Word: chaplinitis
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Although Charlie Chaplin has re-released the best of his movies, don't hold your breath in anticipation, because it will be six months before the entire series is shown. I would guess that this second look at his movies, armed as critics are now with the desperate desire not to let a great film go unnoticed, especially a lowbrow film, will reveal a great deal of autobiography--Chaplin's own autobiography as he imaginatively reconstructs it in several of these films, and the autobiography of Hollywood during the war years...
...more weeks at Brookline Village, and it may well be the most autobiographical of all the films. This Depression fable (1936) concerns the adventures of a mentally imbalanced factory worker whose continual ups and downs produce a great deal of whimsy as an antidote to the cruelty around him. Chaplin's spirit is the only element tying the entire film together; otherwise it is a hodgepodge of styles and aims. It is nearly the last silent to come out of Hollywood, but has some dialogue. It combines pathos, slapstick, leftist social critique, and very personal whimsy on Chaplin's part...
...poor factory worker he plays, after months on the assembly line, and after confronting the hilarious monster of the Automatic Eating Machine, finally goes loony, throws every switch in the factory out of whack, and goes on an oil-spurting spree. As Chaplin gets himself mistakenly arrested as a communist leader (and that one has to be seen to be believed), a poor street gamine (Paulette Goddarde) steals bananas. On the dry hot streets of Los Angeles in the middle of the depression the gamine is nearly arrested, until the gallant Chaplin recently released from jail, takes the rap. Chaplin...
...this point, the film moves from left to right, as domestic sentiment takes over from hifalutin political ideas. Later episodes take Chaplin and his girlfriend into a department store at night, where the tramp blithely roller-skates blind-folded. On the brink of disaster, he is blissfully unaware of a stairwell until the minute he takes his blindfold off, at which point he cannot help but fall in. The movie contains several similar gems of poetic understanding of human predicaments. Chaplin, forced to work as a singing waiter, loses the words to his song, and is forced to sing...
...tools of Chevalier's trade were as familiar as the bowler, cane and flat-footed waddle of his contemporary, Charlie Chaplin; almost always there was a straw hat tilted rakishly over a roguish blue eye, a jutting lower lip, a slightly protruding derriere, and that gay boulevardier's swagger. When famed Director Ernst Lubitsch offered him the role of a prince in Hollywood, Chevalier laughingly declined, saying: "With my swinging walk, I can only play commoners...