Word: chaplinitis
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...home daily, a number roughly equal to the entire work force of the huge automaker's smaller rival, Alfa Romeo. Assembly-line workers argue that they need time off now and then because the job diminishes their sexual prowess and induces a nervous tic they call the "Charlie Chaplin twitch...
UNTIL Little Murders, the great American sound comedies had always been nihilistic, disrespectful of traditional film genres, but severely handicapped by their own uneasiness in scoring thematic points. It is hard to take even films as distinguished as Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux or Huston's Beat the Devil as little more than devastating evidence of the director's hatred for the work he had been doing and the authorities he had obeyed. Chaplin could glorify his own superiority, Huston could include himself (through Bogart) in ironic rings of betrayal and failure; the result was the same. Righteous indignation was nullified...
...eyed girl in whiteface have been putting on what they call an "Imaginary Circus" on the streets of French provincial towns and in a small Parisian nightclub. Enthusiastic audiences have been unaware how Victoria comes by her wistful clowning; she is the 19-year-old daughter of Charlie Chaplin and his wife, Oona-who is herself the daughter of America's greatest playwright, Eugene O'Neill. The circus she and Actor Jean-Baptiste Thierree, 33, have worked up "is not really for children," he says. "It is partly political, partly philosophical. The important thing is to make people...
...lines to move faster. A great many workers have lost any sense of control over what they are doing and often have to move so fast and steadily on assembly lines or at piecework that there is hardly time even to go to the toilet. The image of Charlie Chaplin, in Modern Times, leaving a plant and turning and twisting an invisible wrench all the way home is less funny than ever. "Do you know what I do?" asks a striker outside G.M.'s assembly plant at Tarrytown, N.Y. "I fix seven bolts. Seven bolts...
Savoring Keaton's films, the late James Agee once wrote: "Barring only the best of Chaplin, they seem to me the most wonderful comedies ever made." The comparison is inescapable; the two geniuses dominated silent comedy. The difference in their styles was marked: Chaplin, the gothic Pagliacci, wore his art upon his sleeve. Much as he wanted laughter, he craved significance more. Keaton was too busy with sight gags to realize that he was a major surrealist...