Year 16, Day 204 - 7/22/24 - Movie #4,794
BEFORE: That's 33 documentaries down, just 10 to go before tonight. David Letterman is still in the lead with 10 appearances for the year, and in second place there's a three-way tie between Kevin Hart, Paul McCartney and John Lennon with 9 appearances each. Those Beatles DO tend to turn up in just about every rock music doc. Then tied for third with 8 appearances are George Harrison and Elton John. I think we'll see Elton John at least one more time, maybe two, so we could have a very close race this year.
Charlie Chaplin carries over from "Moonage Daydream".
THE PLOT: A look at the life and work of Charlie Chaplin in his own words, featuring an in-depth interview he gave to Life magazine in 1966.
AFTER: Ugh, more mansplaining tonight, except the narrator is a woman, does that make it womansplaining? Were they trying to avoid the stereotype? You know, a woman telling me facts about the silent movie industry that everybody already knows is just as condescending. Like, did you know that Charlie Chaplin was NOT the character that he played? Yes, umm, it's called acting and we're all quite famliar with it. Did you know that the character does not officially have a name? Well, that just seems like a terrible idea - because rather than make the character seem timeless or eternal, it just seems confusing that we don't know what to call him. The Little Man? The Tramp? See, this is why people fall back on calling the character "Chaplin" or by thinking of Chaplin AS his character. If the Little Tramp had a name, or an official nickname, then maybe we wouldn't all be so confused. Poor planning on Chaplin's part, really.
I know its probably the fact that this film is butted right up against the David Bowie docs, but I can't help but draw a comparison to Bowie and Ziggy Stardust, which for the last two days everyone in the docs is reminding was just a CHARACTER that Bowie played, he was not Ziggy, except for the fact that he was, and part of the reason he had to STOP being Ziggy was he felt like maybe Ziggy was taking over and David had to come back. There's a lesson in there somewhere, which is that if you play the same character in movies or TV for too long, you become the character and the character becomes me and then at some point you maybe don't know which is which. SO, therefore the movie is wrong because Chaplin was his character and his character was Chaplin, because nobody else played the character but him.
Well, that's not exactly true. There were imitators, knock-offs of Chaplin, low-rent actors who decided to dress like him or were paid to dress like him and appear in low-budget silent movies that just weren't as good as the real thing. One aspiring actor took the too-fake stage name of C.H. Aplin, and well that led to a lawsuit and a cease-and-desist order. Mr. Aplin's court testimoney was that he was not imitating Chaplin, but he was performing a tribute to Billy West, another actor who appeared in films and gave off a definite Chaplin-esque vibe. OK, so first off, nice try, but this just wouldn't hold up in court these days. But come on, if Chaplin just put his first Tramp outfit together by throwing together whatever random clothing items (like Fatty Arbuckle's pants) were lying around the costume department, how can you fault another actor for doing the same thing?
Chaplin started in music halls in the U.K. at the age of 14, and when he was 19 he did stage acts for the Fred Karno company, which took him to the U.S. where he was scouted for movies being made at the Keystone Studios. Mack Sennett had just had an actor quit, who played the captain of the Keystone Kops, and looked to Chaplin as a replacement. After learning the ins and outs of silent movie stunts, before long Chaplin was both starring in and directing movies like "The Kid", "The Gold Rush" and "The Circus". But when sound movies ("talkies") came along, he was resistant to change and kept making silents like "City Lights" and "Modern Times", he didn't talk in a movie until "The Great Dictator" in 1940.
Did we also need the narrator to remind us that Chaplin and Hitler looked a lot alike, and were born in the same year, just four days apart? No, we did not, because that was the whole POINT of "The Great Dictator", Chaplin was obviously poking fun at Hitler by playing the villain, Adenoid Hynkel, and also the hero, who was a Jewish barber and Hynkel's doppelganger. Due to a comic mishap the two switch clothes and therefore trade places in the world, and the barber ends up giving a public speech that doesn't inflame the crowd, but instead calls for unity and brotherhood in the name of democracy. Ah, if only. We could use an update of this film for sure - oh, wait, never mind, Sacha Baron Cohen made one a few years ago. Nah, we're good.
