The Real Charlie Chaplin
Showtime Documentary Films (2021)
Dir. Peter Middleton and James Spinney
Narrated by Pearl Mackie
The Real Charlie Chaplin, released in December 2021, is a Rorschach test for our time. It’s also the story of the twentieth century, up to Chaplin’s death on the cusp of the digital age in 1977, shone through the prism of one man. Narrated in present tense, by Old Vic actress Pearl Mackie, inviting viewers to compare the two. Her voice drives the film, along with Chaplin’s poetry in motion.
The documentary’s also a compendium of popular theories about human nature, media technology, and mass hysteria. Its charm is combining biography with mythology, interpreting Chaplin’s life through archival footage, historical narrative and dramatization.
It opens, with copying and imitation.
The mechanical reproduction of Charles Spencer Chaplin. “There are too many of them,” a silent-film panel reads, quoting Chaplin’s friend, writer Max Eastman, referring to the many sides of Charlie Chaplin—and also, to his sea of imitators. There is no “Real Charlie Chaplin;” there is a multitude.
In a paranormal opening sequence, the narrator explains that in December of 1916 The Society for Psychical Research, publisher of such dubious tracts as Phantasms of the Living, and Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, was reporting a startling new phenomenon: silent-film star Charlie Chaplin had recently been sighted in hundreds of locations across North America, “simultaneously.” In response to the wave of teleportation—Chaplin imitators inspired by the advent of cinema—pop psychology stepped in to offer pseudo-scientific, psychic explanations.
Beware the contemporary equivalents of Psychic Research or animal magnetism, our own explanations for uncanny, mass phenomena—or at least, take note of them—seems to be the message. Meanwhile, the film cultivates its own sense of ominous mysticism. The following chapter brings more portentous narration: that the year of Chaplin’s birth, “1889 begins with a total eclipse of the sun.” Hitler, Chaplin’s evil doppelgänger, is born four days days after his alter ego. A serial killer is on the loose, Jack the Ripper. In a nod towards the future, the Nintendo company is founded, manufacturing the nineteenth-century equivalent of video games—playing cards.
What was really happening with Chaplin in 1916, the Society for Psychical Research notwithstanding, was nothing less than the world’s first mimetic super-craze induced by screens, the likes of which are now familiar, first glimpsed in the mass impersonation of Charles Chaplin.
“Chaplin-oia!” “Chaplin Fever,” “the Chaplin Craze,” and “Chaplinitis,” newspaper headlines declare, describing the viral phenomenon at the time. A string of “bootlegs, counterfeits and imitators” flooding the market, Mackie narrates, in Chaplin lookalike contests—Chaplin is rumored to have clandestinely entered one himself (taking 20th place). “Beware of Imitators,” a still reads, as archival footage of Chaplin impersonators, whole troupes and choruses of them, cavorting in unison to Vivaldi’s “Summer,” accompany the film’s opening soundtrack.
It’s a fun but eerie sequence, not just for the psychic phenomena and omens, but for its documentation of crowd psychology in response to technology and charisma—the hoards of Chaplin imitators and fanatics, professional and impromptu, dancing in the streets. And all the while, the latent possibility that… Chaplin has something to do with Hitler (serial killers, and video game companies)? Later, an interviewer asks Chaplin, “When was the first time you knew you were really famous?”
I came to New York… I stopped New York. People were saying, “Jesus, you wouldn’t believe. The whole city of New York is imitating you. Society people going down into the slums to these ten-cent nickelodeons, to see this little guy in the mustache.
The “little guy” in the mustache is Chaplin’s creation, the one that created him—the tiny bowler hat, baggy trousers, flimsy cain, and oversized boots beneath an undersized jacket—an exaggeration of his childhood in the slums of Victorian London: The Tramp.
“The Little Tramp” won Chaplin his first big recognition. The origins behind his outfit inspired a lifetime of questions from journalists—and attorneys, trying to determine who, out of the countless imitations he inspired, created and owned the rights to The Tramp’s image.
