Charlie Chaplin

A dissenting voice opines:

I much prefer Buster Keaton.

For all his pantomimic skills, Chaplin is just too sentimental for my taste: smothered in kids and cute romantic heroines. Very Dickens, in fact: social comment sugared with sentimentality.

Keaton has a poetic edge absent in Chaplin, a frisson of existential confusion to which I (personally) relate much more than to Chaplin's work.

eddie wrote:A dissenting voice opines:
I much prefer Buster Keaton.
For all his pantomimic skills, Chaplin is just too sentimental for my taste: smothered in kids and cute romantic heroines. Very Dickens, in fact: social comment sugared with sentimentality.
Keaton has a poetic edge absent in Chaplin, a frisson of existential confusion to which I (personally) relate much more than to Chaplin's work.

...but it's not an either / or eh eddie?
...I love a sugared-sentiment heart-wrench,
...and keaton's poesy moves me.

blue moon wrote:...but it's not an either / or eh eddie?

No, of course not. Chaplin was a great artist. It's just a matter of personal taste.

Incidentally, I know the mental asylum (not personally, thank goodness) in which Chaplin's mother was confined: St Bernard's, Hanwell in West London. The very same institution which later (unsuccessfully) treated Soho rake Jeffrey Bernard for his alcoholism.

St Bernard's was on the outer fringes of my psychogeographical landscape when I was growing up in Ealing, West London.

eddie wrote:I much prefer Buster Keaton.

Yes but "I gave him work".

I don't like that Chaplin said that

eddie wrote:

blue moon wrote:...but it's not an either / or eh eddie?

No, of course not. Chaplin was a great artist. It's just a matter of personal taste.

Incidentally, I know the mental asylum (not personally, thank goodness) in which Chaplin's mother was confined: St Bernard's, Hanwell in West London. The very same institution which later (unsuccessfully) treated Soho rake Jeffrey Bernard for his alcoholism.

St Bernard's was on the outer fringes of my psychogeographical landscape when I was growing up in Ealing, West London.

...sorry eddie..posted same time as you (was editing original post).

...I just remembered that you posted about psychogeography recently...Don't tell asdf but I could easily obsess about that topic. So I have to shelve it for now.
There's been a lot to read and I haven't had time to read...the arctic explorers are calling me too.
...sigh...

asdf wrote:

eddie wrote:I much prefer Buster Keaton.

Yes but "I gave him work".

I don't like that Chaplin said that

...was it said as a nasty comment?

My (admittedly imperfect) memory tells me that Samuel Beckett originally wanted Chaplin for the lead character in his strange short film (entitled "Film"- what else, since it concerned the all-seeing eye of the camera?), but Chaplin wasn't available.

So, instead, they hauled a semi-alcoholic Buster out of retirement for the role. He did a good job, but the general consensus of critical opinion was that the "Great Stone Face" was criminally underused- you hardly see it!

Has anyone here seen Chaplin's film 'A Countess from Hong Kong' featuring Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren. It has always intrigued me.

...for the first time in my life i saw keaton last week in a documentry about silent films...it was just an excerpt. He was brilliant.
...gorgeous-looking. On another thread re your boring posts option 2. (i think it is) is true for me. I'll be off on a keaton tangent now.

TickleCockBridge wrote:Has anyone here seen Chaplin's film 'A Countess from Hong Kong' featuring Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren. It has always intrigued me.

...i haven't seen it...what's intriguing?

blue moon wrote:

TickleCockBridge wrote:Has anyone here seen Chaplin's film 'A Countess from Hong Kong' featuring Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren. It has always intrigued me.

...i haven't seen it...what's intriguing?

Well, Chaplin directing Brando intrigues me somewhat. I like them both.

blue moon wrote:...for the first time in my life i saw keaton last week in a documentry

For the FIRST TIME IN YOUR LIFE? How is that possible?

eddie wrote:

blue moon wrote:...for the first time in my life i saw keaton last week in a documentry

For the FIRST TIME IN YOUR LIFE? How is that possible?

...I've never had a lot of access to telly or to towns with movies. And then I was busy.

blue moon wrote:

asdf wrote:

eddie wrote:I much prefer Buster Keaton.

Yes but "I gave him work".

I don't like that Chaplin said that

...was it said as a nasty comment?

I think the story is that Geraldine took her boyfriend to have dinner with her family. And during the dinner her boyfriend said he preferred Buster Keaton and that upset Charles Chaplin and said "but I gave him work". So yes, I think it was a nasty comment. But maybe he was just joking...

Chaplin gave Keaton work for the movie Limelight



I don't really like this movie but it's the one with that beautiful soundtrack we like

TickleCockBridge wrote:Has anyone here seen Chaplin's film 'A Countess from Hong Kong' featuring Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren. It has always intrigued me.

I saw it but I almost don't remember anything about it except that Chaplin plays the roll of a strange waiter or something in a boat and he is very old. It takes place in a boat.

blue moon wrote:Don't tell asdf but I could easily obsess about that topic.

Don't worry asdf will never know it...

asdf wrote:

TickleCockBridge wrote:Has anyone here seen Chaplin's film 'A Countess from Hong Kong' featuring Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren. It has always intrigued me.

I saw it but I almost don't remember anything about it except that Chaplin plays the roll of a strange waiter or something in a boat and he is very old. It takes place in a boat.

