplin’s art overflowed the bounds of cinema and raised the tides of history; but Chaplin’s life also overflowed the bounds of law and norms and submerged those who stood in the path of his desires. The story of Chaplin’s success is the story of the cinema itself—an accidental art that raises the infinitesimal to the infinite, that sees through modest or constrained circumstances to capture and exalt the essence of character. The titanic force of his character admitted no distinction between creator and destroyer; his character was mightily unified, and the simplicity of his ineffable grace is forged from the fusion of unbearable contradictions.