Customer Reviews

Chaplin: His Life and Art

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This is absolutely the best book I've ever read on Chaplin, his life, and his films. It details his childhood and family life in England, his new life in the US, his exile to Switzerland, and best of all, his films and his film making techniques (or lack thereof). Robinson has done a fantastic job here! Includes interviews with Rollie (his cameraman), Kono (his butler), and many many others. This book really is an entire life between two book covers. If all you know about Chaplin is from the Robert Downey Jr film "Chaplin", forget that, and start fresh with this book. It will take you a while to read this pretty thick book, but it is definitely the best bio I've ever read on anyone in any field. Absolutely wonderful, and I've read this several times. I plan to re-read it many more times too. Don't miss this one... it renders all other books on Chaplin obsolete.

Robinson is the premier researcher on the life of Charles Chaplin, and this book is the result - a fact filled, balanced book that allows equal focus on Chaplins films and personal life. Most books tend to focus on WAY too much personal life and innuendo, but Robinson avoids this problem, and makes a good book that truly encompasses the entire life of Chaplin.

Robinson's book includes a well detailed filmography, scripts from several early Keystone films, excellent appendices, and many rare pictures. My only complaint is that many of the pictures could be printed much better, and larger too.

Superb reading!

David Robinson has written the definitive biography of Charlie Chaplin. It is largely the basis for the movie "Chaplin" because it was authorized by the legend himself and thoroughly explores his life to a greater extent than his autobiography. It is truly a moving and informative work.

Robinson begins his chronology of Chaplin's life in his childhood. He was largely orphaned by his alcoholic father and was only allowed to spend time with his mother while she was mentally healthy. It was through a failed performance of his mother than he got his first taste of acting as a child. From this point, he would devote almost all of the rest of his 87 years to entertainment. In his youth, he specialized in the stage productions which entertained England. He got his first taste of America on one of these traveling tours. On a later tour, he was offered a contract by an American film company. Chaplin agreed to honor his stage contract before beginning his film career.

The book documents with reasonably precise details the process of each film he released in addition to one the public never saw and the final project he never started. Through this filmography, we see the development of "the tramp" character. With each film, the character moves closer to the final product we know.

Chaplin's personal life is well documented. Unlike the autobiography all four wives are addressed, even the one Chaplin was not very fond of discussing. The fact that his first two wives were young is not avoided. However, it must be put in perspective that people did marry and have babies a lot sooner in those days. It is only unique in Chaplin's case because the husband/father is famous and much older. Despite his work for America during war time and a professed love for the country, the slanderous allegations of McCarthyism, also known as the 1950's witch hunt for communists, forced him to finish his life away from the country he loved. Truly the red scare is made to be a more terrible embarrassment to America by this result.

Today's cinematic audience has little appreciation for the roots of the art form. Charlie Chaplin was a revolutionary and founding father in the film industry. Reading about his life is only a step in appreciating his brilliant work.

Robinson carries us through Chaplin's entire life with emphasis on his various relationships, his loves, and abundant, specific information on each of his movies. The book's well written, very thorough, and best read with Chaplin videotapes alongside, for a real understanding of the history of the early years of "show-biz."

David Robinson's book is the finest biography extant of this indispensable genius of movies. I first read this monumental book 22 years ago and it has remained an indelible part of my understanding of movies and of the life and work of this complex, infuriating, somewhat naive but always questing and humanistic comedian, whose movies are finally being issued on DVD in luminous copies of his own carefully preserved originals.

At the time of Robinson's book, and for a number of years after, Buster Keaton was the preferred choice in silent comics. To take nothing away from Keaton, whom I regard as sui generis ("The General" is a masterpiece, and "The Navigator" is the funniest movie I've ever seen) this may have been more a reflection of the then-current attitudes of "cool," reacting against Chaplin's perceived sentimentality, than an argument for Keaton as the greater artist. Chaplin has recently become of greater interest, and at present his star seems much more firmly fixed, due in large part I think to the recent availability of his work on DVD. Robinson himself, in tandem with the silent cinema scholar Kevin Brownlow, is partly responsible through his access to Chaplin's mint copies of his own movies, which resulted in the superb Thames documentary "The Unknown Chaplin." In any case, it's much easier now to see and to recognize Chaplin's innate (yet painstakingly arrived-at) genius for mixing uproarious physical comedy and subtle pathos; if there is a more moving finale in all of American movies than the last moments of "City Lights," I'm not aware of it.

Robinson's approach is both scholarly and eminently accessible. And he dispels a great many erroneous "facts" that have accrued to Chaplin over the decades, many of them directly attributable to Charlie's own myth-making. The author also refutes some aspects Chaplin's late (and appallingly egocentric) memoir "My Autobiography," whose appearance in the 1960s shocked and saddened many of his former creative collaborators, who found themselves conspicuously absent from Chaplin's over-stuffed tome. If this book is not definitive -- and who can say what future writers may produce in the fullness of time? -- it is at the very least the one fixed starting point for all serious Chaplin research.

There are only two books necessary for the true Chaplin fan; "My Autobiograpy", by Chaplin himself, and this book by Robinson. While there are scores of other books on the market concerning Chaplin's life, Robinson's is THE definitive work.

If Charlie had been around to read this work, he might have amended his famous phrase from "If you want to know me, see my movies," to "If you want to know me, see my movies and read this book".

Robinson's book is more than a biography. It succeeds where other biographies have often fallen short (including Chaplin's own shaded account). It gives the reader a feel for the times Chaplin lived in, giving dimension to the choices made by our hero as well as the circumstances that shaped them.

Of the hundreds of books about Charles Chaplin, this is, by far, the best. With full access to the Chaplin archives, David Robinson gives us the definitve volume on the man and the life, the artist and his art. Not only the finest volume I've read on Chaplin--and I've read everything I can get my hands on--this is one of the best biographies of any artist I've ever encountered.

This book, though thicker than brick, is a swift and fascinating read. You'll wish you'd known old Charlie, you really will. Robinson doesn't care for those who don't care for Chaplin, and that's a little too evident. It's hard to blame him. Overall, a stupendous piece of work.

An exhaustive look at Chaplin's and his closest associates, relatives, and friends' lives. Provides important clues as to the making of most of his films, although it does not concentrate on them. Many rumors are put to sleep, while details previously unknown are included. An interesting/fascinating look at Chaplin's amazing life and lifestyle from front to back.