All language subtitles for Charlie - The Life And Art Of Charles Chaplin

It's hard to believe, but once there was
a world without Charlie Chaplin.

Then one day in 1914, a strange new
face and form emerged from the crowd.

Kid Auto Races at Venice,
an iconography was born.

Chaplin's persona is so rich
and such a weave of so many things.

But he also just has this desperate need
to be in front of the camera.

That's the gag, him enjoying
being in front of the camera.

They push him aside so they can see the
auto races they're ostensibly filming.

He keeps coming back,
and he wants to be there.

That desire to be in front of a machine...

...that gets you in front of people that
he harnessed, partly out of wisdom.

Maybe he never knew
what he was doing.

He just harnessed that desire
to be seen, to be the center.

He was 24. He'd been on-stage...

...mostly in English music halls,
since he was 10.

Mack Sennett hired him for the movies
out of Fred Karno's company...

... then touring America,
for $ 150 a week.

This was his third film,
the second to be released...

...but the first in which he appeared
in his immortal Tramp costume.

Chaplin always said he improvised it
on the spot...

...using clothing he found
lying around the studio.

In the next three years, Chaplin
would make 62 short films...

... writing and directing
the last 26 himself.

By 1917, he was becoming, thanks
to this new, universal medium...

... the greatest comic icon
the world had ever known.

The films were fast, funny,
seemingly casual...

... yet ever more complex
in construction.

But the icon was still in search
of the iconographic sequences...

... that would define his genius.

They would come to him
in the years ahead slowly...

...often enough painfully.

Amid the distractions of being
the most famous man in the world...

...he always felt the pressure
to do more.

He would feel the need to speak
to the yearning human heart.

He would feel the need to speak
from his own heart...

...about the dehumanization of labor
in Modern Times...

...or about the looming threat of
fascism, personified by a monster...

... who bore an uncanny resemblance,
which everyone noticed...

... to his own beloved Tramp.

Yet always there was the terrible need
to be as funny as ever...

... to command the audience's laughter,
its affectionate delight...

...and, yes, its most basic sentiments
as well.

The pressures were relentless,
all-consuming...

...and to the still youthful Chaplin
of The Kid, not yet fully imaginable.

Thirty-one years after The Kid,
Chaplin made Limelight.

It was set in 1914,
the year he made his first movie...

...and the year World War I
blew away the Edwardian world...

...in which he was raised
and knew his first success.

It's about a famous comedian
whose once simple, perfect rapport...

... with his audience has been lost.

Phyllis, Henry!

Phyllis, Henry, stop that!
What do you think you're doing?

You ought to be ashamed of yourselves,
fighting like that.

All right, Phyllis, you stay in the box.
Henry, hurry up!

One night after dinner,
we were seated rather late...

...and Charlie and I were there.
He was going through a book...

...of comedians.

And he came across a picture
of his father...

...who was standing very much
as Chaplin stood...

...with the cane and the hand
on the hip.

And he said, "You know, he lost
the ability to make people laugh.

And there have been comics
who have this terrible dream...

...that they're performing,
and they do something...

...that should get a laugh. And they
look out to this black, cavernous space.

And there's not a sound, not a laugh. "

Then he paused. He said,
"I have this dream, recurring dream. "

Like his Calvero, Chaplin himself
had lost his audience.

The fine, careless rapture
of their beginnings...

...soured by political
and moral criticism of him.

Limelight is, emotionally speaking,
his most autobiographical film...

...for no star ever more desperately
needed his audience.

It's this hunger for the crowd
and this fear of the crowd...

... that drove this life.

You can draw a caricature of Chaplin
with just a couple of brushstrokes...

...and you know who you're alluding to.

The graphic of his body
was just so arresting.

And he was a smart guy. He had
dark hair. He darkened his eyebrows.

Put that mustache on there.
That hat framed things.

Choosing of big shoes pointing outward.

The body was always a shape
that you could identify.

In the Bronx, when I was very much
into the break-dance scene...

...you'd meet a young kid who might not
be able to describe Chaplin to you...

...but he had a step
they called the Charlie.

And it was-- You know, it was
obviously taken from Chaplin.

So he's in our cultural heritage
whether we're conscious of him or not.

Limelight was not Chaplin 's first
filmed evocation of his music-hall past.

In 1915, he re-created his great Karno
success, Mumming Birds, on film.

For the movie, he invented
a second character for himself to play...

...a tipsy, touchy citizen
of the balcony...

...quick to register his displeasure
with the performance.

If he feared the audience's indifference,
he equally feared its volatility...

... which this figure personified.

The music-hall audience
was a tough one.

This movie only slightly exaggerates
the disdain it could instantly mobilize.

For Karno, Chaplin had played
the equally tipsy swell in the box...

... whose need to dominate the stage
matched Chaplin's.

The thing I remember
from his autobiography...

...is the extraordinary account.
He's like 5 or 6, I think.

And he goes on, really, when his mother
cracks up, breaks down, on-stage.

And his mother had been
a performer of some reputation.

And the way he describes it...

...it isn't simply that he goes on
to rescue his mother...

...although I think that was part of it.

There's almost the rivalry
with the mother.

And there's almost that feeling
that performance...

...is the emotional core of the man.

In theaters, Chaplin won admirers...

...a few hundred at a time
over many months.

The movies offered him audiences
in their millions over just a few weeks.

But the demand for fresh material
was relentless and cruel.

What Chaplin did for Keystone,
you can see just fleetingly in moments.

There's no aggregate transformation
to great Chaplin.

Little bits of business
like in Dough and Dynamite...

...where he makes doughnuts by flinging
dough around his wrists.

These are moments that no one else was
doing, that endeared him to the public.

It's his early Sennett ones.

In those things, you felt
he was...

...feeling his way. He hadn't reached
that point of domination.

That was one of the most valuable
things Chaplin did.

He came in to work
with the Keystone Kops.

He showed them how to not be breaking
their tailbones every third week.

They had never learned how to fall.
It was like jump school.

What's fascinating at Keystone,
if you look carefully at the films...

...once he started to direct them,
he's gone to school.

There's one lovely film,
not very important...

...but he discovered you could cut.
You could actually...

...throw somebody out of the screen
in one shot...

...and then have them come in,
in the next shot.

The studio sought him out after Tillie's
Punctured Romance, a huge hit...

...the first feature-length comedy. lt had
a huge stage star, Marie Dressler...

...and had incredible distribution.

Tillie's Punctured Romance
isn't a Chaplin film.

It was directed by Sennett,
and Chaplin didn't think much of it.

But he enjoyed working
with Marie Dressler.

And it really established him
on a really grand scale...

...so that after 35 films
he could announce to Mack Sennett:

"All I need to make a comedy is a park,
a policeman and a pretty girl. "

The public had begun to notice
Chaplin even before Tillie.

He was on his way...

...first to George Spoor and "Broncho
Billy" Anderson 's Essanay Company...

... 1 250 a week
and a $ 10,000 bonus.

Tramps were everywhere in show
business at the turn of the last century.

There were tramp comics,
jugglers, singers...

...mildly discomfiting outsiders
to the middle class audience.

But none had Chaplin's delicacy
or winsomeness...

...or his ability to convey slightly
subversive thought through pantomime.

His costume and makeup made him at
once an abstract and a universal figure.

The gags might still be as crude
as this bop on the head...

...but only Chaplin would think
of planting on his victim 's forehead...

...a sweet little good-night kiss.

He had a unique gift for turning
a simple object into something else.

This palm-frond toothbrush
is an early example.

The great thing that happened
for Charlie Chaplin at Essanay...

...was that he began to be able
to experiment with his own creativity...

...in a way that was going
to make him an artist.

All the things that
he's going to develop...

...and become as an artist...

...he gets the chance to play with
and try in 1915.

Chaplin goes over to Essanay to do
his first film, His New Job...

...which is a kind of slap at Keystone.

The fictional studio
was called Lockstone.

Its director, played
by Charles Inslee...

...bears a suspicious resemblance
to Mack Sennett.

Chaplin wasn't always the Tramp.

A Woman was not the first time
he played, quite fetchingly, in drag.

We're gonna have the cutting in
to medium when something is needed.

And in The Bank we're gonna have
the "give the rose to the leading lady"...

...have the little sad moment.

We're gonna have the superimpositions
of imagined things.

We're gonna have
the "it was all a dream. "

And in Work, there's
this astonishing image...

...of him pulling a big cart
with one big man riding in it...

...up a lonely, bleak hill.
And you look at this, and you think:

"Where are we here?
Are we in an lngmar Bergman movie?"

In A Night Out, you see
these two playing drunks...

...absolute perfection.
The whole thing is, "We're drunk.

We must not fall down, however. "

He's working with Ben Turpin as a unit.

The two of them, physically,
are paired impeccably.

So here's Chaplin able to come over,
get a new job at a new place...

...define himself comically
and use another chosen comic actor...

...who perfectly suits
what he wants to do.

I love the Essanays...

...because they're so completely
and utterly street comedies.

In By the Sea, he and his adversary
are busy on the beach...

...socking one another, falling down.

In the long shot, in the distance...

...a lone swimmer goes down
to test the water.

I mean, he's oblivious
that a movie's being shot.

You're looking at people
out in the frame, over there...

...living their lives
and doing what they do.

Discovering the range of film 's possibility
at Essanay studio in Niles, California...

... Chaplin made a discovery
of another kind: Edna Purviance.

A former secretary, she always seemed
on-screen a real girl, not a glamour girl.

Chaplin was enchanted. Edna would
make 35 films with him.

She became the first
of the three great loves...

...of his maturity.

Edna Purviance, who really wasn't
much of a professional actress...

...comes into these films and completely
holds down her corner of it.

Whatever is asked of her, she can do.

But she's obviously someone
he respected...

...and treated more as an equal.

In The Tramp, the film opens.
There he is in the Tramp outfit.

He's on a lonely road. He's doing
his little waddle down the road.

You see the prototypical
Charlie Chaplin.

This is recognizably who we accept
as the Chaplin image.

He has a little whiskbroom that he takes
out and cleans the dust off himself...

...when a car goes by,
but the camera needs to serve him.

It needs to come up close
so he can dust out his pocket.

So, what you see is, he's taken
control of the camera.

The film was prototypical
in another way.

Despite his confident air,
Charlie's Tramp will not get the girl.

Her heart belongs to another.

Chaplin would almost always lose out
to normally handsome...

...normally well-dressed guys.

It was one of his points of reference
with his audience.

The ending of The Tramp, it doesn't
resolve. He does not get the girl.

He turns away and walks away
from the camera on a lonely road...

...heading toward the horizon.

Here is where the Tramp and Chaplin
really do come together.

There was another coming together
in those years...

