The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (74 page)

Chaplin adored his mother, and his films worship women with an ingratiating but crippled awe. The beautiful women in his films are not just dream women that Charlie loves from afar, but emblems of grace that he aspires to. The delicacy of Chaplin’s own features, the Italianate daintiness of his gestures, and above all, the mooning after misty emotional contentment are feminine characteristics as conceived by an exquisite man. Indeed, Chaplin’s persona is often very close to eighteenth-century sentimentality: a beautifully mannered dreamer who has trained himself into the emotional sensibility that will sometimes shame a woman with its refinement. The history of bisexuality in the movies begins with Chaplin, and the impression of sophistication that he gave in his earliest work is less a quality of the films than his own Cherubino-like refinement amid so much mugging.

But the cruelty in Chaplin is also feminine, impetuous, and instinctive. Chaplin was forever revenging himself on gross, ugly men. His slapstick is often violent and one of the abiding images of Chaplin is of the sharp-toed ballet dancer kicking some thug’s ass. As a mime, too, he used impersonation as a weapon. The most famous instance of this is his Hitler caricature in
The Great Dictator
. But just as he was prepared and able at five to imitate his mother, so the tramp relates to the outside world through his ability to master it with mime.

Such egotism expresses Chaplin’s hostility to the world, and suggests how his portrait of the little man pandered to the desire for recognition in anonymous audiences. Similarly, Chaplin’s wistful admiration of women seems ultimately prettier and more rarefied than any woman is capable of—as witness the last, tremulous close-up of
City Lights
. Was Chaplin’s common man so far from Hitler? He spoke to disappointment, brutalized feelings, and failure and saw that through movies he could concoct a daydream world in which the tramp thrives and in which his whole ethos of self-pity is vindicated.

Third, in his line, “This thought was conveyed to the audience,” there is the early appreciation of the need to signal emotion and laughter to an audience. The tramp’s famous glance into the camera, for all its simpering, is an acute grab for sympathy. Just as in
A Night in the Show
—the film of Chaplin’s most successful music-hall act—as the drunken toff in the balcony about to destroy the stage show, he looks at the camera as if to say “Shall we? Let’s …,” so Chaplin’s private world is one that he could only reach out from through personal rhetoric. He does not make an artistic, comic statement on the world but channels it through himself and that demagogic moment when he knows that he has an audience’s attention. The instinct for that attention is central to the workings of cinema, and I believe Chaplin understood years before anyone else the way in which audiences might identify with a star. It is no accident that he often employed dream sequences in his early films—for example,
The Bank
and
Shoulder Arms
. Intuitively, he sensed how ready the viewers were to have their fantasies indulged.

But that instinct usually lacked artistic intelligence, real human sympathy, and even humor. Chaplin’s isolation barred him from working with anyone else. He needed to fulfil every creative function on a film, whether it is scripting, composing, or directing actors. He is isolated, too, in the sense that his later films seem as cut off from any known period or reality as the earlier ones. That eerie feeling one has in reading the later parts of
My Autobiography
—that Chaplin was still unable to appreciate the world on any other than his own terms—is borne out by the films that supposedly deal with the world’s problems but in a social setting that seems increasingly implausible. Only a great egotist could have made films as unspecific as
Limelight, A King in New York
, and
A Countess from Hong Kong
. Of course, comedy should be its own world, but Chaplin seems innocent of realities of place, time, character, and situation. And in the end such numbness is disturbing, just as Chaplin’s weird old age seemed unreal and deluded. More and more, with that thin, unlocalized voice forever talking the dictionary, and with silver-haired prettiness untouched, Chaplin looked like a great instinct narrowed by the absence of the other qualities that would mature an artist.

His later films are dreadful, and they are few and far between. The early work seems to me narrow when put beside the films of Keaton and the Marx Brothers. But the early shorts do have a strange sophistication that derives from Chaplin’s intuitive skill at easing himself into an audience’s mind. Their jokes are usually corny and repetitive, but Chaplin’s attempt to charm the viewer is masterly. Those recurring conclusions that iris in on the figure of Chaplin walking away from us are ingenious fosterings of our own sense of loss and our hope that he will be back soon. And as an actor/performer who has impinged on the world’s huddling round the idea of the oppressed little man, Chaplin may be the most famous image of the twentieth century. It is a marvelous and intriguing story, and one that needs major biographies to make up for the inconsequence of most of his own book.

