Chaplin: His Life and Art
By David Robinson
Penguin, 2001
892 pages, $33 (pb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
It would have been Charlie Chaplin's greatest performance. "I'd have turned up in my tramp outfit — baggy pants, bowler hat and cane — and when I was questioned I'd have used all sorts of comic business to make a laughing stock of the inquisitors. The whole Un-American Activities thing would have been laughed out of existence in front of millions of viewers."
Unfortunately, the anti-communist witch-hunters of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) eventually decided, after three deferred subpoenas in 1947, that discretion was the better part of ideological valour and decided not to call Chaplin to stand trial for his left-wing politics. Chaplin's universally loved tramp would certainly have stolen the show and, however briefly, derailed the McCarthyite juggernaut.
The Chaplin of David Robinson's colourful, if pedantic, biography emerges as a lyric clown with a conscience who made political rulers edgy and fearful.
Born to a London music hall family in 1889, Chaplin's early years made him forever sympathetic to the plight and dreams of the poor. Chaplin scoured the streets for show-business work. His talent for mime, movement and comedy attracted the eye of Fred Karno's Speechless Comedians whose knockabout stage act successfully toured the US. While there, Chaplin was discovered by the Keystone Film Company in 1913.
To the frenetic Keystone slapstick, Chaplin added subtlety and a slower pace, a pinch of pathos and a slice of sentimentality. His use of the dream sequence where adventure and romance reign only to be shattered by cold reality, connected with the life of the common people and touched their hearts.
Chaplin's tramp belonged to the dirt roads and mean urban streets of his working-class viewers, to the exploitation of wage-labour and the humiliation of unemployment. An instinctive libertarian (he believed in "the natural human revulsion against any sort of authority"), his targets for mayhem included bosses, police and the bourgeois pretensions of the middle class: "the average person [delights] in seeing wealth and luxury in trouble. The reason for this, of course, lies in the fact that nine-tenths of the people in the world are poor."
Chaplin's cinematic brilliance meant he was able to name his own salary. He soon achieved the rare feat of compelling the film industry to serve him, not vice versa, by establishing his own independent production company.
Chaplin's seemingly simple films were the result of hard labour, endless take after take, attention to detail and taut editing, driven by his often neurotic quest for perfection. Demanding the same standards from his employees, he was autocratic on the movie set and often difficult, sometimes impossible, to work for. Nevertheless he was the only Hollywood producer to pay his employees their full salaries even when not in full production.
By 1918, his fame was at its peak. It seemed that everyone was watching Charlie Chaplin. The FBI certainly was. Chaplin's FBI file (which eventually ran to 1900 pages) recorded his transgressions.
He held parties for prominent union leaders, befriended Marxists and socialists (singer Paul Robeson, painter Pablo Picasso, scientist Albert Einstein, Bolshevik filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein to name a few). He was hostile to motion picture censorship. His films sided with the underdog, mocked the well-off and undermined authority. He had a deep hatred for the folly, waste and tragedy of war and he regarded patriotism as "the greatest insanity the world has ever suffered".
He argued that automation "should benefit mankind, not spell tragedy and throw it out of work". His 1936 classic, Modern Times, satirised the enslavement of workers by machines. One scene that didn't make it to the final cut illustrates the state of his political mind. Two tramps on a park bench solemnly discuss the world economic crisis and their fears of going off the gold standard: "This means the end of our prosperity, we shall have to economise" one says as they carefully replace their cigarette butts in their tins.
Chaplin employed two "ardent Marxists" in the production of The Great Dictator (1938), in which a Jewish barber, mistaken for Hitler, toys with a balloon globe in a comically sinister ballet, and delivers a long closing speech summing up Chaplin's idealism, fears and hopes for humanity: "The way of life can be free and beautiful. Greed has poisoned men's souls — has barricaded the world with hate — has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed ... we need humanity ... kindness and gentleness."
Wartime cinema audiences loved the film and the ridicule heaped on Hitler. The Communist Party of Great Britain issued Chaplin's final speech from the film as a pamphlet.
The United States' temporary war-time alliance with Russia, however, did nothing to allay the FBI's suspicions of Chaplin. They continued to spy on him, monitored his cheque account for (non-existent) donations to the US Communist Party, gravely logged his petition-signing against racism and his denunciation of "the atomic bomb [as] the most horrible invention of mankind". They fed anti-Chaplin slander to the gossip columnists.
Unable to prove any financial links to the Communist Party, the FBI resorted to digging for dirt amongst Chaplin's first two disastrous marriages and string of love affairs. Indicted in 1944 for "illicit sexual relations", Chaplin was found not guilty but was nevertheless in and out of court on other sex charges as former lovers sought to cream off some of his millions in paternity suits.
The campaign against Chaplin's "moral turpitude" and communist sympathies, however, failed to damage Chaplin's popularity except amongst the already hostile hard-right. It merely served to hone his political sharpness.
In his 1947 film, Monsier Verdoux, a bank clerk made redundant during the Great Depression takes to murdering rich widows for their money and adopts the defence at his trial that he was merely carrying out the philosophy of capitalism which had developed weapons of destruction for the purpose of wealth generation. In one of many lines that did not survive the censors, Verdoux proclaims that mass murder is "the history of many a big business. One murder makes a villain ... millions a hero".
This film infuriated the Cold War zealots. Hollywood Boulevard's "Walk of Fame" could not find a bronze star for Chaplin amongst the thousand set in the pavement because of protests by property owners. Right-wing extremists picketed his films and staged riots inside cinemas which showed them. Whilst one arm of the government (HUAC) hesitated to act, another arm (the Immigration and Naturalization Service) pounced. Whilst on board the QEII to London, the US attorney-general rescinded Chaplin's re-entry permit. Chaplin was forced into exile.
From Switzerland, Chaplin retaliated with "my most rebellious film", A King in New York, in 1957. This shot against McCarthyite paranoia and capitalist materialism was not shown in the US for another 20, such was official America's hatred of the world's most popular comedian.
Reconciliation was eventually achieved, however. Chaplin's last film, A Countess in Hong Kong, was a gentle romantic comedy and he was allowed back into the US to accept shelf-load of awards and an honorary Oscar.
Chaplin died in 1977, an unrepentant liberal humanist, a comic genius and man of the left whose clowning and oblique, sometimes direct, socio-political satire made millions weep at the injustice of social division and laugh at the luxuried few and those who policed their privilege.
A symbol to the poor and marginalised, Chaplin was the "little fellow" bewildered by a world that had no place for him but who brought it down to size and made it vulnerable by aiming a giant laugh against it.
From Green Left Weekly, May 8, 2002.
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