...a reunion with his beloved
half-brother Sydney.

He's the patron at the bar
in this Sennett comedy.

Chaplin helped him get a contract
with the studio.

A star in the English movie halls,
he was an adept movie comedian.

In one sentence, I'll tell you
about the elder Sydney.

Charlie said about him, "He was
never impressed by anything. "

Not, certainly, by the men in suits
from the Mutual Film Corporation.

Sydney helped Chaplin get a raise
to $ 10,000 a week...

...plus a signing bonus of $ 150,000.

His 12 Mutual films
of 1916 and 1917...

...contain his first truly
immortal gags...

...like the escalator sequence
from the first, The Floorwalker.

We sometimes forget the risks
the silent comedians ran...

...as they courted our laughter.

There are no nets available
to the fireman...

...but this thrill sequence was
only a beginning for Chaplin.

What's truly wonderful
about his Mutual films...

...is the ever increasing length, intricacy
and subtlety of his gag sequences.

This man had skill, unimaginable skill.

He was a superhero.

He was the most endearing superhero...

...you could ever want to watch.

One A.M. , which is a 18-minute--
The whole short...

...with the guy just trying
to get into bed.

If you took a performer and that
was the only thing they ever did...

...that would be enough.

Yet he did it again and again and
innovated and, I mean, you know....

You know, in the '80s,
I was thinking about Chaplin a lot...

...and I talked to a video-store guy.
And he said:

"You can put anything on the monitor
in the window, and people will pass by.

But if you put Chaplin,
people will stop. "

If you're walking along the sidewalk
and see a black-and-white image...

...first of all, the black-and-
white image is so arresting.

And you see this almost flickers
maybe like an abstract of action.

The moment you stop,
you see it as a human being...

...but a wild, like a flailing version
of a human being.

I'm thinking of a
movie like The Rink...

...Chaplin and his great foil,
Eric Campbell, a big guy.

They're on skates. They do this stuff,
and people just stop and look at that...

...because the abandon with which
people are falling backwards...

...falling forward on the skates,
just perfectly still.

There's a rhythm there
between wild abandon...

...and it almost, like, mirrors
social control.

Something wild,
and then there's hell to civilize...

...and then back, of course, to wild.

Chaplin the Tramp,
he tried to keep up appearances.

He never settled that
to be slovenly and tramp-like.

He pretended that he had
social aspirations.

In Easy Street he plays
a paroled convict...

... who will eventually become
an unlikely policeman.

The very title, Easy Street,
suggests East Street...

...which is the street
on which he was born.

That wonderful evocation
of South London.

The police are avoiding Easy Street...

...and it takes a tramp
to clean up the violence.

It takes one of them to clean it up.

As the cop, he tries
to subdue the bully...

...and he uses his truncheon
to hit him on the head.

And he hits him and hits him
and hits him.

No effect. It's like a nightmare.

And then, in a display of strength,
the bully bends down a gas lamppost...

...and that's Charlie's opportunity
to jump on his back and gas him.

This set design, one street crossed
by another to form a T...

... was based on a street
where Chaplin had lived as a boy.

He would use the design
in many pictures.

Memories of London's East End
scored every aspect of his work.

It's as great as it was years ago.

I mean, it's just a wonderful,
wonderful short...

...because it'll always be funny.
It'll be funny 1 000 years from now.

In 1916, the press reported a nationwide
Chaplin impulse or celebrity craze.

It didn't comment on some of the very
odd impulses that moved his character.

There's an exquisite ladylike
daintiness to him very often...

...and I think that women
in one way appealed to him...

...for that way of moving, that rather
hesitant, fluttery way of moving.

He does it a lot. He simpers.

I don't think Chaplin was
a simperer in real life...

...but he was fascinated by, you know,
this sort of little coy shake of the head...

...as a seductive measure.

I'm not even sure women
really act like that.

Certainly, uncomplicated Edna didn't.

She was, just then, very much
a part of his happiness.

Never thereafter would Chaplin's life
be as uncomplicated...

...as it was during his year with Mutual.

They did love each other dearly,
and there was a motherly quality...

...along with her luminous beauty,
that attracted Chaplin to Edna.

I think she was placid
and a calming force...

...as opposed to his rather demanding
and high-energized personality.

The relationship with Edna Purviance
is something very interesting in his life.

Obviously, Edna meant
a great deal to him.

She must have been
an enchanting woman...

...and I think that this satisfied
something in him very much.

They did have a very close
and passionate relationship...

...for two or three years.
Women got jealous of the work...

...because when he was working,
he didn't have time for anybody.

Every woman in his life became
a little bit jealous of the work...

...and probably Edna did.
And she had a flirtation...

...and this was too much for Charlie.

Things went wrong after that.

Things were still going right
for them...

... when Chaplin made The Immigrant
in 1917.

It was often broadly funny, yet also
one of his most complex films to date.

It would sympathetically take up an issue
that had troubled America for years...

... the tidal wave of lower class
European immigration.

What other film at the time
do you have...

...where half the film is set
on an immigrant boat?

And certainly, it's a comic view of it,
but it is about immigration.

It was, as well,
an innocently romantic film.

The line was, "We don't like
this going after the girl...

...and mooning after women.
We don't like that Chaplin.

We like the Chaplin
of the earlier shorts. "

They say the same thing
about Woody Allen.

The thing that lingers in your mind with
the character the Tramp, Little Tramp...

...is the sweetness, you know...

...that innocence, that purity.
But at the same time...

...there is that other side,
that rascal.

I remember watching The Immigrant
again recently...

...and for a second being really stunned.

Chaplin is playing cards.

He loans a guy money, and the guy
gives him his pistol as collateral.

And when Chaplin wins,
the guy gets violent.

And I was stunned when Chaplin
pulls the gun on him...

...and gives him this look, like, "Hey! "
You know, just for that second.

And then he immediately goes back
to this pure being, this innocent thing.

He was ever willing to kick
authority in the pants...

... though genteel America muttered
disapproval of his anarchic side.

I think we've definitely
lost comic patience.

Everything needs to be now,
and what those guys did--

I mean, what Chaplin was
able to do was milk a gag...

...and really stretch it out
and really draw it out.

Even if you knew what the result
was gonna be, it was still hilarious.

It's the starving Tramp walking outside
a restaurant looking at the door...

...you know, thinking, "God, I'd love
to go in and have a meal there. "

He picks up the coin on the ground,
dumps it in his pocket...

...heads towards the restaurant.
Ding! lt hits the ground.

He goes inside, has his meal.

Some guy walks in holding
the coin that he dropped.

That gag lasts for, I don't know,
seven, eight minutes, and you're there.

You can't take your eyes off him.

You need more than comedy, more
than laughs, to make a feature film.

A feature film has to have some kind
of an emotional string to it.

Chaplin called it his favorite two-reeler.

In fact, in one of his later books...

...he said The Immigrant touched him
more than any film he made.

He liked the ending in particular,
that these two young immigrants...

...getting married on a rainy day.
He thought it was very poetic.

I, frankly, prefer the longer,
more ambitious Chaplin films...

...even to the funniest
of the early films.

Comedy transposition,
the idea of one thing suggests another...

...was not unique to Chaplin,
but it was one of his great gifts.

The Pawnshop is a great example of that
where, as a pawnbroker's assistant...

...he's asked to look at an alarm clock.
And of course, in his hands...

...he becomes the doctor
and the clock becomes his patient.

Late, middle, early Chaplin, his gift for
transforming one object into another...

...remained central to his comic genius.

These transformations...

...deliberate manipulations
of our perceptions of the real...

... were also central to modernity...

... with its fluid, ever-changing
definitions of what constitutes reality.

This idea of transformation
goes back right to the start.

I can't quite think where it comes from.
Everything he looked at...

...suggested the possibility
of something else.

My favorite one is where he has to move
a whole heap of bentwood chairs...

...and so he puts them all on his back.
He becomes a hedgehog.

I just think that's wonderful.

He could certainly
bring things to life...

...bring something inanimate
and static and give it life...

...give it some kind of movement
and life.

And that was certainly
a great gift that he had.

Old-fashioned man that he was, Chaplin
would have denied being a surrealist.

But unconsciously, that's what he was.

Who else would have thought of turning
a massage into a wrestling match?

Or a fire engine
into a cappuccino machine?

"All that is solid melts into air, "
Karl Marx said.

In Chaplin, all that seems solid
melts into something else.

Of his many gifts, this one is among
his most enduring and endearing...

...sophisticated visions converted
into playful, childlike action.

Skeptical Sydney was one
of Charlie's perfect comic foils.

But he remained even better at business.

His year at Mutual ending, Chaplin
received an attractive overture...

...from First National.

This time, the Chaplins had
a very firm ideal in mind.

They asked him to come to New York
to negotiate a deal...

...and so he got on the train
with Sydney...

...who was going to do
the negotiating for him.

And he said to Sydney "All right,
Sydney, you go in, and you negotiate.

And you know I want a million dollars. "

Sydney said "All right, now as for you,
if you're going to play your violin...

...you gotta stay in the bathroom
and play because it's terrible. "

So Charlie went in the bathroom,
stood in the tub, empty of water...

...and played his violin to soothe himself
while Sydney went down the corridor.

He came back, and he said
"Charlie, they're offering $500,000. "

Charlie said, "We're not gonna
even talk to them about that.

You gotta go back. "
He went back, 600,000.

"You gotta go back. " He went back.

And finally he came back, and he said:

"Charlie, they've come up to $ 750,000
and not a nickel more. "

And Charlie, bowing away, said,
"Tell them I am an artist.

I know nothing about money.
All I know is, I want a million dollars. "

And Sydney went back,
and he came running back in. He said:

"Charlie, throw away your violin.
Get yourself a bull fiddle.

You got a million dollars. "

He began building a studio
in the groves of La Brea Avenue.

Chaplin created this time-lapse
sequence for a promotional short.

His dream studio took the form of
a poor English lad's dream of luxury...

...suburban London fa�ades.

Think of it. In a matter
of three years...

... Charles Spencer Chaplin, age 28,
had become a millionaire...

...and one of the world's
most famous people.

Most important to him,
his First National deal granted him...

...absolute control over his films
and his own destiny.

In all of movie history, no rise
was ever more meteoric than his.

He had to give them the performance
because he knew better than anyone...

...what he wanted and what he
needed from the actor...

...and the best way to do it
was to show.

And this isn't very much different...

...from what an actor/manager
did in the English music halls.

This is standard practice of what Chaplin
knew. The actor was also the director.

Chaplin was not necessarily
a terribly articulate man.

He was just a Cockney lad.

And I think he had trouble with words,
particularly in his early days.

The easiest way to tell someone how to
do something was just to show them...

...because no one was more articulate
than Chaplin, physically.