Yeah, most reviews seem to sum it up in that way, hence why I haven't bothered to seek it out!

asdf wrote:...I think the story is that Geraldine took her boyfriend to have dinner with her family. And during the dinner her boyfriend said he preferred Buster Keaton and that upset Charles Chaplin and said "but I gave him work". So yes, I think it was a nasty comment. But maybe he was just joking...

...that would be like a son-in-law looking at his dinner and saying his mother was a better cook.....oooohhh!

I think it wasn't appropiate to say that, what Geraldine boyfriend's said... but somewhere in Charles Chaplin's mind he had the answer ready...

asdf wrote:I think it wasn't appropiate to say that, what Geraldine boyfriend's said... but somewhere in Charles Chaplin's mind he had the answer ready...

...I like the way you put that.

MI5 spied on Charlie Chaplin after FBI asked for help to banish him from US

British agency concluded that actor – described by US counterparts as 'parlour Bolshevik' – was no security risk

Richard Norton-Taylor

guardian.co.uk, Friday 17 February 2012 00.00 GMT


Charlie Chaplin and Claire Bloom in the 1952 film Limelight. The following year he was banned from returning to the US and settled in Switzerland. Photograph: Allstar/United Artists/Sportsphoto Ltd

MI5 opened a file on Charlie Chaplin while he was being hounded by J Edgar Hoover's FBI for alleged communist sympathies.

The FBI, which described the star of Modern Times and The Great Dictator as one of "Hollywood's parlour Bolsheviks", asked MI5 for information to help get him banned from the US. The results, including information gathered through eavesdropping, are contained in an extensive personal MI5 file released on Friday at the National Archives.

"Chaplin has given funds to communist front organisations … He has been involved in paternity and abortion cases," an MI5 liaison officer in Washington warned in October 1952.

MI5 noted that a decade earlier Chaplin had told the Los Angeles branch of the National Council of American Soviet Friendship: "There is a great deal of good in communism. We can use the good and segregate the bad."

Papers have been withheld from Chaplin's MI5 file to protect the names of informants though there are unexplained, probably inconsequential, references to Jimmy Reid, the communist Scottish trade unionist; Larry Adler, the harmonica virtuoso who left his native US where he was branded a communist and blacklisted; and Humphrey Lyttelton, the Eton-educated jazz musician who once described himself a "romantic socialist".

MI5 intercepted a telegram from Ivor Montagu, a film critic, producer and one-time Soviet spy, telling Chaplin how sorry he was to miss him in London when the star visited London in 1952.

The file also contains cuttings from newspapers and magazines. Noting that Chaplin had not taken American citizenship though he had lived in the US for more than 30 years, the Daily Worker welcomed him to London. "His films have lampooned the great and the dictators, raised up the common man against the rich," the paper said. "Now the world's bully threatens the world's clown."

The FBI, which amassed more than 2,000 pages on Chaplin, asked MI5 if he was going to meet any "highly placed persons" in London, and to establish any links he had with the Communist party there.

In particular, it wanted MI5 to find out where Chaplin was born and pursue suggestions that his real name was Israel Thornstein.

MI5 searched but to no avail. There was "'no evidence that Chaplin's name is or ever has been Israel Thornstein", it told the FBI. A suggestion that he "may have been born in France" came to nothing.

MI5 found no record of his birth in Somerset House, then the home of the register of British births. "It would seem that Chaplin was either not born in this country or that his name at birth was other than those mentioned," an MI5 report concluded. It told the US that there was "no trace in our records of Charlie Chaplin".

It had always been assumed that Chaplin was born in Walworth, south London, on 16 April 1889. Recently, however, a letter was discovered in family papers from Jack Hill, who told Chaplin in the 1970s that he had come into the world "in a caravan [that] belonged to the Gypsy Queen, who was my auntie. You were born on the Black Patch in Smethwick near Birmingham."

The newly released file shows that while communist sympathies were the determining factor for the FBI, for MI5 the issue was whether Chaplin ever presented a security risk. And in its view, it makes clear, he was not.

"We have no trace in our records of this man, nor are we satisfied that there are any reliable grounds for regarding him as a security risk," Sir Percy Sillitoe, then head of MI5, told the chief police commissioner in South Africa, where Chaplin was planning a visit.

MI5 suggested his name had been exploited in the interests of communism as "one of the victims of McCarthyism".

Files previously released at the National Archives reveal that shortly before his death in 1950, George Orwell handed a female friend working for an anti-communist propaganda unit in the Foreign Office a list of 35 names of people, including Chaplin, whom he considered "crypto-communists and fellow-travellers".

Chaplin's MI5 file, number PF710549, concludes: "It may be that Chaplin is a communist sympathiser but on the information before us he would appear to be no more than a 'progressive', or radical."

In 1953 the US prevented Chaplin from returning to America. He denied ever being a communist but decided not to contest the US ban and instead live in Switzerland. "I am a victim of lies and vicious propaganda," he said.

Chaplin died in his sleep in Vevey, Switzerland, on Christmas Day in 1977.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH18_0nFVLA
Mark Steel on Chaplin 1/4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j0Daw6m9n4
Mark Steel on Chaplin 2/4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2EjUpg3TfQ
Mark Steel on Chaplin 3/4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fKOY0SHV_8
Mark Steel on Chaplin 4/4