The facts of Chaplin’s career amply bear out the theory of overweening abstraction from the world. He toured America with Fred Karno twice before 1914 when he went to work for Sennett at Keystone. By 1915 he moved on to Essanay, by now the writer and director of all his films. His salary rose prodigiously as in 1916 he went to Mutual. From 1917 he was producing his films independently, to be handled by First National. Then in 1919 he was one of the founding members of United Artists, for whom
A Woman of Paris
was his first film. It was also his first full-length film. After that, in fifty years he made only ten films. Increasingly, around the period 1935–50, his dissatisfaction with the world was voiced in films. Like many more learned men, he feared progress and the agony of choosing between capitalism and socialism. It was only petulance that made him resist sound until 1936, and then horribly misuse it.
The Great Dictator
is an extraordinary mixture of comic mime, halting construction, and an embarrassing sermon at the end.

The crisis in his life came after the war.
Monsieur Verdoux
is by far his most interesting film, the story of a Landru figure and the only undisguised expression of his distaste for women and the world. At this time he was mildly sympathetic to communism and, in 1952, he chose to leave America, hurt by official hostility. His political philosophy was actually threadbare and the move now looks like a final retreat into the cloud cuckoo land of Switzerland. As early as
Easy Street
, Chaplin’s withdrawn sensitivity had depicted an intractable town, dominated by bullies, that the cop Charlie made safe for the bourgeois to walk about in. Chaplin’s return to Europe was a sorrowful gesture that could only, eventually, prompt a guilty change of heart in America. Eventually, he was reclaimed and must have taken great satisfaction in the way so vast an audience came round. In truth, Chaplin is the looming mad politician of the century, the demon tramp. It is a character based on the belief that there are “little people.” Whereas art should insist that people are all the same size.

Geraldine Chaplin
, b. Santa Monica, California, 1944
The father’s place in film history is automatic, but there are those who found his personality hard to receive. Yet to criticize Charlie Chaplin amounts, in some quarters, to an unforgivable heresy that marks one down as the baleful, inhuman, and antilife anti-Charlie. I believe I would give up all of Charlie’s work for
Cria Cuervos
(75, Carlos Saura), which contains a performance of the utmost emotional rigor and depth from his daughter Geraldine. Geraldine’s eloquent features are like a territory helpless against invasion. In
Cria
, she is especially touching in that she seems to have been devastated by feelings that cannot be fobbed off or acted out. She has the natural face of vulnerability: the same resolute stare belonged to Lillian Gish, the young Anna Karina, and to Ana Torrent, her other self in the magnificent
Cria
.

This European actress is too little appreciated in America, thanks in part to the very different, garrulous cuckoo Robert Altman created in
Nashville
(75), where Chaplin gave herself to Opal from the BBC as generously as she aided Saura’s film. Of course, Carlos Saura was her lover and may be expected to see and know an inner person. Whereas Altman’s gallery pictures are more concerned with the oddities of first impression. But it is just as likely that the actress herself is creatively divided. Her own history of London, Beverly Hills, Geneva, and Madrid may be the surface turmoil of remarkable pedigree: the first child of Chaplin’s happy, last marriage to Oona, daughter of that implacably tragic playwright Eugene O’Neill. It’s easy to see Chaplin’s dark romanticism in Geraldine’s face; but listen as well for the echo of
Anna Christie
and
Long Day’s Journey into Night
.

She was a ballet student as a child, and it is likely that her lessons inspired part of her father’s
Limelight
, as well as the debut of Claire Bloom, a woman with O’Neill looks. Geraldine made her first film in 1964, and since then she has worked hard in a variety of countries and languages:
Par un Beau Matin d’Été
(64, Jacques Deray); an introduction to Madrid in
Doctor Zhivago
(65, David Lean);
Peppermint Frappé
(67, Saura);
Stranger in the House
(67, Pierre Rouve);
Stress es Tres, Tres
(68, Saura);
I Killed Rasputin
(68, Robert Hossein);
La Madriguera
(69, Saura);
The
Hawaiians
(70, Tom Gries);
Zero Population Control
(71, Michael Campus);
Ana y los Lobos
(72, Saura);
Innocent Bystanders
(72, Peter Collinson); as Anne of Austria, overshadowed by Dunaway and Raquel Welch in
The Three Musketeers (The Queen’s Diamonds
) (73, Richard Lester) and
The Four Musketeers (The Revenge of Milady
) (74, Lester);
Noroit
(75, Jacques Rivette); Annie Oakley in
Buffalo Bill and the Indians
(76, Altman); bemused and wandering in
Welcome to L.A
. (76, Alan Rudolph); a classic victim in
Roseland
(77, James Ivory);
Brief Letter, Long Farewell
(77, Herbert Vessely);
Un Page d’Amour
(77, Maurice Rabinowicz);
Elisa, Vida Mia
(77, Saura); the distraught mistress of ceremonies in
A Wedding
(78, Altman); brilliant as the woman out of prison in
Remember My Name
(78, Rudolph); and
L’Adoption
(78, Marc Grunebaum).