He has his own studio, his own team.

He can take as much time as he likes,
which is really what he wanted.

Chaplin didn't just use the first shot.

He would take a shot not twice
or three times...

...but he would take a shot
20 times if he was to get it right.

This was something completely new.

So was this. In Spring, 1918...

... with America now a combatant
in World War I...

... Chaplin and the movies '
other greatest stars...

...Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks...

...embarked on a personal appearance
tour selling Liberty Bonds.

It was the first major demonstration of
movie stardom 's unprecedented power.

Everywhere they went, the crowds
were vast and impassioned.

They sold millions of dollars'
worth of bonds.

The tour was especially important
for Chaplin.

He had come under the first
personal criticism of his life...

...for not enlisting in the English army.

Mostly this came from the press,
trying to create a scandal.

Chaplin professed his willingness
to serve...

...but the British government knew
he was infinitely more valuable...

...raising money for the war effort.
The Liberty Loan adventure proved that.

But this was the first
mild controversy...

...of a life that would eventually
be plagued...

...occasionally dominated by them.

Later that year, he made this short,
promoting another Liberty Loan drive.

Syd Chaplin played the hapless Kaiser.

His most lasting wartime work was
Shoulder Arms. The Tramp in uniform.

He'd always been a brave little guy...

...but he'd never been tested on
such a huge and tragic field.

The spirit was willing,
maybe a little too much so.

Chaplin began production
of Shoulder Arms...

...while the First World War
was being fought.

And many in the Hollywood community
were persuading him not to do it.

But Chaplin went on with it,
trusting his own artistic instincts.

But he had doubts.
He was unsure of the result.

But when the film was
released, it was a huge hit.

It was one of the most popular films
of the entire First World War period.

The picture was released just
weeks before the armistice...

...so it didn't do much for morale.

But the movie proved especially
popular with returning doughboys.

They thought it caught, humorously,
something of the horror...

...and absurdity of trench warfare.

Capturing a large enemy group, the
Tramp becomes an unlikely hero.

But his treatment of the aristocratic
officer aligns him...

... with the common people
of both sides.

Not that the Tramp was allowed
to capitalize on his heroism.

That would have been out of character.

But he was allowed time for a little
cross-cultural wooing with Edna.

In real life, their romance
was coming to an end.

Though, typically, Edna was
a good sport about it.

He loved young girls. The younger
the better, and he really did.

He only saw pureness and innocence
and youth and beauty.

He was a romantic.

In principal, it might have been okay
to marry these girls of 16 or 17.

The big problem was this:
That they looked great...

...but having got them home,
they were not very rewarding partners.

Chaplin met Mildred Harris, a young
actress, then 16 years old...

... while working on Shoulder Arms.

Seen here in Cecil B. DeMille's...

...Fool's Paradise,
she convinced him, falsely...

... that she was pregnant. And he married
her three days after his film's release.

They were never happy together,
and a portion of the public...

... was not happy thinking of Chaplin
with a child bride.

In the summer of 1919, however,
she delivered a baby...

... who died three days later.

Chaplin 's personal anguish was reflected
in his blocked creative life at the time.

It's remarkable that Chaplin always
made what he wanted...

...and put his own money behind it...

...and would do it and do it and
do it until he got it right.

I mean, he was Kubrick before Kubrick,
and Kubrick didn't use his own money.

That megalomaniac sense of
"I've got a vision.

Although, maybe I'm not seeing it yet,
but I'll see it when it's there.

I'll know it when I see it.
And let's shoot for a year. "

Which really is not an exaggeration
in some cases. "Until we get it. "

That's crazy.

Perhaps justifiable
craziness in this case.

Starting, stopping and starting again
on major productions...

... Chaplin cobbled together this film,
A Day's Pleasure...

...from old footage and some new
material, trying to satisfy First National...

... which was desperately pressing him
for releasable product.

I've never been clear about who chose
when to use a title card.

And Chaplin uses them as brilliantly
as anybody in some movies...

...and then other movies-- There's one
where the family is driving a Model T...

...and they're resurfacing the road.

And quite clearly, a dump truck dumps
a lot of tar onto the road...

...but somebody decided they had to put
a title that said, "Tar. " So one word:

Then you come back and see
people with their feet stuck.

The old "shoes nailed to
the stage" gag...

...which Chaplin uses great because
his feet are stuck in the tar.

His major preoccupation was The Kid.

He'd seen the remarkable Jackie
Coogan in vaudeville, signed him...

... then appeared with him before this
assemblage of visiting exhibitors...

...promoting his unfinished dream.

Laughter is very unpredictable.
You cannot sit down and write out:

"We will do this, this, this
and this. That is the gag. "

And then do it and hope
it will be funny.

It's quite true that weeks and
sometimes months would go by...

...when he didn't have the inspiration,
and everybody sat around the studio...

...and he would or wouldn't come in,
but nothing would happen.

That happened very badly before
he started on The Kid, for instance.

Mildred Harris sued Chaplin
for divorce in 1920.

Her attorneys threatened
to attach his negative.

Chaplin fled to Salt Lake City
to finish editing The Kid.

He ate women up, and they came and
they went in extraordinary numbers.

If you're leading a life like that, you're
gonna have trouble sooner or later.

You're gonna get involved with women
who are too young...

...women who've got dangerous
mothers or dangerous lawyers.

It was a year and a half before he
finally turned the negative of The Kid...

...over to his distributors.

It was worth the wait.

A masterpiece and a huge
step forward for Chaplin.

Early in the film, Chaplin keeps trying
to abandon the abandoned baby.

He injected within something,
such as The Kid...

...a truth, a poignancy,
which was just magical.

He's been landed with this baby.
He doesn't know what to do with it.

There's one brutal moment when
he's sitting on the pavement...

...holding this baby, and there's a drain
there. He just lifts up the drain cover.

Oh, why did he do that? ls he going
to drop the baby down the drain?

They're passing thoughts
that flit through his head...

...but he gets them over to the audience.

It was a very daring film in many ways.
The idea of mixing slapstick comedy...

...with dramatic scenes had not been
done. And many intelligent people...

...told Chaplin it could not be done...

...that one of the story elements
was bound to fail.

And the performance that
he created with Jackie...

...a miraculous piece of cinema
acting and relationship.

Jackie Coogan was his greatest costar.
The reason being...

...that Coogan was so malleable.
I mean he was the perfect Chaplin actor.

He could just repeat and do exactly
what Chaplin would show him to do.

Including stealing quarters
from the gas meter.

The Kid was Chaplin's most directly
autobiographical film.

He had been a waif on London 's streets.
He had yearned for a father.

His own had abandoned him.
He had been, until she went mad...

...lovingly tended by his
impoverished mother.

He had known all the emotions
The Kid played upon.

In the autobiography, he talks about that
he was not very healthy as a little boy.

And his mother would sit at the window
when he was in bed, sick...

...and she would just describe everything
that went on outside and imitate it...

...and say, "And now there's this man. "
And she would imitate the man.

"And there's this little boy,
and there's this woman. "

And she would tell stories about
what was going on outside.

He knew how every part
should be played.

More than anything, he'd have
liked to play every part.

Every boy, every girl, every old man,
everything in the film.

Of course, he couldn't. He had
to use, unwillingly use, other actors.

What he really wanted to do
was to tell them...

...and show them exactly how
he would do it.

He wanted them to be him
playing the part.

This was absolutely fine when you had
a brilliant little mimic like Jackie Coogan.

Charlie just did something and Jackie
could do the exact imitation of it.

By a strange chance, I saw
The Kid last night...

...and I am once again convinced
it is his best work.

That intensity when there's the threat
that the Kid is going to be...

...taken to an institution, I think that
has to come out of his own childhood...

...his own feelings, his own memories
of being taken off...

...separated from his mother and his
brother and incarcerated in an institution.

And I think that that is what gives
The Kid its peculiar intensity.

The scene where he becomes a madman
in his effort to rescue the child.

Is there a more tragic moment in pictures
than the Kid begging to go with him?

It's one of the greatest things
I have ever seen...

...that kid pleading to be taken to him.

In The Kid, the big emotions
are in the boy.

The little boy that's being taken
away from where he should be...

...from love and affection,
by the state, to do good...

...to do good because this
will be better for him.

In The Kid, they're taking this little
kid to a horrible orphanage.

He was taken away from his mother...

...and put in the Lambeth Workhouse
at the age of 7.

He was taken away from his mother.
It's so terrible.

He and Sydney, and they were
in the workhouse.

He knows what it is, that wrenching,
being pulled away. Why?

Because the mother was in no fit mental
state, and the father had disappeared.

And they were destitute.

Charles Chaplin Sr. had been a
headliner, until he succumbed to drink.

All his life, his son abhorred alcohol.

When they really hit rock bottom,
then the only recourse...

...was to go to the workhouse,
which was the place for the destitute...

...of this parish.

Not much of it remains.

And what there is of it is blackened over
by a hundred years of London soot.

After becoming a star, Chaplin supported
his mother in a London asylum...

...and eventually brought her to America.

But he largely avoided her.

Both his parents had lost control
of their lives...

... to the irrational forces
he deeply feared.

Meantime, while still fulfilling his
First National contract, Chaplin...

... with D. W. Griffith, Mary Pickford
and Douglas Fairbanks...

...created United Artists.

They would now have full
ownership of their films.

The plan had been hatched
on the Liberty Loan Tour.

Ever the performer, Chaplin
donned costume and makeup...

...for the newsreel cameramen.

Despite these affectionate poses,
Chaplin and Pickford...

... were often at odds within
the company.

But her husband, famously athletic Doug
Fairbanks, was Chaplin's closest...

...and, obviously, most supportive friend.

Doug and Mary saw Chaplin off
for London in 1921.

It was his first trip home since leaving
on the Karno American Tour in 1912.

As he set sail, Chaplin had no idea...

...of what was awaiting him
in his native country.

As the SS Olympic sailed eastward,
a relaxed Chaplin supervised...

...a shipboard contest aimed
at discovering his best imitator.

Hundreds of such contests were going
on all over America at the time.

One of their winners was a
6-year-old Milton Berle.

The Olympic docked at Southampton
on September 9th.

The mobs greeting him were
without precedent.

It was a repeat of the Liberty Loan Tour,
but now raised to flash point.

Until these mobs emerged to meet
Chaplin, no one had quite imagined...

...how movie stardom had upped
the stakes in the celebrity game.

So how did that affect him? I think he
always fought to keep his integrity...

...and part of his fighting things, too,
was fighting himself, fighting to keep--

To keep his humanity in the face
of this enormous fame he had.

Keeping your humanity.
It's celebrity's most basic issue.

For the rest of his life, even when
he was an old man in exile...

... Chaplin would have to contend
with mass adoration...

