The story of Charlie Chaplin only gets more incredible as the years go by: the man who left behind poverty and the workhouse to become the inventor of cinema, celebrity and modernity. As his movies took off, his globally adored “little tramp” character became mass produced, like the Ford Model T or the populist political movements of interwar history. In his heyday, Chaplin’s wealth and fame fused together to create something beyond anything people had conceived those two things to be. No wonder his triumph created a residue of wariness and resentment among America’s governing classes, which spilled out into outright red-scare rage when Chaplin, the bumptious autodidact and autocrat, opened his mouth about communism.
Film-makers Peter Middleton and James Spinney are well positioned to take advantage of this enduringly potent real-life legend with their own retelling; they also use new archive material of press conferences and interviews, which they transform with “verbatim cinema” reconstruction techniques. Anything like this inevitably stands in the shadow of David Robinson’s mighty 1985 biography, which set the gold-standard for Chaplin studies and inspired Richard Attenborough’s 1992 biopic starring Robert Downey Jr. But interestingly this documentary moves away, just a little, from the unitary single-stranded heroic biography – to the multi-faceted question of Chaplin’s elusive personae, with and without voice, with and without moustache, with and without political opinions. No matter how often I see it, Chaplin’s non-moustached face is thrillingly naked and strange: with upper lip exposed, the quirky little sketch of a face suddenly evolves into something hyper-intelligent, ambitious, sensual. And this film is more concerned to give Chaplin’s wives more of a presence, rather than being simply walk-on players in the tabloid-gossip farce about the great genius’s weakness for sex.
