Charlie Chaplin and His Times [Hardcover]

Kenneth S. Lynn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 3, 1997

One of America's most distinguished biographers, Lynn goes far beyond a mere recounting of the well-known events in Chaplin's career. By setting his life, his art, and his controversial politics in the context of his times, Lynn gives the book extra richness and dimension. In penetrating and exquisite detail, Lynn also traces the deep psychological connections between the man and the artist and brings his own keen critical intelligence and historical awareness to the meanings of Chaplin's films. And he has at last succeeded in separating the facts of his life from Chaplin's own artful fictions. Combining the strengths of a seasoned literary biographer and social historian, Lynn debunks the Chaplin myths passed on by unquestioning film critics, biographers, adulatory documentary filmmakers - and by Chaplin himself. He returns to the original sources to trace the origins of Chaplin's comic routines, and relates the story lines of his films to events in his childhood as well as his adult preoccupations. Lynn documents Chaplin's meteoric rise as a film actor, his failed early marriages and love affairs with glamorous stars, his communist sympathies, the infamous Joan Barry case, his voluntary exile in Switzerland with his young wife, Oona O'Neill Chaplin, and his triumphant return to America in 1972. And through it all is the gleaming thread of Chaplin's films. By delving deeply into the unique combination of slapstick and sentiment, wit and whimsy that characterize Chaplin's art, Lynn deftly captures both the magnetism of the man and the magic he created in his films.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Loved by millions in his heyday, exiled into obscurity in his middle age, and worshipped anew in his final years, Charlie Chaplin has been the subject of many biographies. In this book, Kenneth S. Lynn focuses on Chaplin's personal, political, and romantic associations. Lynn sees Chaplin's obsessive egotism and brutality toward women as a result of his obscure London upbringing and the torment and embarrassment his mentally disturbed mother caused him. Lynn also takes a fresh look at Chaplin's alleged victimization at the hands of immigration officials in the 1950s and performs an intriguing psychological reading of Limelight, which he considers Chaplin's most autobiographical film. Along the way, Lynn provides mini-histories of issues and events that shaped Chaplin's life, including a consideration of the tramp in early 20th-century America, biographies of famous silent film stars, and an account of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

From Library Journal

On the heels of Joyce Milton's excellent Tramp (LJ 5/1/96) comes a second critical biography of film's greatest comic. Lynn (Hemingway, Harvard Univ., 1995) deftly interweaves Chaplin's life with the events and personalities of his era, including British music hall impresario Fred Karno, silent screen star and pal Douglas Fairbanks, numerous lovers and wives, brother Sydney, and Adolf Hitler. Lynn has done meticulous research, consulting census and asylum records to evaluate Chaplin's relationship with his increasingly schizophrenic mother. Through London maps and late 19th-century sociological studies, he detects a lower-rung but not entirely poverty-stricken Chaplin childhood; other dissimulations found in Chaplin's My Autobiography (LJ 10/15/64) are explained as well. Lynn addresses his subject's leftist views and makes sense of the House Committee on Un-American Activities investigations of 1947 that led to Chaplin's European exile until 1973. All a biography should be, this is enthusiastically recommended.?Kim R. Holston, American Inst. for Chartered Property Casualty Underwriters, Malvern, Pa.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 608 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; First Edition edition (March 3, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 068480851X
• ISBN-13: 978-0684808512
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,708,444 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Unpleasant, February 28, 2006

By 

Priscilla von Pancake (NY, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Charlie Chaplin and His Times (Paperback)

Kenneth S. Lynn's "Charlie Chaplin and His Times" is an almost-unmitigated piece of ugly character assassination. Focusing obsessively on Chaplin's romantic/sexual liaisons and his "radical-left" politics, it is not Mr. Chaplin so much as Mr. Lynn himself who ends up as the unlikeable figure: narrow-minded, prudish, politically-unbalanced and, ultimately, unfair. By the book's midpoint, the only reason to continue reading is to marvel at the insidious viciousness with which Lynn pretends to accurately portray Chaplin [a task which pays dividends on nearly every page]. Chaplin was surely no saint, but Lynn's account allows Chaplin no quarter, continually twisting incidents in such a way as to render Chaplin as little more than a libido-driven, communist-duped, ungrateful egotist-and while these elements may have been present in the man, obviously he was much more. Lynn gives us precious little of the "more." To add to the book's ineffectiveness, it offers few insights into Chaplin's films themselves. Scrambling for a positive statement about the book, the best thing one can say is that it is rather gracefully-written. In sum, Kenneth S. Lynn's biography of Charlie Chaplin is a one-sided, mean-spirited, entirely unsympathetic book which does no one any good. Not recommended.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars beware: author hates subject!, January 11, 2000

By 

Stephen A. Melisi "smelisi" (Halifax, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Charlie Chaplin and His Times (Hardcover)

This book is factually wonderful. More details about Chaplin's life are discussed here than in other bios. But, I gradually wondered what it was that was bothering me about the writing. Suddenly it dawned on me. Kenneth Lynn hates Chaplin! I dont know why, but there is an overwhelming sense that he is doing his best to knock Chaplin down wherever he can, but Chaplin's genius is always sticking it to him in the end. Read with the knowledge that the author is in no way in love with his subject (a strange concept to be sure) this book can be read through and enjoyed with reservations. Without realizing this fact though, the reader can get a very unfair view of Chaplin.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars The Tramp was a Red!, December 22, 2003

By 

"willtb2004" (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Charlie Chaplin and His Times (Paperback)

The best thing I can say about this biography by Kenneth Lynn is that counterbalances the 1992 biopic of Chaplin's life. In this film, Robert Downey Jr portrayed Chaplin as an artist-hero who was martyred by the political right. While the Chaplin movie didn't ring particularly true for me, Lynn's biography appears to go too far in the opposite direction. This biography is not about Chaplin the Tramp, Chaplin the filmmaker, Chaplin the comic. Its about Chaplin the sputtering, spastic tyrant, Chaplin the felon, Chaplin the sex fiend, Chaplin the Red.

This book reads more like an indictment than a biography. Lynn makes his case persistently and repetitiously. He grants weight to negative accounts of Chaplin's character while positive accounts are brushed aside, or are relegated to the footnotes. (A typical example: Lynn gives an account of the problematic relations between Chaplin and Brando. Lynn relies on Brando's account of an interaction between the two men, which reveals Chaplin as a petty tyrant. Then, in the footnote Lynn slips in a completely contradictory account of the same incident by another source. The footnoted source, which depicts Chaplin in a much more favorable light, seems far more credible than Brando's. Lynn repeatedly dismisses the veracity of Chaplin's autobiography. But when he comes to Brando - now there's a reliable memoirist!)

In some cases, Lynn delivers jabs at his subject which seem quite pointless (for example, Lynn states that Chaplin "ignorantly" named his Modern Times heroine the Gamin. (the word is correctly spelled gamine). To me, this sort of criticism seems petty and overly personal. In sum, this mean spirited and poorly informed biography of Charlie Chaplin can be safely bypassed. David Robinson's Chaplin biography remains the primary recommendation.