... whenever he went out in public.
It does something to a man.

Chaplin sneaked away from his hotel
to visit the scenes of his childhood...

...as he always would whenever
he returned to London.

A friend, the writer Thomas Burke,
once said of Chaplin that:

"He needed London
as an actor needs a script. "

This pub had once been owned
by his uncle.

It was here that he observed an aged
retainer, Rummy Banks, a horse-holder...

...doing the toes-out walk that Chaplin
would make the most famous aspect...

...of his Tramp character.

He returned, too, to the humble flats
he'd once shared...

... with his mother and brother.

This was once a pickle factory...

... the stench of which he never
got out of his nostrils.

The Chaplins lived hard by it
in this little street.

On this trip, Chaplin was also
tumultuously welcomed...

...in Paris and Berlin,
where he experienced...

...something of their decadent,
aristocratic life.

He returned to America determined
to put it on-screen.

Chaplin also wanted to give
Edna a great role...

...one that would help her build a
career independent of him.

When A Woman of Paris came out,
it had the biggest critical reception...

...practically of any silent film.
The critics said it was absolutely great.

The audience just stayed away.

It was Chaplin's first failure, and this
was because he wasn't in it.

It was a terrible miscalculation to have
a Chaplin film without Chaplin.

I think there are probably
two reasons for this.

One was certainly that he was
determined to try to help Edna...

...to give her a new career
as a dramatic actress.

And, obviously, she was going to look
much better if he held back...

...and was not there to--

If Charlie Chaplin was in the film, nobody
would see anybody but Charlie Chaplin.

I think it was also just he wanted
to try himself, to see if he could...

...make a dramatic film and not be
a part of it in performance.

He does this tiny little piece.
He's unbilled...

...and he's a porter.
He carries a trunk.

There are actually reviews from the time
where people hadn't known...

...it was Chaplin, but they picked out
this little comic moment.

Probably the film would have
done immensely better...

...if Chaplin had taken his name off it.

You do feel it when certain aspects
are just rejected and say:

"You are only meant to do
this sort of thing. That's it. "

"We'll only see your film
if you're in it.

We don't care how beautifully
you composed the frame.

We don't care about
the sumptuousness of the d�cor. "

It's detail, and then to go from
that detail out.

And that is what you see in A Woman of
Paris is the detail. And they always say:

"It's in the details. "
That's a clich�, but it's true.

The kitchen scene at the beginning
has to do with the smell of the game.

Why is this elaborate thing going on?

But you get a sense of how
the people lived because of that.

Look at her bedroom, alone, or the party
scenes or the woman being unraveled.

You know, it really is extraordinary.
He cuts to the guy.

The cloth is being unraveled from
the left of the frame to the right.

The sense of decadence, the sense of
eroticism in the film is very strong.

It's purely modern. lt really is modern.

It's advanced for its time. And the thing
about it is, it doesn't have the words.

They didn't have the technology
for the words.

But they're like really up there.
They're behaving.

Look at the moment.
I get chills when I think of it.

It's a beautiful scene when
the painter comes in to the party.

Balloons are flying around,
and girls are dancing.

And Adolphe Menjou invites him in,
and his elegance, just his form--

Has him sit down, and he lights
the cigarette for the artist.

Just watch that again in terms of acting.
Now, that's everything, the subtlety.

Once you concentrate on a moment
like that, it's quite something.

And it's very modern. It's very
natural. lt isn't overdone.

This is the film 's basic triangle:

Jean, the provincial painter
who abandoned Marie...

...Pierre, the Paris decadent
who is now keeping her.

Another scene in that film, which
is fascinating, is when the artist...

...is telling his mother it was just
a moment of weakness.

And she comes in, and she
hears them say that.

It's a shot on her back, and you can see
the reaction it has on her, her body.

She doesn't move. The camera doesn't
cut to a tighter shot of her or anything.

But you feel all of that, and it holds
for a very long time before she turns.

Another director would not have done
it that way. There's no doubt.

And it's very powerful.

Then, of course, he's telling
the story with pictures.

You have that moment in the picture...

...where the artist is standing
under the lamppost.

Their love has been rekindled,
but the painter is weak-willed...

...dominated by a disapproving mother.

And there's a slow fade-out on him,
and you know what's going to begin.

It's going to take it now to a tragic turn.

He doesn't stop there, though.
It's a slow fade-out on his face...

...and he's just left glowing a little bit.
And then it cuts to a series of shots...

...that are irises. Edna in bed,
that's an iris. The mother.

And you just know that now
everything's in place...

...and we're ready to go because
the final scene is coming.

There's a calmness about it
that is terrifying...

...because you know it's
going to go badly.

And it's all very objective.

Putting everybody in place until
you have that great moment...

...where the mother takes
the gun, and she's like...

...something out of mythology
in this black veil...

...and the dress and the flowing
in the wind.

Jean has killed himself.
His mother wants to avenge him.

But discovering Marie weeping
over him makes her relent.

First you think she's going
to shoot her, and she doesn't.

There's no close-up,
but it's very moving.

A Woman of Paris on a big screen must
have been powerful, very powerful.

The film 's great concluding irony.

Pierre is untouched by the tragedy,
perhaps unknowing of it.

She and Jean 's mother devote
themselves to an orphanage.

She and Pierre pass
one another unseeing.

Another of Chaplin 's open-road endings,
but without the cheerful Tramp.

Since 1915, the public had been
encouraged toward total adoration...

...of Chaplin's image. You could
see him in animated cartoons.

Or in the comic strips.

Or you could buy a Chaplin toy or game.

The Tramp was ubiquitous
and inescapable.

Everywhere you turned, there he was:

The sweet, slightly befuddled
little fellow.

It was the first great multimedia
merchandising barrage.

Chaplin, in those days, loved his fame
in quite an uncomplicated way.

Everyone who was anyone visited
Chaplin at his studio...

... when they visited Los Angeles.

He was always on.
The camera was always present.

If he loved playing the Tramp...

...he loved at least as much his role
as a world-class celebrity.

Thomas Burke again, "He lives only
in a role, and he is lost without it. "

But he was also the great god Pan,
a famous or notorious womanizer.

I think falling in love for Chaplin
probably was a great, great moment.

There are moments in his films where he
sees the girl, and he sort of swoons.

I think he did it in real life,
which is wonderful and romantic...

...and attractive and pretty,
except that he probably does it...

...three or four times a day,
and that requires an endless supply.

In his Show People cameo
for King Vidor, the joke is...

... the world's most famous man
is unrecognized in real life.

The unimpressed girl is Marion Davies,
William Randolph Hearst's mistress...

...and one of Chaplin 's lovers as well.

She swooned.
They all swooned.

Often to Chaplin's ultimate sorrow.

He had met Lita Grey when she was 12.

She'd played an angel, of sorts,
for him in The Kid.

She reappeared in his life, age 15,
when he was casting The Gold Rush.

The Kid's dream sequence
is uncannily symbolic.

She presented herself at the studio,
and Chaplin made a screen test of her...

...and then she was hired as
the leading lady in The Gold Rush.

Lita had hero-worship for Chaplin...

...and Chaplin had an interest
in young women.

He liked to see the young girl awaken.

As Lita would say,
"He had a fetish for virgins. "

They married in November, 1924.
She was pregnant with their first child...

... when Chaplin took his company
on location to Truckee, California.

By then, he knew the pregnant
Lita would have to be replaced.

Their baby was born in May, 1925.

Chaplin knew what he has
to show the audience.

When he's making films in the
environment which is known to us...

...from everyday life, you know,
he doesn't need to show you much.

But then in The Gold Rush, you know,
who ever traveled to Alaska...

...and the Klondike and saw all this
and like that?

So he knew, "I have to show it. "

In Truckee, Chaplin made the most
spectacular sequence of his career.

It involved 600 extras.

Curiously, the man famous
for his obsessive retakes...

...did the entire piece in a single day.

But Truckee was a brutal and
uncontrollable location.

Chaplin would have to match his location
footage to studio-made footage.

Mostly, The Gold Rush would be adored
by critics and public.

But some reviewers struck a note that
would resound more loudly in the future.

They said that Chaplin
was old-fashioned...

...not keeping up with
advances in film technique.

But the Tramp was unchanged,
ever the optimist...

...ever the seeker after good fortune...

...and ever oblivious, at least at first...

... to whatever dangers
might be stalking him.

It was the same with Chaplin,
a devoted cinematic purist.

That's how you know he's a legend
already by The Gold Rush...

...because, of course,
the Little Tramp can be...

...on the side of an
icy mountain with no coat.

The hope of shooting
The Gold Rush on location...

... was buried in the snows of Truckee.

Chaplin became increasingly miserable
there and would expensively...

...return to Los Angeles
for most of the shoot.

Even the famous chicken gag
had to be reshot there.

For one take they used a double.
You could obviously put a double...

...into a chicken costume.
I mean, one chicken looks like another.

Not true. Apparently the double--
You could see it was a double.

It just didn't move like a chicken,
like Charlie moves like a chicken.

The miners are starving.

They're so hungry
that Mack Swain begins hallucinating.

Was ever there a more perfect
animal imitation than Chaplin 's?

His ability silently to convey thought,
even a bird's thought...

...inspired a young Richard Attenborough
when he saw the film in rerelease.

He was able to convey the most
extraordinary thoughts...

...and intricacy of thoughts,
and debate and reaction...

...purely by physical,
and not just facial...

...but physical reaction to things.

It was an experience
I had never even considered...

...in that here was somebody
who could not only hold...

...my attention absolutely, but deny me
the choice of laughing or crying.

I mean, he dealt with me
as this figure on the screen.

I thought it was the most magical thing
I'd ever seen in my life.

And it was that occasion, no question,
I want to be an actor.

If I could do what he could do
in relation to an audience...

...I want to be an actor.
That's how it started my love of him.

The Tramp was, as usual, the outsider,
especially when it came to love.

It looked as if he would not get the girl.

Or maybe it was that
the girl did not get him.

Georgia Hale had replaced
Lita Grey in the film.

In real life, Chaplin naturally
began having an affair with her.

The discontinuities between his Tramp
character and Chaplin's own...

... vast worldly success
were not much remarked.

Except by Chaplin, who once rather
bitterly noted the irony...

... that he had become rich
by playing the poorest of men.

Johnny Depp had to duplicate one
of The Gold Rush's...

...most famous moments
in his movie Benny & Joon.

Approaching the roll dance, when you
see the thing it's very simple.

It's so difficult. It's so difficult.
l mean, the coordination.

It's something that Chaplin
just did in an instant.

He just came up with it like that.

It took me about, I don't know,
a good three weeks to a month...

...of really working on it.

It's not just in this.
It's in this, you know. It's all in here.

