CHAPLIN, CHARLIE

Charles Spencer ("Charlie") Chaplin (April 16, 1889–December 25, 1977), motion-picture actor, director, producer, and writer, was born in London, England, to two music-hall singers who separated soon after his birth. Chaplin experienced a difficult and often unstable childhood. A talented mimic, he began acting early, and by 1913 the successful music-hall performer signed a movie contract to work for Keystone's Mack Sennett. Chaplin quickly developed a comic persona, the Tramp, which launched him to stardom, and began to write and direct his short comedies. By 1919 he had built his own movie studio and cofounded United Artists with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith. During the 1920s Chaplin shifted from two-reel shorts to feature-length films, most notably The Gold Rush (1925).

During the Depression Chaplin completed one film, City Lights (1931), and made two more, Modern Times (1936) and The Great Dictator (1940). City Lights was planned before the stock market crash of 1929 and is best considered Chaplin's farewell to the 1920s, particularly for its satirical portrayal of an urban millionaire who is generous when drunk but suicidal when sober.

The Depression left its imprint on both Modern Times and The Great Dictator. In 1931 and 1932 Chaplin took a fifteen-month world tour, which demonstrated his global fame and confronted him with the suffering of the Depression. Responding to calls for socially relevant works, Chaplin began work in 1933 on a project, The Masses, that was released in 1936 as Modern Times. Although it resembled earlier Chaplin features with its visual comedy, romance, and pathos, Modern Times was more topical than his previous films, alluding to the Depression in images of frantic assembly lines, closed factories, and street clashes between protesters and the police. Ideologically progressive, the film sympathized with common people like his Tramp and the gamin, and criticized authority figures like the factory owner or the policeman who kills the gamin's father. Critics and moviegoers were divided in their response to this new and more socially aware Chaplin.

Chaplin's next film, The Great Dictator, aligned itself with another progressive cause of the later Depression years: antifascism. A pointed satirical attack on fascism, the film starred Chaplin in two roles—a gentle Jewish barber and the dictator of Tomania, Adenoid Hynkel. Chaplin conceived the film in the late 1930s, halted production on it briefly when World War II erupted in 1939, then decided that even during wartime, it was important to use humor to combat what he considered to be cruel totalitarianism. The Great Dictator was Chaplin's biggest box-office success in its initial domestic release. Recognizing its popularity, Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Chaplin to read the film's final speech at a presidential inaugural ball in 1941. By the end of the Depression, Chaplin was developing the reputation of a politically aware and progressive filmmaker; that reputation would later cause him problems after the Cold War set in, when he faced accusations that he was a Communist.

See Also: FASCISM; HOLLYWOOD AND THE FILM INDUSTRY.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gehring, Wes D. Charlie Chaplin, a Bio-Bibliography. 1983.

Lynn, Kenneth Schuyler. Charlie Chaplin and His Times. 1997.

Lyons, Timothy J. Charles Chaplin, a Guide to References and Resources. 1979.

Maland, Charles J. Chaplin and American Culture the Evolution of a Star Image. 1989.

Robinson, David. Chaplin, His Life and Art. 1989.

CHARLES J. MALAND