The Essential Chaplin: Perspectives on the Life and Art of the Great Comedian [Paperback]

Richard Schickel (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 18, 2006

At age twenty-eight, Charlie Chaplin was a millionaire and one of the world's most famous personalities. He had grown rich playing the poorest of men. He was to go on playing unforgettable characters in timeless films, but now the psychology of celebrity began both to drive and to damage his creativity. Richard Schickel, the distinguished film critic, has called Chaplin the first victim of modern celebrity culture, “driven by his relentless ego, by his helpless need for an audience to dominate, to lead. All the tragedies of his life stemmed from those drives and needs.” Mr. Schickel is the rarest of Chaplin enthusiasts, an unabashed fan who can celebrate the object of his affection without looking away when his subject deserves a poking. In this indispensable collection of some thirty essays, he has selected the most provocative and insightful criticisms of Chaplin's life and work, from the great comedian's beginnings through his early features, his mid-life crisis, and his late films. The contributors include Andrew Sarris, David Thomson, Andre Bazin, Gilbert Seldes, Alistair Cooke, Frances Hackett, Robert E. Sherwood, Stark Young, Penelope Gilliatt, Edmund Wilson, Stanley Kauffmann, Alexander Woollcott, George Jean Nathan, Winston Churchill, Max Eastman, Graham Greene, Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Dwight Macdonald, Robert Warshow, Walter Kerr, J. Hoberman, and others. Mr. Schickel, the last critic to study Chaplin intensively (for his award-winning documentary of a year ago), offers a long Introduction.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Schickel reviews movies for Time, and has an obvious but clear-eyed affection for Chaplin, whom he calls "gallant and plucky and romantic and hopeful" and "the most famous man in the world" in his time. Most of the writers he gathers for this collection were Chaplin's contemporaries and fans, including the critics Edmund Wilson, Alexander Woolcott and Brooks Atkinson. Schickel has unearthed a few rare and notable pieces, including Alistair Cooke's memories of working with Chaplin on a screenplay when Cooke was a young man, and novelist Graham Greene's thoughts on Chaplin's film Modern Times. Even Winston Churchill wrote about Chaplin. (Perplexingly, Churchill declares that poverty in America in 1935 was "deliberately chosen, rather than imposed from without.") There are very few bum notes, but one is surely James Agee's histrionic defense of Chaplin's little-liked film (and first talkie), Monsieur Verdoux; Andrew Sarris's auteurist take paradoxically comes off much better. In the main, these 33 essays offer a 20th century-eye view of Chaplin's cultural impact. There's even this, from Theodor Adorno: "He once imitated me, and sure I am one of the few intellectuals to whom this happened and to be able to account for it when it happened." For many theory-minded readers, what follows will be worth the price of admission.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School–A fascinating compilation. The range of writers of these 33 selections is amazingly wide, and the whole reads as an overview of professional critics and the evolution of the genre. Among the who's who are Andrew Sarris, Alistair Cooke, Robert E. Sherwood, Alexander Woollcott, Winston Churchill, Graham Greene, and James Agee; several others, such as Sigmund Freud, are quoted. Chaplin made 82 films, and his work is broken up into six categories in this book. For good or bad, every idea in his productions was his own, and he insisted on creating every aspect of his films himself. Most of the criticism that he received in his lifetime, and that he receives here, is that he should have expanded into areas beyond comedy and into more literary and serious films. This pressure caused critics' dissatisfaction with Chaplin's later work, leaving him embittered. For fans, this book is a must; it is also valuable as a study of expository and critical writing.–Dana Cobern-Kullman, Luther Burbank Middle School, Burbank, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 315 pages
• Publisher: Ivan R Dee (May 18, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566637015
• ISBN-13: 978-1566637015
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #738,803 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Wealth of Different Perspectives, November 17, 2008

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Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Essential Chaplin: Perspectives on the Life and Art of the Great Comedian (Paperback)

Richard Schickel has assembled, organized, edited, and provided an Introduction to 33 essays about one of the greatest film actors, Charles Chaplin (April 16, 1889 - December 25, 1977). Their authors' diverse perspectives on his life and career provide an excellent supplement to Stephen Weissman's recently published Chaplin: A Life in Film as well as to Charlie Chaplin's Own Story (as told to Rose Wilder Lane) and Chaplin's My Autobiography as well as David Robinson's Chaplin: His Life and Art.