Chaplin's head and, you know,
the little glances, the side glances.

The Gold Rush is the one film in which
the Tramp ends up a millionaire.

Maybe it's Chaplin 's acknowledgment
of his own equally astonishing rise.

Six years after the company's founding,
Chaplin had finally delivered a hit...

... to his United Artists partners.

Meanwhile, Lita, seen with him
here at a premiere...

...had delivered
their second son, Sydney.

But the marriage was not going well.

The Circus, maybe Chaplin's
most purely hilarious feature...

... was not going well either.

Its production was haunted
by unimaginable problems.

It was in '28. I was 5 years old,
and I went to see the film.

It must have been The Circus.
I was amazed.

I laughed, and it moved me...

...even though I was a 6-year-old boy.

And then I started to imitate Chaplin.

I stole the bowler hat of my father,
his trousers...

...and with the ink I put
the moustache on, and I mimed Chaplin.

With this picture, self-consciousness
enters Chaplin 's universe.

It's his first exploration
of his own art, the art of being funny.

When he tries to be funny, he isn 't.
When he doesn't try to be funny, he is.

The scene also comments on
his supposed old-fashioned qualities.

The bits that don't work here in 1927,
did work for him a decade earlier.

The clown in this scene
is played by Henry Bergman...

... who worked with Chaplin for decades.

He represents classic, highly stylized,
commedia dell'arte comic values.

Chaplin represents
a more naturalistic variation.

He's going to exaggerate, of course...

...but there's also something
real about him...

...something that works for the movies...

... that most seemingly
realistic of all media.

And in the film,
Chaplin had to play this pantomime...

...but when he saw the clown
with a real arrow...

...he was frightened he could be killed.

Then he did this--
I show you what he did.

That means, "I cannot do it, because
there is a worm in the apple. "

He was a master in pacing.

He knew exactly when after one gag...

...he has to top it
with an even bigger gag...

...or if he suddenly has to go
into total opposite.

It was never gag for the sake of the gag.
It was always the gag for the sake of...

...revealing something about
the character or something...

...about the story,
or revealing something about the plot.

In The Circus, Chaplin's plagued
by an endless array of animals...

...all irrationally bent
on assaulting his dignity.

It's true that he mastered
the cinematic art...

...so well that you don't see it.

You don't see it.
It just flows in the film and it goes.

It's just so natural, everything.

Chaplin 's routine with
the magician 's table...

...is one of his most masterfully
orchestrated gag sequences...

... yet he would go on
to top it in this very film.

The Circus, it's just
a wonderful good time.

The jokes and the execution
of them are so brilliant...

...and so uncluttered by anything
that can date it.

Social ideas and satire...

...on the mores
of the time date all the time.

This stuff is so beautifully done,
and it's as fresh as could be.

Another example, say, would be
the movie Singin' in the Rain.

That will be as fresh
500 years from now...

...as it was the day it came out.

Sometimes his gags were simple
little throwaway moments.

Sometimes the gags were as familiar
as this nightmare of entrapment.

Though perhaps only Chaplin would
have thought of this awful logic:

A barking dog threatening
to awaken a sleeping lion.

Surely the Tramp's
endless on-screen problems...

...reflect Chaplin's off-screen problems
as he struggled to finish The Circus.

The Circus isn't even mentioned
in his autobiography.

It's a miracle that that film
got made, for a start...

...because everything happened. All the
disasters in the world happened with it.

The whole set was completely
destroyed by fire...

...and then what the fire didn't
destroy, the firemen destroyed.

Then he had the most messy
and disastrous and horrible divorce.

The shooting had to stop
for nine months...

...because his wife divorced him.
And it was such an ugly divorce...

...that he was frightened that she would,
in fact, kidnap the film.

And so he had to hide the film.

Lita's 42-page divorce complaint
was designed to ruin Chaplin.

It named the names of his lovers,
discussed intimate sexual behavior...

...and in book form,
became an underground bestseller.

The divorce was quite ugly,
and she got quite a bit of money...

...my mother, and so they had
nothing really to talk about.

Therefore, Chaplin did not
appear in court. He threw money at Lita.

The divorce settlement was the largest
in American history to date.

Such was his popularity that most
of the mud she threw ended up on her.

Chaplin nearly collapsed under the strain.

He fled to New York,
where these pictures were taken...

...and suffered a nervous breakdown.

He was having an affair
with his leading lady...

...the best friend of his wife.

So maybe that's why he never
mentioned it as one of his favorite films.

She was Merna Kennedy.
In the movie, she loves Rex...

... the tightrope walker,
played by Harry Crocker.

Trying to impress her,
the Tramp decides to emulate Rex.

Though I always am so much in awe of
and express my admiration...

...for his sense of story arc
and of how he subordinated...

...everything to story, still I realize...

...my visceral memory and reaction
are to individual chunks.

So when I think of The Circus,
that sequence on the tightrope...

...with the monkey climbing on his head,
that's the movie to me.

My father had an idea.
He said, "l have an idea...

...of the Tramp being in a situation
where he can't get out of. "

Comedy is often
a situation of a nightmare.

And this was a nightmare situation
of a man on a tightrope.

Everything goes wrong.
He's falling off. His pants fall down.

He's got a whole lot of monkeys
around him who are biting his nose.

And the idea started off
by that nightmare situation.

You'd have to say this is the best
banana-peel joke in human history.

Also, the last scene in the film...

...this beautiful scene with the horses,
all these wonderful wagons...

...and the dust and the light,
and it's extraordinary.

He shot it and shot it and shot it,
and looked at the rushes...

...at 3:00 in the morning and said,
"No, it's not-- His hat isn't quite right.

We've got to do it again. "

And someone stole the wagons.
They weren't there.

This whole freshman
course of students...

...stole the wagons
for their fire ceremony.

Chaplin rounded up
the wagons and reshot.

The ending of The Circus is one
of Chaplin's most beautiful.

He could be,
whatever his critics might say...

...a great pictorialist
when he wanted to be.

But there's a larger symbolism
to this sequence.

Chaplin finished work on
The Circus just three days...

...after the premiere of The Jazz Singer.

Sound was about
to revolutionize the movies...

...and everyone, Chaplin included,
wondered if the Tramp...

...a figure it was impossible
to imagine talking...

... would survive the revolution.

He, however, was already
writing his next movie.

It was City Lights, Chaplin's last fully
realized, fully acknowledged masterpiece.

The Tramp's introduction,
unconcernedly snoozing...

...on the establishment's statuary, was
the greatest of all his movie entrances.

The film had a score
and a bit of gibberish talk...

...but it was essentially a silent movie.

I've often said that it's much harder
being a talking comedian...

...on the screen than a silent comedian.

The example I always gave was the
difference between chess and checkers.

It's like checkers to do it silently.
You can figure out the gags...

...and painstakingly write them,
and then execute them...

...but as soon as you have to speak,
you're plunged into a different reality...

...that's much more complex and
the demands become much different.

Even so, the demands of silent comedy
were not that easily satisfied...

...especially by Chaplin.

For unlike his competitors,
Keaton and Lloyd, he did it all himself.

He never employed gag-writing teams
to help hone his humor.

He always built up his routines
on his feet...

...in endless rehearsals like this one.

Later, in retake after retake,
he would elaborate or simplify them.

In feature-length things...

...you can't just do them
alone with comedy.

So he brings in
romance and sentiment.

When I saw City Lights, I realized
what a deep filmmaker he was...

...because I felt that that film
said more about love...

...than so many purportedly serious
investigations of the subject.

Emotionally, it lives out
feelings of real love.

You see what he feels for the girl...

...and to what lengths
he's willing to go.

If she can't see him,
she's able to feel that love...

...and she has no idea
that it's some scruffy little tramp...

...that's making her life beautiful.

The production was strained,
particularly in Chaplin 's relationship...

... with his inexperienced
leading lady Virginia Cherrill.

As he grew, he started having to...

...construct stories.
He started having to involve, also...

...his own emotional feelings
with women...

...and get deeper into himself.

And I think that must have
made it a lot harder for him.

It must have been a greater
struggle then to construct something...

...because he tried to put
another dimension into it.

And I think that's when
he would have moments...

...of struggling to find ideas.

He's always thinking, "What is logical?
Is the gag logical?

Is it right for it to happen?"
And the stories about City Lights...

...how he spent months trying
to work out one little bit of business...

...to make it plausible, to make it logical.

This is that bit of business.

How to make the blind girl misidentify
her benefactor as a rich man.

It's the noises of a limousine door
slamming, its motor purring off...

...sounds resonant of wealth,
that do the trick.

This is one instance where a soundtrack
would have made Chaplin's job easier.

But he and Cherrill have
to convey her misunderstanding...

...and his all too clear understanding
of what happened...

...by brilliantly mimed thought.

Chaplin, whose mood at the time
was erratic and angry...

...shot on this picture for over a year.

I love the toying with the sentimentality,
the way he makes you feel sentimental...

...and particularly the scene
where he's watching her...

...he's in love with her,
and she's at the fountain.

He had me going
with the sentimentality...

...and yet the moment happens
when she sprays the water...

...in his face and breaks it.
I thought, "This guy's the best. "

The movie's brilliant subplot:

Henry Myers is a millionaire
who 's benign when sober...

...but madly suicidal when he's drunk.

And then, of course,
the guy with all the money...

...who's got all the possessions
and all the money in the world...

...and is on the verge
of suicide all the time...

...because his feelings
are unrequited in love.

It's such an interesting exploration
of all those feelings in a nonverbal way.

It's one step removed from music.

For me, it's his best picture.

The intertitle says it all. The job, as
what was once called a "white wing"...

...cleaning up after animals
on the street, is demeaning.

But it tells us Chaplin will do
anything to help the girl.

And it leads to what may be one
of Chaplin's greatest sight gags.

I began to be impressed with the fact
that he was such a good actor as well...

...because the serious side
of that movie...

...he handled with legendary brilliance.

Well, my favorite picture
of all time, I guess, is City Lights.

I've seen it 40 times or more.

I think it's very funny,
incredibly touching...

...and the end is just hard to....

I get choked up now
even thinking about it.

When she recognizes it's him
that's helped her regain her sight...

...and everything, it's murder.
Beautiful picture.

The Tramp has secretly paid for the
operation that restores the girl's sight.

Three days after City Lights premiered,
an exhausted Chaplin...

...embarked on a world tour.
As usual, the crowds were enormous.

As usual, no door was closed to him.
In London, he met George Bernard Shaw.

More important to him, he met Gandhi.

As the world-wide
depression deepened...

... Chaplin made the Mahatma's political
and spiritual concerns his own.

Chaplin moved on to Berlin
in what many have said...

... was his most enormous popular
reception ever.

Yet it was tainted.