Older, gaunt sometimes, yet oddly childlike, she remained capable of indelible moments:
Mama Cumple 100 Anos
(79, Saura);
Le Voyage en Douce
(79, Michel Deville);
The Mirror Crack’d
(80, Guy Hamilton);
Les Uns et les Autres
(81, Claude Lelouch);
La Vie est un Roman
(83, Alain Resnais);
L’Amour par Terre
(84, Rivette);
The Corsican Brothers
(85, Ian Sharp);
White Mischief
(87, Michael Radford); superb as the vain collector in
The Moderns
(88, Rudolph);
Return of the Musketeers
(89, Lester);
Je Veux Rentre à la Maison
(89, Resnais);
The Children
(90, Tony Palmer); as her own deranged grandmother in
Chaplin
(92, Richard Attenborough), the one reason for seeing that picture;
The Age of Innocence
(93, Martin Scorsese); and
Words Upon the Window Pane
(94, Mary McGuckian).

By the midnineties, she was working a lot in Europe or in films of a religious nature:
Home for the Holidays
(95, Jodie Foster);
Para Recibir el Canto de los Pájaros
(95, Jorge Sanjiner);
Gulliver’s Travels
(96, Charles Sturridge);
Jane Eyre
(96, Franco Zeffirelli);
Os Olhos da Asia
(96, João Mario Grilo);
Crimetime
(96, George Sluizer);
The Odyssey
(97, Andrei Konchalovsky); the lead in
Mother Teresa: In the Name of God’s Poor
(97, Kevin Connor);
Cousin Bette
(98, Des McAnuff);
Finisterre, Donde Termina el Mundo
(98, Xavier Villaverde);
To Walk with Lions
(99, Carl Schultz);
Beresina
(99, Daniel Schmid);
Mary, Mother of Jesus
(99, Connor);
Tu Qué Harias por Amor
(99, Carlos Saura Medrano—the son of Carlos Saura);
In the Beginning
(00, Connor);
Hable con Ella
(02, Pedro Almodóvar);
Dinotopia
(02, Marco Brambilla);
Winter Solstice
(03, Martyn Friend);
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
(04, Mary McGuckian);
Heidi
(05, Paul Marcus);
Oculto
(05, Antonio Hernández);
Melissa P
(05, Luca Guadagnino);
Blood Rayne
(05, Uwe Böll);
The Orphanage
(07, Juan Antonio Bayona);
Teresa, el Cuerpo de Cristo
(07, Ray Loriga);
Diario de una Ninfómana
(09, Antonia Molina).

Cyd Charisse
(Tula Ellice Finklea), (1921–2008), b. Amarillo, Texas
She was the daughter of a ballet enthusiast who made her take dancing lessons. She joined Colonel de Basil’s Ballet Russe and married Nico Charisse, a ballet instructor, with whom she opened a dance school in Hollywood (she subsequently married singer Tony Martin). After small parts in
Something to Shout About
(43, Gregory Ratoff) and
Mission to Moscow
(43, Michael Curtiz), she had a brief spot as the ballerina in
Ziegfeld Follies
(46, Vincente Minnelli). Thereafter she played in a number of musicals, often in dance cameos:
The Harvey Girls
(45, George Sidney);
Till the Clouds Roll By
(46, Richard Whorf);
Fiesta
(47, Richard Thorpe);
Words and Music
(48, Norman Taurog); and
Singin’ in the Rain
(52, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly). By then, her dancing carried her as an actress in
Sombrero
(53, Norman Foster);
The Band Wagon
(53, Minnelli);
Brigadoon
(54, Minnelli);
It’s Always Fair Weather
(55, Donen and Kelly);
Silk Stockings
(57, Rouben Mamoulian);
Party Girl
(58, Nicholas Ray). She appears at events still, but has done nothing worthwhile since the ex-wife in
Two Weeks in Another Town
(62, Minnelli).