Original subtitles

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.