The Nazis, just two years
before taking power...

...issued vicious anti-Semitic
attacks against him.

Chaplin was not a Jew,
but he was reluctant to say so.

He thought that would implicitly
support the anti-Semites.

Immediately on his return to America...

...he met Paulette Goddard,
the second of his great loves.

Even now, the grapevine
is enough alive so that people say:

"He could be a difficult man
to work for or be married to...

...and he often confused
the two statuses. "

As he did with Goddard,
planning to star her in his next picture.

A former showgirl,
she was a lively, lovely companion.

Among her accomplishments,
she effected a reconciliation...

...between Chaplin and his two sons.

Oh, she was absolutely adorable.

I used to sleep with her
until I was about 8.

And my father said, "You can't
sleep with Paulette anymore. "

I said, "Why can't
we sleep with Paulette?"

Chaplin 's great recreational
passion was tennis.

Here he's about to play a charity match
against Groucho Marx, among others.

He played almost daily
on his court at home.

It was after those matches,
drinking Cokes, sharing a snack...

... that his friends thought him most
relaxed, reminiscent...

...and expansive,
especially about politics.

Mankind, he thought,
was being turned into animals...

...blindly serving the factories,
the machinery...

... that were supposed to serve it.

In its most aspiring moments,
Modern Times...

... was about a Marxist concept:
the dehumanization...

...and the alienation of labor.

No doubt about it, Chaplin was a leftist
of a devoted and radical kind.

In fact, the first time
we ran the picture together...

...I was so taken with it
that I about fell off the chair.

He told me later
that he wondered about that...

...whether I was putting it on, and he
said, "I soon discovered it was not so. "

Attention, foreman.
Trouble on bench five.

Check on the nut-tighteners. Nuts
coming through loose on bench five.

Attention foreman.

Charlie did not know
how to notate music...

...and he didn't know how
to extend musical ideas.

And they needed somebody
to work with him.

The fellows who were in charge,
Alfred Newman and Eddie Powell...

...knew my work from New York,
and they brought me out here.

And I went to work for Charlie.

And he really had a wonderful
instinct for music.

They were simple little tunes,
and my job was to take them down...

...to alter them when I thought they
needed altering. And that's what I did.

We worked five days a week,
sometimes six...

...and it was altogether
quite wonderful, you know.

He became this sort
of a surrogate father for me.

What you feel sometimes with a thing
like the eating machine...

...you see an investment in a prop,
in a shot, in an idea.

So we have to let this really play
and we have to do it.

And it's about twice too long,
maybe, the eating machine.

There's nothing in film
like the feeding machine.

It was just absolutely wonderful.

The man is reduced to something less
than the sum of the parts, you see.

He's just an animal,
which is being fed by a machine.

Few people know that table,
which goes around...

...Charlie was manipulating that himself.
It wasn't somebody else doing it.

He was the guy with gadgets
underneath the table...

...and he would make it turn around
and all that sort of stuff.

The man was simply incredible.

And he also manipulated
that mouth-wiper...

...that comes and hits him in the face
and hurt him...

...and just made his face puff up
and his mouth puff up. He was amazing.

Sometimes you feel
something akin to pretension...

...in the agenda of Modern Times,
and it's a little off-- It's distancing.

At the same time, when I watch
Modern Times, I'll sit there...

...and feel slightly superior,
which with a great master...

...part of you is urging,
"How can I get a leg-up on this guy...

...and feel at least even with him?"

But then there'll be a sequence
and you'll think:

"That was so smart and so efficient. "

Nothing was smarter
or more efficient than this sequence.

The ever-helpful Tramp
picks up a red flag...

...and before he knows it, he's innocently
leading a Communist demonstration.

There's something prescient
in the sequence.

Within a decade, Chaplin himself
would be cruelly red-baited.

In a strange way, Modern Times
is a bit of a throwback.

Because if you look at it, it's really
a collection of four two-reelers.

The film was certainly not
all politics, all the time.

Goddard was cast as the waif
opposite the Tramp...

...and much of the comedy was as
innocent as any Chaplin had ever done.

In Modern Times, it is brilliant...

...and you're following the story,
and it kind of peters out.

It doesn't go anywhere.
It's just a brilliant trip...

...and each skit is very funny
and brilliantly executed.

And it goes along on the
momentum of his genius...

...the fact that he's funny
and the bits are funny.

We talked politics,
we talked just about everything...

...because he had a real knowledge
of these things.

He had a mind like a super attic.

We went to Musso & Frank's
for lunch every day...

...five days a week. We were
driven there in Charlie's car.

And we had a table...

...which was reserved for us,
and we'd sing.

There was a thing called
"I Want a Lassie. "

And it was a tune Charlie knew
and I knew, and we'd sing to that tune.

And the people in the place would look
and say, "What's that?"

And then they'd suddenly see
it was Chaplin...

...and they had great prospects
for their evening conversation...

...so they listened.

I think people sometimes
don't understand about the fact...

...that a man like Charlie,
who was a millionaire...

...can do this poverty-stricken Tramp.

Yet he did it, and there was never
anything more convincing in films...

...I think, than the way he did it.
And that's a great tribute to him.

Despite the film's casual construction,
some critics thought Chaplin...

... was beginning to take himself
and the world too seriously.

But still, in the end, he was able
for the last time in movie history...

... to find an open road
into a better future.

This time with a pretty girl on his arm.

I really still love Charlie.

He was not just like a father to me,
which he was in some ways...

...but I admired him very much
for the constancy of his point of view.

He really had a feeling for those
who lead ordinary lives...

...and are sometimes
shortchanged by circumstances.

After Modern Times' release in 1936...

... Charlie and Paulette
took a vacation cruise.

Charlie never saw a newsreel
camera he wouldn 't play to.

What was supposed to be a short
Hawaiian vacation...

... would soon stretch
into a three-month tour of Asia.

Back home, people began to wonder...

...if Charlie and Paulette
were actually married.

They later claimed
that they were married...

... though there's no record
of the nuptials, somewhere in Asia.

Still later, when their relationship
began to come apart...

... they found themselves
denying rumors of divorce.

For the moment, though...

... they were obviously delighted
with one another's company.

And Chaplin was beginning
to plan his biggest...

...and most problematic movie to date.

The Great Dictator opens on the
Western Front during World War I.

It is Chaplin's first
all-talking production.

In it, he would play two characters.

One of them would be
a Tramp variation...

...an innocent Jewish barber
serving bravely, if ineffectually...

...in Tomania's army.

-Breech secured!
-Stand clear!

Ready! Fire!

Behind-the-scenes footage,
shot by brother Sydney...

...has recently been discovered.

On The Dictator, I remember, he had
a thing where he pulled the gun.

He fired this Big Bertha sort of a cannon.

And I was out there, and I let out
a big, "Ha, ha, ha! "

And he said, "Cut, cut! " I thought
he was gonna be sore as hell.

He was absolutely thrilled
that somebody laughed at it.

Chaplin threw their famous
resemblance right in Der F�hrer's face.

His pictures were now
banned in Germany...

...but that's not what motivated
his portrayal of the dictator Hynkel.

For his comic German accent,
he drew on his vaudeville training.

Most comedians of his era
could talk "Dutch. "

You know, I really started to see
movies when I was 13...

...after the World War II.

I lived in Czechoslovakia,
which was occupied by the Nazis.

Suddenly comes The Great Dictator...

...and there was a liberation,
because single-handedly...

...Chaplin reduced this monster
into a pathetic...

...ridiculous, venomous clown.

You can say that, you know,
the Allies liberated Europe physically...

...but The Great Dictator, Chaplin,
liberated us spiritually...

...and made you think also, because
suddenly you realized watching:

"How is it possible
that this pathetic creature...

...had such a power
over good German people?"

Millions of people followed him...

...died for him, for this insane lunatic.

It's almost as if he made that film
because he felt...

...that Hitler had become his rival
in reaching out for everybody.

The Hitler character,
he had a strong relationship...

...to the early Tramp, who's
a troublemaker, who's primitive.

And the other person, the barber,
is more his human side.

It's interesting, the relationship between
the two and how they get confused.

I think it was a very brave film to make.

I don't think that many people
were being openly critical...

...of what was going on at the time,
and he was one of the--

Maybe not the only one,
but he was one of the few.

Come here, you!
Attacking a storm trooper, huh?

-Grab him!
-You'll hear from my lawyer.

Come on!

Why, you--

He bit my finger!

The barber and Hynkel
will eventually exchange roles.

The Jewish barber pays a comic, balletic
price for the accident of his birth.

His creator,
asked once if he was Jewish...

...made this superb reply,
"l do not have that honor. "

I love the whole film, and I think
that this scene when he plays...

...with the globe...

...and it's just perfect metaphor
for the sick dreams of every dictator.

Out, Caesar of Nuris,
emperor of the world.

My world.

That scene was written. Every single
movement was written down.

Whereas all the scenes where he does
that pretend German were improvised.

l would have thought that that would be
written to make it sound like German...

...but he just apparently said to the
camera, "Roll. " And then went on...

...and just rambled on
in this almost perfect German.

It's an idea he'd had for a long time.

Some smart guy said,
"Oh, that was my idea. "

But then there's actually footage of
him way back in home movies doing it.

In the home movie,
he was dressed in a Grecian outfit.

It just was so perfect for Hitler.

The globe dance, I could watch it
for hours and hours. Rewind, once again.

It's absolutely incredible.

Literally, I could watch it
for weeks and never get bored.

I mean, just the metaphor.
It's just endlessly, endlessly brilliant.

People just fall down dead
over an alleged metaphor...

...but I don't find it funny
or a brilliant metaphor.

Some would agree with Woody Allen.
Some would not.

But at a time when 90%
of America opposed war...

...and half the country
was to some degree anti-Semitic...

... this admittedly preachy film
was undeniably courageous.

It was Hitler who seemed to be imitating
Chaplin, not Chaplin imitating Hitler.

Chaplin came first. Chaplin was famous
long before Hitler was famous.

There's a little bit of Hitler in all of us.
That's the whole idea...

...that Hitler is not some creature who
came from outer space. He's one of us.

l think the genius of the film is that
Chaplin realizes a lot of Hitler in him...

...that there's a lot of Hitler...

...in anyone who dominates audiences
and rouses the rabble.

There is no doubt in The Great Dictator
that he felt he had to say...

...something about this phenomenon,
this issue of fascism...

...and where the world was headed.

And when he does blatantly speak,
he's the voice of a generation.

He's the voice of several generations.
What is he going to say?

It's an imposing of a kind of self-
importance. It's very dangerous.

I happen to like the tone of his voice.
I liked being with him.

You must speak.

-I can't.
-You must. It's our only hope.

You have a situation, World War II,
and he speaks very clearly.

He makes statements on the world
and the nature of government...

...the nature of fascism.

It does sound like preaching.

lt sounds like, "They expect me to make
a comment, and I'm gonna do it. "

The people at the time said, "He's too
self-important. He's got above himself. "

I don't think it was quite that.
He did take life terribly seriously.

He thought a lot about things.

He would get terribly troubled by things
that were going on in the world.

He was deeply distressed
by the Spanish Civil War, for instance.

He genuinely felt he got an audience,
he's got to say something.

It's not Hitler/Hynkel,
it's not the Jewish barber.

Suddenly, Charles Chaplin's face
comes through.

I'm sorry, but I don't
want to be an emperor.

That's not my business.

I don't want to rule or conquer anyone.

I should like to help everyone if possible,
Jew, gentile, black man, white.

We all want to help one another.
Human beings are like that.

We want to live by each other's
happiness, not by each other's misery.

We don't want to hate
and despise one another.

In this world, there's room for everyone.
The good Earth is rich...

...and can provide for everyone.

Not one word has lost its significance.
It's as true now as it was then.

Pacifist public opinion, critical hesitation,
counted for little.

In its initial release, The Great Dictator
was Chaplin 's biggest-grossing film.

In World War II, he vocally...

...controversially supported
our Russian allies...

...notably, at a Carnegie Hall rally, where
he followed a waffling Orson Welles.

The next speaker was Charlie.
He came out, this natty figure...

...walked to the center of the stage...

...raised his hand...

...said, "Comrades! "

Well, the place came down.

He remained what he had always been,
a restless, driven man.

But at 53, he began to find a measure
of happiness when he met Oona o'Neill.

She was 16, the daughter
of the playwright Eugene o'Neill.

A New York debutante,
she was now both shyly and eagerly...

...seeking a career as an actress.

For Chaplin, it was love at first sight,
the last and greatest love of his life.

Within a couple of months,
she was living with him.

This screen test for an unmade film
called The Girl from Leningrad...

...gives us a unique glimpse
of her spirit in 1942.

Don't turn around so quick.
Hey, stop. Not so quick.

But he had recently had and broken off
an affair with Joan Berry...

...a very disturbed would-be actress...

... who desperately broke
into his home one night.

I came home, he was very strange.
He said, "Go to bed. "

I went into bed, and what had happened
is, she had broken in with a gun.

He talked her out of this nonsense,
and she put the gun down and left.

He said, one day, he did the greatest
piece of acting he's ever done in his life.

She pulled a gun on him,
and she was going to shoot him.

He acted his way out of the situation
till he got that gun out of her hand.

He could not act his way
out of the law's clutches.

Here, he is humiliatingly fingerprinted.

The FBI had been keeping a file
on him since 1922.

For some reason, J. Edgar Hoover
held an implacable hatred for him.

The FBI conspired to charge him
with a Mann Act violation.

The law ludicrously forbade
the transportation of women...

...across state lines
for immoral purposes.

Chaplin, here shaking hands
with the jury, eventually won that case.

Simultaneously, Joan Berry
brought a paternity suit against him.

There were two trials
and countless scandalous headlines.

Berry's lawyer had a field day.

"Lecherous hound,
Cockney cad, a reptile"...

... were just some of the names
he called Chaplin.

Blood tests proved Chaplin
could not be the father...

...but they were inadmissible
under California law.

Chaplin lost the case...

...also lost was much of America 's
affection for its beloved Tramp.

You know, he supported that child.
He didn't make an issue of it.

He said, "Okay. " Paid for the kid,
but it was not his.

Monsieur Verdoux would deepen
the nation 's alienation...

...despite this hilariously
failed attempt at murder.

No, he won't--

-What are you gonna do with that?
-Lasso him.

Don't be silly, you can't lasso a fish.
Any fool knows that.

Oh, yes, you can.

All you have to do is to place it
over his head like that.

Then you pull it tight, like this.

What's that?

A yodeler.

-Oh, that ruins everything.
-Certainly does.

Too bad we couldn't find a place
all to ourselves.

Certainly is.

Orson Welles proposed
the idea to Chaplin.

Based on the true case of Henri Landru,
a notorious French wife-murderer.

Chaplin vastly expanded it
into an indictment of bourgeois society.

Making Verdoux at that moment
in his life...

...when his own morality was so much
in question, was great provocation.

It was the final pin
that broke the camel's back.

It got him into deep trouble
with all sorts of war veterans....

And everyone, I think,
came down on him for making that film.

Monsieur Verdoux is a bank official
who gets fired after decades of service.

To support his wife and child,
he takes to marrying rich widows...

...and then killing them for their money.

It's a black comedy by a man
who actually had no blackness in him.

I wonder how long he's going
to keep that incinerator burning.

-It's been going for the last three days.
-l know.

I haven't had a chance
to put my washing out.

It's almost a mea culpa.
It's a statement about capitalism.

It's a statement...

...that murder's the logical
extension of business.

That when you're out
to make a living, anything goes.

Verdoux expertly counting
his money was a chilling...

...but well-remembered
comic motif in the film.

The Lydia scene is unique, though.

I think that's the first murder you see.

And going up the stairs
and him talking about the moon.

The elegance of the shot.
And, oh, "Yes, my dear. "

The way he says, "Yes, my dear,"
is like a snake.

He's just coiling around her.

Yes, my dear.

And you know it's going to come down,
he's going to kill somebody.

That extraordinary moment,
going up the steps...

...and looking at the moon outside
and reciting--

I forget exactly the words,
but about the moon.

She says, "What are you doing?"
"Oh, nothing. "

-What a night.
-Yes, a full moon.

How beautiful, this pale Endymion hour.

What are you talking about?

Endymion, my dear.

A beautiful youth
possessed by the moon.

Well, forget about him and get to bed.

Yes, my dear.

And then he turns into a silhouette,
goes out of frame, the music rises....

Her feet were soft in flowers.

The night changes to day,
and you know it's been done.

The vulgarity of his victims
is often contrasted...

...perhaps misogynistically so,
with Verdoux's dandyish elegance.

The next thing is followed by the comic
refrain of the counting of the money.

But it takes you by surprise because
what seems simple with this man...

...is suddenly translated into something
so eloquent and elegant...

...and absolutely horrendous behavior,
but it's done absolutely beautifully.

A friend has told him of a poison
that leaves no trace.

He decides to try it on someone...

... with whom he has no connection
the police might discover.

It is one of the moral turning points in a
film that took him four years to write.

And now for the experiment.

Even when he says, "Now
for the experiment," with the poison...

...when it dissolved to the young
woman in the street, I was shocked.

He had the ability to shock you,
slap your face, then pull you back.

You went with it because
you didn't want to see him kill her...

...and you knew he wouldn't do it...

...but I was shocked by him
thinking that way, "An experiment. "

The first person you see is beautiful.
My goodness, he's going to kill her.

-Quite a shower.
-Yes, it is.

-Can I escort you anywhere?
-Oh, thank you.

It's beautiful, but it's also a very
ugly film in a way. It's very disturbing.

It's almost as if he was pushing the
audience, particularly after World War ll.

The worst war in recorded history.

"If I play a character like this, how far
could I push you and you still love me?

Will you still accept me? Am I even
relevant in a world like this right now?"

The criminal is eventually caught.
He will accept his fate.

But not before he broadens
the indictment against him...

... to include most of humanity.

Humanity was profoundly uninterested.

Have you anything to say
before sentence is passed upon you?

Oui, monsieur, I have.

However remiss the prosecutor
has been in complimenting me...

...he at least admits that I have brains.

Thank you, monsieur, I have.

And for 35 years,
I used them honestly.

After that, nobody wanted them.

So I was forced to go
into business for myself.

As for being a mass killer,
does not the world encourage it?

Is it not building weapons of destruction
for the sole purpose of mass killing?

Has it not blown unsuspecting women
and little children to pieces...

...and done it very scientifically?

As a mass killer,
I'm an amateur by comparison.

It was a very interesting...

...disturbing touch as he walks out.

It's like, if you watch him walk,
his stomach is a little extended...

...the walk is awkward, like a grotesque
of the Little Tramp's walk.

It really is.
They lead him to the guillotine.

It's the end of the Little Tramp,
the real end.

I can only imagine what it must
have received when it came out.

No one liked it.

You know, as a man gets on in years,
he wants to live deeply.

A feeling of sad dignity comes upon him,
and that's fatal for a comic.

Sad dignity.

It was a feeling that Chaplin knew
all too well in the late '40s.

He would turn 60 in 1949.

His old genius for inventing gags...

...and developing them in sustained
sequences had largely deserted him.

His audience was older too
and standing on its dignity.

They were lost to him, as he
had always feared they might be.

Calvero, his character
in Limelight, directly...

... wearily projected his most
despairing vision of himself.

What a sad business, being funny.

Very sad if they won't laugh.

But it's a thrill when they do.
To look out there, see them all laughing.

To hear that roar go up,
waves of laughter coming at you.

But let's talk of something
more cheerful.

Besides, I want to forget the public.

Never. You love them too much.

I'm not sure. Maybe I love them,
but I don't admire them.

I think you do.

As individuals, yes,
there's greatness in everyone.

But as a crowd, they're like
a monster without a head...

...that never knows which way
it's going to turn.

It can be prodded in any direction.

Chaplin 's has-been character,
depressed and drunken...

...meets the dancer Thereza
when he rescues her from suicide.

She is in despair
because she cannot walk.

Old man and young woman
will conspire to inspire one another.

It still to me is amazing that at 20...

...I worked with the greatest genius in
movies and had been chosen by him.

It was certainly he that found me.

I was a young actress. I was 19.
I was in a play in London.

And then I got a wire
from Harry Crocker saying...

...would I send photographs
to Chaplin?

And it seemed so unbelievable to me...

...and I was so frightened by it,
I did nothing.

And then about two weeks later,
I got a telegram saying:

"Where are the photographs?
Charles Chaplin. "

So I sent them off as quickly as I could,
and, of course, from that moment on...

...I wanted to be in Limelight
more than anything.

Every day was a miracle.

I woke up every morning,
could not believe...

...that I was going to go
and do this part.

On the other hand,
I had no film technique whatsoever.

I didn't know anything.
So he eased me very gradually into it...

...by starting the scenes
where I was comatose on the bed.

I got very quickly used to being filmed
and being in a film.

I liked the intimacy of it
compared with the theater. I still do.

His way of directing, from the beginning,
was to demonstrate...

...and he would demonstrate everything.

My hand here, there, look up,
say the line, how to say the line.

It was fine with me
because I worshipped him...

...and I would have done
anything that he wanted.

And also,
when he played the young girl...

...he was more young and girlish
and feminine and charming...

