Word: chaplinitis
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With 60,000 words already ghostwritten Michael Chaplin was suddenly having some second thoughts about the unfilial opus due out next month called I Couldn't Smoke the Grass on My Father's Lawn. Father Charlie had decided long ago that he didn't like the fumes of his beatnik boy either, but even with the family feud Michael was beginning to worry that Grass was a bit thick, asked a London High Court justice to suppress the book because it exploited "the piquancy of a situation where the son of a famous man is shown...
Emily, the pet five-foot python that Geraldine Chaplin, 20, used to carry around Europe in a sack, evidently taught her something. On location in Spain, where she is playing the role of Tonia, the demure, bourgeois wife of Dr. Zhivago, the great Charlie's daughter suddenly assumed a herpetic pose. But as Geraldine said once, "For a young dancer like myself, what a treat it is to watch a snake move. Their suppleness and their elegance are incomparable...
Newley has obviously modeled himself on Charlie Chaplin, but he loves the master less than the master's cloak, and he wears it with a rueful difference. Where Chaplin was earthy, Newley is smirkingly vulgar. Chaplin was a prisoner of life who sang in his chains; Newley is a resentful slave of the class system who cries in his pint of bitters. Chaplin's Little Tramp was a tattered knight of the open road, dueling his foes with his wits and a twirling cane. Newley's Oh-So-Little Man, windily inflated with his rights...
...first skit, "Hungry in the Park," begins in the Chaplin vein, a hungry loafer trying to con a meal off passersby. When his begging proves unsuccessful, the tramp discovers how surprisingly delicious his fingernail tastes, and then eagerly dines on the fingers of his left hand. But before desert, the men in the white coats drag the tramp away, which is not funny...
Died. Sydney Chaplin, 80, Charlie's half-brother (his elder by four years) and former business manager, an actor in his own right, who appeared with Charlie in Mack Sennett's early Keystone Cops comedies, starred in the first of four film versions of Charley's Aunt in 1925, ended his movie career in 1939 after assisting his brother in The Great Dictator, spending his remaining years in Switzerland and France; of heart and other ailments; in Nice...