Word: chaplinitis
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...this film (and in another enticing compilation, David Johnson's The Lavender Lens: 100 Years of Celluloid Queers, available in some video stores), we see gay characters haunting the corners of the film frame. From the early days of silent films (when Charlie Chaplin, in a barbershop, gives a cruel hairdo to an effeminate man) to the '90s (when gay or bisexual murderers lend lurid pizazz to The Silence of the Lambs and Basic Instinct), American films--like America itself--have typically treated gays as a joke or a curse...
DIED. BRODRICK HALDANE, 83, photographer whose status as a member of high society (Scottish son of the 26th Laird of Gleneagles) helped him capture classic images of the famous (Dietrich, Chaplin) and the powerful (President Kennedy, Queen Elizabeth); in Edinburgh. DIED. RUSSELL COLLEY, 97, dubbed the "father of the spacesuit," who designed the 1961 extraterrestrial fashion statement worn by astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. in America's first step starward; in Springfield, Ohio...
DIED. LITA GREY CHAPLIN, 88, actress; in Woodland Hills, California. At 12, she was Charlie Chaplin's new star in The Kid (1921). At 16, she was Chaplin's new wife. At 18, her lurid divorce complaint launched one of the earliest celebrity court cases...
...mouth into an awful grimace. But this blank visage was a versatile comic instrument. The giant eyes spoke all manner of emotions: ardor, terror, despair, sheer mulishness. The Keaton deadpan is stoic, heroic and as thoroughly modernist as a Beckett play or a Bauhaus facade. Next to him, Chaplin is a Victorian coquette, Lloyd a glad-handing politician...
...also his brother-in-law, sold him out, literally, to MGM, and Keaton lost control of his films. It was a crash that led to pained obscurity--as second banana to Jimmy Durante, gag writer for Red Skelton, waxwork to Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd., cracked mirror image to Chaplin in the 1952 Limelight. Keaton died at 70 in 1966. He never got to savor the happy ending that film history had planned: the rediscovery and restoration of his films, the flabbergasted smiles of today's children gazing on the Great Stone Face, the influence his work has on movie...