...than I could ever have been.

Sometimes he got very angry.
It's his prerogative.

Once, very much,
but I think it was deliberate.

I had this very difficult scene.

I now look at it and marvel
that I could do it at that age.

I'm walking, Calvero.
I'm walking.

I was terrified of it,
as anybody would have been.

So he called me into his dressing room
and he said:

"Claire, we'll just go over the words.
I don't want any acting.

Let's go over the words. "

So I kind of went over the words
with him, the scene, and he said:

"What is that supposed to be?" I said,
"That's what you asked me to do. "

"No, I didn't ask you to do that.
I want you to do the scene! I can't--"

Whatever it was.
Of course, I started to cry...

...which is what he was waiting for.
So we went out on the floor.

Everybody was ready.

They'd obviously been clued in to what
was going to happen to this poor child.

And we did the scene.
It was wonderful.

Now is the time to show them
what you're made of.

Now is the time to fight!

Remember what you told me
standing there by that window?

Remember what you said
about the power of the universe...

...moving the Earth, growing the trees,
and that power being within you?

Well, now is the time
to use that power and to fight!

Calvero, look, I'm walking.

I'm walking!

I'm walking!

I'm walking!

Calvero!

He'd worked me up
into that emotional pitch.

He knew what he was doing
when he was angry.

I think he, at that point,
was an older man...

...and had many things he wanted to say
in the film about love and about death...

...and about his background in London...

...about the music hall,
about something he knew well:

A young girl falling in love
with an older man.

Chaplin, Oona and their growing family
sailed for London...

...and Limelight's world premiere
in September, 1952.

I went before he did to set up
some publicity things and everything.

He was going to come later.

Then he got from the State Department
the right for a re-entry permit...

...because his whole life he was English.

But the day he and Oona
got on the boat, they said:

"We're not going to honor it. " Well,
of course, he got to London furious.

He sent Oona back to America,
and he said, "Sell everything.

Sell the house, sell the studio,
everything.

We're not going back there. "

We have an idea of touring
beautiful England...

...and going to all
the historical spots.

Naturally, we'll go to Stratford-on-Avon
and elsewhere...

...up to Scotland and Edinburgh
and all that.

This is the first time that my wife
has ever been abroad.

And so naturally, we're going to try
and cram in as much as we can.

Grand. One other thing.
Would you comment, sir...

...on this proposed ban on your
re-entry into the United States?

I've already-- I can only reiterate
what I said before.

I suppose-- I presume
that that's already been published.

-Thank you very much.
-Thank you.

As the late Calvin Coolidge said
when he terminated his presidency...

...embarking to go home, waylaid by one
of the pressmen who said:

"Mr. President, won't you say
a few farewell words...

...to the American people?"

He said, "Yes, goodbye. "

Eventually, Charlie and Oona
would have eight kids.

The last four of them born in exile.

Probably didn't work
as hard as he did in America...

...but I don't think he could be idle.

He definitely slowed down,
and he'd go traveling.

He took us on trips to Africa,
to the East.

The Chaplins settled in the Manoir
de Ban in Switzerland, in 1953.

He would live out his life here,
24 more years.

He was never idle.
He wrote scripts...

...rescored older films,
wrote his autobiography.

And thumbing his nose at America,
fellow-traveled with the Communists.

He even accepted a peace prize
from the Soviet Union...

... then distributed the cash
that came with it to the poor.

He created his own demise
with America, I think, over time...

...and was quoted as saying
in a very embittered way:

"The only thing I miss about America
is Almond Joy bars. "

Almond Joy and Mounds candy.

Uncle Sydney, he was great.
He was our funny uncle.

He was very, very eccentric,
or we thought he was very eccentric.

He was married to Gypsy...

...and they lived in a caravan because
Uncle Sydney never wanted a house...

...because he thought if he got in a
house, he would die there.

And that depressed him. He would get
very depressed about a lot of things.

And he was extremely nostalgic
for the past.

And he would watch the sunset
and cry.

And he would look at little babies
and say "Oh, if only I were that age. "

He was really terrible.

And he and my father
had a fantastic relationship...

...extraordinary relationship.
The ideal relationship between brothers.

He twice interrupted his exile
to make films.

A King in New York in 1957...

...and A Countess from Hong Kong
in 1966.

His son Sydney worked
with Sophia Loren.

Chaplin 's daughters
also appeared in it.

But like A King,
it was a critical and popular failure...

... which deeply depressed Chaplin.

He loved public and his kids
were a great public for him.

And if we went to a restaurant,
he had an even bigger public.

So in Switzerland we used to go to a
restaurant, and he would always order...

...truite au bleu.
It's a trout, and it's boiled live...

...so it sort of looks at you.
And we would be horrified.

And he'd pick up the plate
and he'd take this trout and he'd say:

"Emma, Emma, darling. " And he'd kiss
the trout on the lips, and we'd go:

"Oh, Daddy, how horrible! "

And by then, the whole restaurant
would be looking.

So he was an entertaining father.

His audiences now
were mainly accidental.

His most faithful camera
was Oona's.

But the old man would take
what he could get...

...and do the old bits
from his glory days.

It was as though he was surprised
at his own work and would say:

"But he's good. " He would talk
about him as "him. "

"Oh, that's very good. Oh, but that's,
that's very good. Oh, he's funny. "

I never met Chaplin. And only time
I saw him in person was in Cannes.

When he was towards the end of his life,
he was honored with a special award.

I was there. The theater was packed!
Packed to the roof!

Electricity was enormous...

...because nobody saw Chaplin
in person for years.

And the award is given to him...

...by French Minister of Culture,
Monsieur Duhamel, who, at this time...

...was also a very sick man
who was walking with a cane.

So then suddenly the light
goes out...

...spotlight on the curtain,
curtain opens...

...and then
they are standing there.

Theater explodes!
Bravo, standing ovation, bravos...

...one minute, two minutes,
five minutes!

Chaplin was visibly so moved
by this reaction...

...that he felt that he has to reward
the audience somehow.

So he's looking around and suddenly
he sees Monsieur Duhamel...

...next to him with a cane.

So he grabs his cane
and does few steps.

But in that moment, Monsieur
Duhamel, being stripped of the cane...

...starts to St. Vitus Dance
because he couldn't--

Now, Chaplin sees it,
and he just-- They just...

...clasp each other like that,
embrace, just to keep standing.

People in the audience who knew
about Monsieur Duhamel's condition...

...were petrified.
But most of the audience didn't know...

...and they thought that this
is a comic number to entertain them.

And they started to applaud
and laugh!

It was so surreal.
It was like Chaplin's films.

As the years wore on, more and more
honors were heaped on him.

The world was bent on reconciliation.

Even the United States
wanted to forgive and forget...

...and remember.

That process was completed...

... when he received an honorary
Academy Award in 1972.

He did come for the Academy Award,
but that was only for financial reasons.

Because he's rereleased his pictures,
and he came back and said:

"Oh, that's very kind of everybody. "
Two days at the Beverly Hills Hotel...

...he says,
"When are we going home?"

I can only say...

...thank you for the honor
of inviting me here...

...and, oh, you're wonderful,
sweet people. Thank you.

Chaplin had five more years to live
in declining physical and mental health.

But one has to believe
death held few terrors for him...

...because he'd long since
imagined his triumph over it.

His artistic immortality as well as
the hard, simple fact of his passing.

Both occurred in the same
Limelight sequence...

... which he shared with his great rival
Buster Keaton.

I think he must have known
he was the greatest.

But I think he had a problem wondering
if everyone else still thought so.

I remember once, he was then very old,
and I came with a boyfriend of mine...

...very interested in cinema.
Not so interested in Chaplin.

He preferred Buster Keaton,
which was not the thing to do.

We arrived, and he spoke with my father
a bit about the silent films.

And then he went on to talk about
Buster Keaton, and my father just....

He got smaller and smaller
and he shrunk, and he was so hurt.

It was like someone had stabbed him.
And he just became very, very quiet.

He didn't say a word
during dinner.

And after dinner, he was thinking
and he was looking into the fire...

...and suddenly he peeped
in a little voice.

He looked at my friend in the eyes
and he said:

"But I was an artist. " And no one knew
what he was talking about.

And then he said,
"You know, I gave him work. "

It's so moving, with Buster Keaton and
him together. He's in the foreground.

Your eye's on him.
But he has Keaton perfectly placed.

He doesn't diminish him at all.
And it goes on and on....

The two of them are going.
It's like jazz musicians taking off.

It was beautiful.

It was two men who had the greatest
respect for one another.

I personally was moved because I knew
that Buster had seen some hard times...

...and here was Charlie,
a multimillionaire...

...still with his own studio and all that.
And there was Buster...

...had had all that and lost it.

David Thomson once called Chaplin:

"The looming, mad politician
of the century, the demon tramp. "

A harsh judgment.

Yet there was something demonic in
him, quite visibly so in this sequence.

He was still driven
by his relentless ego...

...by his helpless need
to dominate his audience...

...now indifferent, even hostile.

If you're not curious anymore, you're not
anxious to know how to grow...

...as a filmmaker or a writer,
artist, or whatever, that's death.

He, I think, felt that, and I think
you have the results in Limelight.

There's something brave, sublime
and without precedent in movie history...

...about a man contemplating
his own death on-screen.

He makes a peace with it too.
He accepts the passage.

Doesn't like it, but accepts the transition
of being old and dying...

...but also of him no longer
having the energy of youth.

When that sheet is put over his face,
with that beautiful music at the end...

...that is the final image
of Chaplin's there.

I was fortunate enough
to be in that scene, silent.

And Buster was there.
And we're pulling back...

...and Buster is muttering to Charlie,
not moving his lips:

"Good, Charlie. Stay just where you are.
You're right in the center.

Hold it. Don't move. Yeah, yeah,
that's it. We've made it. Yeah. "

And I thought:

"Boy, you, Norman, have been present
at a moment in history. "

And it was just--

It made you embrace
your whole profession, so to speak.

You say, "This is what real greatness
in this profession is. "

The last years of his life,
he very much withdrew into himself.

It was very hard for my mother.

She had a very hard time, really, looking
after a man who'd been so vital...

...and such a strong presence,
suddenly, really, vanishing away.

But he seemed to be very much
at peace with himself.

He kind of slowly drifted,
drifted away...

...and his death was just at the end
of a very slow drifting away.

His was the face of his century.

His was the life of his century.

Through his will and energy,
and yes, genius...

...he encompassed,
as much as one man can...

... the joy and the anguish
of his times...

... their romance, their horrors...

...and, of course, what laughter
we could find in them.

He was a flawed man,
a haunted man, a tormented man.

Which is to say,
he was only human...

...but with this uncanny ability
to reflect and refract...

...our humanity back at us.