Weissman is among the contributors to The Essential Chaplin and in his essay, "Charlie Chaplin's Film Heroines," he observes: "It was the loss [of Chaplin's mother] and the scars it left that later shaped Chaplin's development of an alter-ego screen character whose core identity (in the feature length films) was the rescue and repair of damaged and fallen women. And of all his rescue films it was The Gold Rush which Chaplin later said was the one picture by which he most wanted to be remembered by posterity." (Page 66)

Note: In the "Afterword" to his biography, Weissman provides an especially interesting discussion of contradictory opinions about the legitimacy of Chaplin's Own Story that appeared in a series of 29 installments in the San Francisco Bulletin from July 5 to August 4, 1915. Weissman believes that Lane transcribed Chaplin's comments as accurately as she could. Robinson dismisses Own Story as "romantic and misleading nonsense." Weissman acknowledges that "Neither Robinson's theory nor mine is provable" and suggests that his reader take her or his choice.

Here are other brief excerpts from The Essential Chaplin.

"So far one man, and only one, has shown that he entirely understands the new art of the cinema. Only one man has shown that he knows how to use this art as if it were a keyboard where all the elements of sense and feeling that determine the attitude and firm of things merge and convey in one cinematic expression the complex revelation of their inner life and quality...In him the human drama possesses an instrument of expression of which people hitherto have had no suspicion, an instrument which, in the future, will be the most powerful of all - namely: a screen upon which falls a shaft of light; our eyes toward s it; and behind the eyes the heart." (From Elie Faure's The Art of Cineplastics, 1923, Page 77 in The Essential Chaplin)

Chaplin's "impatience to have done with the adulation - which he once significantly remarked `is given, after all, to the little fellow, not me' - brought him unfairly the reputation of a misanthrope. Simply, but hopelessly, he discovered, after the first return to New York, that he could enjoy no such luxury of choice as Nat Goodwin recommended: `Pick out one or two friends and be satisfied to imagine the rest." (Alistair Cooke, Six Men, 1956, Page 127 in The Essential Chaplin)

Chaplin "is the only comic star in the movies who does not employ a gag-writer: he makes everything up himself; so that, instead of the stereotyped humor of even the best of his competitors, most of whose tricks could be interchanged among them without anyone knowing the difference, he gives us jokes that, however crude, have an unmistakable quality of personal fancy. Furthermore, he has made it a practice to use his gags as points of departure for genuine comic situations." (Edmund Wilson, "The New Chaplin Comedy," 1925, Page 171 in The Essential Chaplin)

"Destiny shifts us here and there upon the checkerboard of life, and we know not the purpose behind the moves. His father's death brought a safe, comfortable world crashing down about Charlie Chaplin's head, and plunged his mother, his brother and himself into poverty. But poverty is not a life sentence. It is a challenge. To some it is more - an opportunity. So it was to the child of the theater. In the kaleidoscopic life of London's mean streets he found tragedy and comedy - and learned that their springs lie side by side...So we need not regret the shadows that fell over Charlie Chaplin's life. Without them his gifts might have shone less brightly, and the whole world would have been the poorer. Genius is essentially a hardy plant. It thrives in the east wind. It withers in a hothouse." (Winston Churchill, "Everybody's Language," Collier's magazine, 1935, Pages 206 and 207 in The Essential Chaplin)

The appeal and value of these and other essays will, of course, depend on what each reader seeks to understand about Chaplin, an immensely complicated person who was (as Schickel explains) "driven by his relentless ego, by his helpless need for an audience to dominate, to lead. All the tragedies of his life stemmed from those drives and needs." To Schickel's credit, he has selected essays that (together) trace the key influences on Chaplin's development throughout childhood and adolescence as well as during his early success on stage, his subsequent career in films, the controversies associated with his later years, and the period of recognition and awards he enjoyed just prior to his death.

Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Weissman's aforementioned biography, Chaplin: A Life in Film, and Robinson's Chaplin: His Life and Art as well as Charlie Chaplin's Own Story (as told to Rose Wilder Lane) and Chaplin's My Autobiography.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Essential Chaplin is essential reading for fans of the little fellow, tramp, genius of the cinema!, July 31, 2007

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C. M Mills "Michael Mills" (Knoxville Tennessee) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Essential Chaplin: Perspectives on the Life and Art of the Great Comedian (Paperback)

Charles Spencer Chaplin has had millions of words written about his long life and spectacular career.Chaplin (1889-Christmas Day, 1977) was born in London in the same month that the evil dictator Adolf Hitler was born in Austria. What different paths these two mustached men took in their life careers! Chaplin was the son of a music hall comic who left the family when Charlie was an infant. The father was alcoholic and his mother was insane. One of the 33 essays in the book reveals that Chaplin's mother may have been suffering from tertiary syphillis leading to her confinement in a mental institution. Charlie had a half brother Sydney who was close to the world famed comedian.
Charlie left the Fred Keno Show on a US tour to become the most famous screen actor in the world. Some of his best movies were "City Lights". "The Circus", "The Great Dictator", "Modern Times". "The Kid", "City Lights"
and lesser but still fine later films: "Monsieur Verdoux" and his final film "Limelight" (largely autobiographical).
Chaplin was the Dickens of comedy and motion on screen. Charlie was short, thin and could do amazing things with his body. His mother had been a ballerina and he displayed incredible agility. His best films were made before he was 30 years old. He hobnobed with the rich and famous such as Winston Churchill (who has an essay in the book); Alastair Cooke
(who has a very good look at Chaplin in one of the book's longest and best essays); George Bernard Shaw, Herbert George Wells and the stars of stage and screen.
Charlie slept with thousand of nubile young women. He was married three times to Mildred Harris, Lita Grey and Oona O'Neill (the daughter of Eugene O'Neill). He had several children and grandchildren. Chaplin left America due to the McCarthy charges he was a communist to enjoy a long retirement in Switzerland. He returned to Los Angeles to receive an honorary Oscar on his 83rd birthday.
Richard Schickel the outstanding film critic of Time magazine has edited this fine book. The volume could well be used in film classes. Some of the reviewers disagree with one another. An example would be James Agee's praise of "Monsieur Verdoux" while Dwight McDonald thought the film about a serial wife killer was a poor effort by Chaplin. The book is a good place to start if you have never read anything about the man who was the most famous movie star from the teens to the late 30s of the twentieth century.
Chaplin was a deeply flawed human being who bore scars from his Oliver Twist childhood of poverty, despair and hunger. He will, however, live for all time on the silver screen.
This is a good book on a man who was the first victim of celebrity culture who has brought countless pleasure to millions by his comedic genius.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nearly 30 essays from film critic Richard Schickel deserve ongoing recommendation and mention for any Chaplain fan, August 18, 2006

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Essential Chaplin: Perspectives on the Life and Art of the Great Comedian (Paperback)

Nearly thirty essays from film critic Richard Schickel deserve ongoing recommendation and mention for any Chaplain fan, whether newcomer or seasoned. Schickel gathers the best criticisms of Chaplin's life and works from contributors - many of whom were his contemporaries - and pairs them to assessments of Chaplin's films from start to finish. The idea is to place under one cover the very best writing about Chaplin from non-movie-reviewer writers: the result is an analysis of genius and methods rather than films alone, and one which holds up well against movie reviewer surveys or biographies alone.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch