Charlie Chaplin

Hunger as a Screenplay

Charlie Chaplin was born in London in 1889, a city that smelled of coal and poverty. His parents were music-hall performers whose careers quickly fell apart. His mother ended up in an asylum, and his father died of alcoholism before the boy turned twelve.

That childhood of hardship shaped the harshness of his later films. In 1910, he traveled to the United States with Fred Karno's vaudeville company. He wasn't after art, just a way to never again sleep on the streets of Lambeth.

And the gamble paid off.

Mack Sennett signed him to Keystone Studios in 1913 for 150 dollars a week. While filming Mabel's Strange Predicament in 1914, he wore baggy trousers borrowed from Fatty Arbuckle and shoes in size 47 worn backward. Chaplin wanted a costume that was a mass of contradictions.

The character was a tramp with a gentleman's manners who connected with a working class that saw its own hardships reflected in him. Chaplin soon understood that real money lay in absolute control of the production process. In 1919 he founded United Artists with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks to keep theater owners from cutting his films.

He demanded hundreds of retakes, wearing out the actors completely.

During the filming of The Kid in 1921, he shot more than 120,000 meters of film for a final result of barely one hour. He was an obsessive perfectionist who composed his own music because he didn't trust the judgment of the orchestra conductors of the era.

Silence Against the Machines

When sound film arrived in 1927, Chaplin refused to let his character speak. He knew a voice would break the universal magic of pantomime, which worked just as well in Beijing as in Madrid. City Lights in 1931 was a massive hit, even though it was a silent film in the age of synchronized sound.

But the world was changing too quickly for the old style of physical comedy.

In 1936 he released Modern Times, a direct critique of industrialization and assembly-line production systems. It was the last time audiences saw the Tramp on the big screen. Politics inevitably crept into his life when he decided to parody the rise of fascism in Europe.

The Great Dictator in 1940 was his first fully talking film. It was also a direct attack on Adolf Hitler, which brought him serious trouble with the U.S. government. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI began monitoring him over alleged communist sympathies and his refusal to adopt American citizenship.

He was barred from entering the United States in 1952 while traveling to London.

The news reached him while he was sailing across the Atlantic. Chaplin decided not to fight it and settled in a mansion in Switzerland called Manoir de Ban. He lived there for the rest of his life with Oona O’Neill and their eight children, in an exile that lasted two decades.

The Failure of the Final Show

His films grew bitterer and less physical over the years. In 1957, he shot A King in New York in England to mock the anti-communist paranoia that had driven him out of the country. The film didn't have the impact he had hoped for and showed a director who was starting to lose his grip on younger audiences.

In 1967, he directed his last film, titled A Countess from Hong Kong.

Critics were merciless toward the film. Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren didn't fit with Chaplin's directing method, which involved acting out every scene himself so that the actors would imitate him exactly. Brando even said the director was a sadist on the set.

He died on Christmas Day 1977 in Corsier-sur-Vevey while asleep. Three months after his funeral, two mechanics stole his coffin from the local cemetery and demanded a ransom of 600,000 Swiss francs from the family.