With the popularity of Charlie Chaplin (1889 - 1977) came a large number of artificial, bootlegged Charlie Chaplin movies and a host of fraudulent 'Charlies'. All the fake Chaplins were clad the same and all answered to the same name yet all had different biographies and were not terribly funny in the slightest degree. Chaplin No. 1 did not care for this one bit and did not hold back while talking to this correspondent from "Motion Picture Magazine".
The Irish playwright St John Ervine (1883 - 1971) wrote this article for VANITY FAIR in an attempt to understand Charlie Chaplin's broad appeal; rich and poor, highbrow and lowbrow, all enjoyed his movies.
"Mr. Chaplin is the small boy realizing his ambitions."
This short column appeared in 1916 answering the question for so many concerning the salary of Charlie Chaplin who served as his own inspiration for his famous character, "the Little Tramp".
We have all seen it many times before: the well-loved, widely accepted comedian who decides that being adored by the masses is simply not enough. For too many comic talents, sadly, there comes a time when they slip on one banana peel too many and it occurs to them that they want the world to appreciate them for their ability to think. Comics who fill this description might be Al Frankin, Woody Allen or Steve Martin.
This article tries to understand why Chaplin wanted to play a tragic part in a 1921 London stage adaptation of William Thackeray's 'Vanity Fair'.
We have seen such behavior in comics many times before, they hadn't.
Attached are five assorted photographs of Charlie Chaplin as they appeared on the sleekly printed pages of a 1916 issue of MOTION PICTURE MAGAZINE.
This poem was submitted to the
Vanity Fair editors by an obscure film critic named Carl Sandburg (1878 – 1967):
"The room is dark. The door opens. It is Charlie
playing for his friends after dinner, 'the marvel-
ous urchin, the little genius of the screen...'"
Between the years 1920 - 1928, Sandburg served as the film critic for the Chicago Daily News.
Attached you will be able to print the film review for Charlie Chaplin's movie, "Shoulder Arms" (1918). Printed in a popular humor magazine from the time, the flick (which had been re-released) was hailed by this one critic as "the greatest comedy in movie history".
The number of movie stars who have found Los Angeles a disagreeable spot in which to live and work is a far larger number than you could ever imagine; however, for those of you who are keeping just such a list, here is proof-positive that Charlie Chaplin hated the dump, too.
In Nazi occupied Paris there was a secret underground movie theater (93 Champs Elysees) operating throughout the entire four year period and it charged an excessive sum of francs to gain entry. Guess which
Chaplin film was shown?
Shortly before his movie The Kid was released, Charlie Chaplin (1889 - 1977) wrote a few "remarks on the discovery of Jack Coogan, and the picture built around him" in the attached Vanity Fair article, "The Marvelous Boy of the Movies".
Attached is a three page article about Charlie Chaplin that first appeared in 1930 and contains far more information about the man than you might possibly care to know:
"He is a splendid boxer and a keen boxing fan...He plays bridge well...He loves traveling and dislikes flying...He likes to be alone...He likes to talk...He swears now and then...He did not go to school..."
"The world, with the exception of those bright eyed youngsters under the age of five, has waited pretty breathlessly for the reappearance of a forlorn little figure in a derby, baggy trousers, and disreputable shoes. The fact that his reappearance was to be under the sinister title, Modern Times alarmed not a few of us. This hapless creature, whose name by the way, is Charlie Chaplin, had come to mean an unchangeable element to us...Disguised in current mechanistic ingenuity, veiled in lukewarm disapproval of the plight of the working man, and tinted a slight shade of Red, it remain, delightfully and irrevocably, Chaplin.
It must have been a slow news week when the industrious reporters at MOTION PICTURE MAGAZINE opted to write this piece about Sydney Chaplin (1885 – 1965),businessman, aviator, actor,(thirty-four films between 1914 and 1928) and occasional business partner to his younger super-star brother, Charlie:
"Charlie Chaplin is small and thin. Sidney is tall and husky. Charlie is dark, with curly hair like a boy. His big brother is light, and looks like a big lumberman. Here is contrast indeed. Their natures are as different as the natures of a flee and a bee. To see them together one would not take them brothers..."
Three years after this article was published, Syd Chaplin would started the first domestic airline company in the United States: The Syd Chaplin Airline, Co., which he saw fit to close when the U.S. government began to regulate pilots and all commercial flight ventures.
"This, the much-discussed final speech in
The Great Dictator, is more than a climax and conclusion to Chaplin's newest film, it is a statement of Chaplin's belief in humanity, a belief in which his creative powers and artistic development are deeply rooted."
"Hope...I'm sorry, but I don't want to be an emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone, if possible -Jew, Gentile -black man -white."
Within the toasty-warm confines of the attached PDF lie the text of a speech that Chaplin delivered over the war-torn airwaves in 1942. Wishing only to encourage the citizenry of London and Washington, D.C. to be of stout heart in their battle against the Fascist powers, Chaplin's address was titled, "Give Us More Bombs Over Berlin".
Attached is an article about the Charlie Chaplin film, "Monsieur Verdux" (1947) and the monstrous beast Henri Landru -the French murderer on whom the story is loosely based. This article was written by Gordon Kahn, remembered chiefly in our own time as one of the blacklisted Hollywood screenwriters of the post-World War II period. Not too long after this article was written he went into self-exile in Mexico.
Restless with the manner in which the film colony operated, Chaplin joined forces with three other leading Hollywood celebrities to create United Artists; a distribution company formed to release their own films. Attached is a printable history of United Artists spanning the years 1919 through 1939 which also outlines why the organization was so original:
"[United Artists] introduced a new method into the industry. Heretofore producers and distributors had been the employers, paying salaries and sometimes a share of the profits to the stars. Under the United Artists system, the stars became their own employers. They had to do their own financing, but they received the producer profits that had formerly gone to their employers and each received his share of the profits of the distributing organization."
The
Time Magazine review of Charlie Chaplin's film,
A Woman of Paris, fell in line with many other reviews of the work: they all believed that Chaplin, as director, had moved the ball forward insofar as the development of film - and
Time hoped that they had seen the end of Chaplin the clown. However, the 82 minute film was a commercial flop, primarily because
he wasn't in it (they chose not to publicize that he played an extra's roll for one quick scene).
The first film Chaplin had directed was The Kid (1922) - and you can read about that here...
Here is an interesting review of
Charlie Chaplin, a 1951 biography:
"The acting of Charlie Chaplin has enriched our lives; it has become part of our experience. Regardless of how his casual and unserious politics are interpreted, irrespective of what attitude is taken toward newspaper stories of his private life, his films have demonstrably healthy influence on audiences. All one needs to do to prove this is to sit in a theater and listen to the genuine laughter which Chaplin evokes."
