![]() ![]() And Chaplin was calling Hitler out from very, very early on and stood to lose quite a lot with that film.”įinishing the script on the day Britain declared war on Germany, Chaplin was under huge pressure not to make it. They were re-cutting films, they didn’t want to lose the German market. “A lot of Hollywood throughout the 1930s were sort of looking the other way. “The thing that struck us in our research, I think, is just the external courage it took for Chaplin to make that film,” says Middleton. A film that satirised Adolf Hitler, Chaplin famously played both a fascist leader, Adenoid Henkel and a Jewish barber. It all made the final incarnation of the Little Tramp in 1940’s The Great Dictator all the more poignant. “He’s a wandering outcast, always being forced out of employment, hounded by the authorities, uprooted and exiled,” adds Spinney. “When he finally did, he said ‘I don’t have that honour.’” As Holocaust survivor and philosopher Hannah Arendt put it, Chaplin’s Tramp tapped into the idea of “the Jew as a pariah”. “Chaplin was reluctant to correct the popular assumption that he was Jewish, because he thought that to do so would play into the hands of antisemitism,” explains Spinney. But it was the Second World War that, perhaps, came to define him.įor years, Chaplin had been thought of as Jewish, either by antisemites or Jews themselves. The Great Depression, for example, is commented upon in Modern Times (1935), a film about increased mechanisation. Yet this is just part of The Real Charlie Chaplin, which does a fine job of showing how Chaplin’s life ran in parallel to some of the biggest events in 20th Century world history. The psychological disconnect that is really striking.”īy now, Chaplin had co-founded Hollywood studio United Artists, giving him complete control over beloved films such as The Kid (1921) and The Gold Rush (1925). “The papers were estimating, it would be more people coming out in the streets to greet him than on Armistice Day. “We were kind of interested in, I suppose, just how that mythology that surrounds him was cultivated and the impact on him.” He cites the day, in 1921, when Chaplin returned to London, and he’s greeted by tens of thousands of well-wishers. By 1916, his films are regularly being watched by hundreds of millions of people across different continents.”Īs Middleton notes, Chaplin’s rise has been dubbed “the greatest rags to riches story of all time”, and it’s hard to argue against it. When he first steps on screen, films are just beginning to spread across the world. Before Chaplin, people had never been famous in that particular way. And a type of fame that really began with him. “But this is really just a shadow of the fame that he experienced during his lifetime. “He first stepped onto the screen in 1914,” says Spinney. Tracing his path from his poverty-stricken upbringing in London’s Lambeth, the film posits that Chaplin became the world’s first global celebrity. “Freud said about Chaplin, he’s destined to revisit the humiliations of his childhood.” “His Tramp character is really a vehicle for him to journey back into his past,” suggests Spinney. As the title suggests, it attempts to go behind the Tramp, the bowler hat-wearing vagrant with that all-too-familiar moustache that became his on-screen persona. A compelling cradle-to-the-grave portrait, using archive footage, unique audio recordings and dramatisations, and narration from former Doctor Who star Pearl Mackie, it’s a film that doesn’t flinch from Chaplin’s more troublesome side, just as it doesn’t stop short of appreciating his significance -particularly to Jewish people.Ī far cry from Spinney and Middleton’s previous doc, 2016’s Notes on Blindness, the story of writer John Hull losing his sight, the film is a remarkable primer for those only dimly aware of Chaplin and his output. The Real Charlie Chaplin, the new documentary by British filmmakers James Spinney and Peter Middleton, invites viewers to reconsider the silent movie star.
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