Word: unknown
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Called Unknown Chaplin, it consists of three hour-long documentaries made for Britain's Thames Television by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, the team responsible for the best overall film history ever made, 1980's 13-part Hollywood. They were given access to Chaplin's film vaults by his widow, and to numberless outtakes from the pictures he made in 1916-17 for the Mutual Film Co., which are now controlled by a silent-film collector-impresario, Raymond Rohauer. From hundreds of hours of this material, the pair has fashioned not only a priceless contribution to film...
...bellboy functioning as a policeman trying to straighten out the splendidly lunatic traffic jam they inevitably create. He then abandons this marvelous scene entirely to turn himself into a spiflicated patient entangling him self in a revolving door, a sequence that turns out to be even more brilliantly timed. Unknown Chaplin offers dozens of examples of this kind of comic grace under self-generated pressure. (He was obliged by his Mutual contract to turn out a film a month, and later, when he was entirely his own boss, it was his money that he could see gurgling down the drain...
...finally, it is not Chaplin's profligacy that awes the viewer of Unknown Chaplin but the relentless perfectionism of his all-encompassing ego and, curiously, a sort of higher frugality. He seems never to have forgotten a good idea, returning to half-formed conceptions years after they occurred to him in order to perfect them. Brownlow and Gill have, for instance, found home movies taken at a Douglas Fairbanks party that show Chaplin dancing with a globe. Something like a decade later, that little improvisation becomes the basis for The Great Dictator's strongest image, that...
Many delegates questioned the selection of Owen Bieber, 53, to succeed Fraser as president. Bieber, a relative unknown, who had been director of the U.A.W. General Motors department, was nominated by the union's international executive board last November. "Bieber's an honest, hardworking, committed person," said one official. "The question is, has he got the qualities to lead the union enthusiastically? When he was in charge at General Motors, his first bargaining session ended up in concessions." Nonetheless, the convention unanimously elected the 6-ft. 5-in. Bieber...
Passion requires directorial fine-tuning, and, for some unknown reason, it does not receive that from Marshall W. Mason, who has proved admirably sensitive on any number of past occasions. The complexity of the intertwining roles called for more rehearsal time than the actors apparently got. Bob Gunton is a shade too stilted as James, hoping perhaps that physical constriction could simulate advanced middle age. Frank Langella moves with grand assurance across Broadway's Longacre stage, ranging from impish mischief to laceration of soul. As Eleanor and her alter ego, Damon and Kerr lend their roles compelling honesty...