But before Chaplin's personal life shot his career in the foot, he was at one point the first real international movie star, and he was also the highest paid actor in the industry, at least for a while. Hell, he was one of the highest paid people in the world, which led to him having his own movie studio, but then formed a new distribution company, United Artsts in 1919. Just in time for the Great Depression to hit and suddenly nobody could afford to do anything except go to the movies maybe once a week.
Yeah, about that personal life, though - Chaplin married four times, and according to those wives, he was never really faithful, always looking for the next young girl, and he liked them young, sometimes a bit too young. OK, mo money mo problems, I guess, and divorce was costly even back then, but it doesn't seem like he ever went out of his way to change. Ex-wife Lita Grey was probably the most vocal about how he pursued her when she was under-age, and then after they got married secretly in Mexico, but soon after she had their sons Lita split, most likely because of his infidelity. But sure, just move on to the next teenage girl, that'll solve everything. Chaplin probably wasn't the first celebrity who felt that the general rules of relationships didn't apply to him, but who knows, maybe he was.
Legal troubles continued after "The Great Dictator", with more affairs and a paternity suit, meanwhile J. Edgar Hoover was suspicious of Chaplin's political leanings, so he indicted him and charged him with violating the Mann Act, which prevented transporting young women across state lines for, well, you know. He was acquitted, but the scandals plagued him, and not even marrying another teenager could help him feel better. But he did stay with his fourth wife until he died, and they had 8 children together, so who's to say?
Chaplin was also hounded by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the HUAC, when the government started seeing communists everywhere in the late 1940's and started blacklisting Communist sympathizers. After making "Limelight" Chaplin and his family boarded an ocean liner to go attend the movie's premiere in London, and the next day the U.S. Attorney General took steps to bar him from re-entering the country because of his political views and moral behavior. And so Chaplin lived in exile for many years, and he didn't come back to the U.S. until he got that honorary award from the Academy in 1972.
Some of the methods here employed to make this film were a little unusual - like I could tell when they were using archive footage, but then also two actors are credited with playing Chaplin, in the years 1947 and 1966. Huh? Why isn't there footage already of Chaplin from those years? My guess is that they only had audio interviews from some years, and rather than just play that audio over random footage that didn't match up, they decided to hire look-alike (or not) actors to lip-sync to those audio interviews - I can't be sure, however. But if they used this technique, it reminds me just a bit too much of how they made that show "Drunk History".
Also starring Jeff Rawle (last seen in "Rebecca"), Paul Ryan (last seen in "Cinderella Man"), Matthew Wolf (last heard in "Murder Mystery 2"), Dickie Beau (last seen in "Colette"), Anne Rosenfeld, Dominic Marsh, Paul Leonard (last seen in "The Witches"), Eben Young (last seen in "Doctor Strange"), Anthony Eden, Haley Flaherty, Charlie Carter (last seen in "Blithe Spirit"), David Olawale Ayinde and the voice of Pearl Mackie (last seen in "Greed").
with archive footage of Geraldine Chaplin (last seen in "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom"), Jane Chaplin, Michael Chaplin, Oona Chaplin, Virginia Cherrill, Jackie Coogan (last seen in "Marlowe"), Alistair Cooke, Walt Disney (last seen in "Lucy and Desi"), Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (last seen in "Ghost Story"), Mohandas Gandhi, Paulette Goddard (last seen in "Second Chorus"), Lita Grey, Merv Griffin (last seen in "Little Richard: I Am Everything"), Oliver Hardy (last seen in "Remembering Gene Wilder"), Stan Laurel (ditto), Mildred Harris, Adolf Hitler (last seen in "The Strange Name Movie"), J. Edgar Hoover (last seen in "LennoNYC"), Hedda Hopper (last seen in "Topper"), Al Jolson (last seen in "Babylon"), Buster Keaton (also carrying over from "Moonage Daydream"), Ring Lardner Jr., Harold Lloyd, Joseph McCarthy (last seen in "Where's My Roy Cohn?"), Edna Purviance, Paul Robeson, Franklin Roosevelt (last seen in "The Special Relationship"), Mack Sennett, Robert Taylor, Dalton Trumbo, Orson Welles (last seen in "De Palma"), Effie Wisdom,
RATING: 5 out of 10 people standing in bread lines - or maybe they were lining up to see "The Gold Rush", it's tough to say. Why didn't they just combine the lines, then, and let people eat while watching the movie? That would have been way more efficient.
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