Inside the courtrooms, infinity was going up on trial.
In the 1920s, Charles Chaplin sued a character named “Charles Aplin” for stealing The Tramp’s identity. Aplin, in turn, claimed he was not imitating Chaplin’s Tramp, but that of another famous Chaplin impersonator, Billy West.
As our narrator incants from her hypnotic script: “Aplin’s Chaplin isn’t Chaplin, says Aplin. Aplin’s Chaplin is an imitation of an imitation, of Chaplin.” Two members of Chaplin’s former comedy troupe, the impeccably-named Karno Company, claim they invented The Tramp. There were countless others, facsimiles of facsimiles.
According to The Real Charlie Chaplin, these derivative Tramps came from an American tradition of tramp comedians, whose stylings were derived from lived hobo experience. An itinerant, American existence that Chaplin wasn’t quite subjected to himself (except as an overworked theater trouper touring the continent, performing brutal physical comedy three times a day)—but it was an American experience whose poverty Chaplin could relate to from his Dickensian childhood in London.
One of Chaplin’s oldest friends, her voice recordings from a 1983 interview echoing throughout the film like a cockney chorus, chanted by a ninety-year old woman—the auspiciously-named Effie Wisdom—recalls Chaplin performing a Tramp routine when they were just children in the slums. Ironically, the most revered and original version of the American tramp may have come from England.
The Tramp struck a chord in the heart of Everyman. In part, the film suggests, because he was a floating signifier, a trickster. A silent-film vessel for others to pour their own ideas into. Including, some forty years later, the creator of “the Mystery Tramp.” Bob Dylan, who named a 2006 album after Chaplin’s Modern Times, remarked in 1961: “If I’m on stage, my idol—even my biggest idol when I’m on stage—the one that’s running through my head all the time, is Charlie Chaplin.”
My own adolescent experience, when I discovered that the real Charlie Chaplin looked much different from his characters, after glimpsing a photograph of “The Tramp” sans costume, clean shaven, seated at a black-tie dinner—was akin to feeling duped, or tricked.
Chaplin’s trickster, Mackie notes, has no family, no fixed address, no specific point in time or space—“You can’t pin him down.” As a silent-film star, he speaks “no language.” In a world “divided by bitter conflict” during WWI, “the Tramp could make you laugh, no matter what side you’re on.” A mediator between London poverty and Hollywood success, between the factions of global geopolitics, he “defies the boundaries of identity” and “upends authority and class.” Clips show The Tramp turning Keystone cops against themselves with comic jiujitsu, or pulling-one-over on unsuspecting food vendors to win a free meal.
“He’s a nobody, and he belongs to everybody,” Mackie says. “The adulation’s not for me, it’s for the little man,” Chaplin confirms.
Even the The Tramp’s outfit is described as an exercise in contradiction and multiple identity, “assembled, magpie-like, from bits of other costumes.” Improvised in a hurry, so Chaplin might keep his job, in the dressing room of the Keystone Film Company (of “Keystone Cops” fame). The hat was too small for Chaplin’s head. The boots too large for The Tramp’s feet. The oversized trousers, chosen to contrast with the undersized coat, were pilfered from Fatty Arbuckle’s wardrobe.
“The Tramp,” Mackie mythologizes, “would make Chaplin more famous than any king, queen, or emperor; more famous than any philosopher, artist or religious figure.” If this seems questionable—consider the number of Christians, Hindus or Muslims on earth at any given moment, compared to the number of Charlie Chaplin devotees—Mackie homes in on the point: “Famous in a way that no one has been before,” famous all at once. And consider this, from the 129th anniversary of Chaplin’s birthday in Adipur, India, in 2018. Is this what the Society for Psychical Research had in mind when it published Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death?
The Real Charlie Chaplin is in large part a meditation on mass media fame through one of its first heroes, and victims: The Tramp, and Charlie Chaplin.
Another lens the documentary plays with: the ritual inversion of Charlie Chaplin’s reputation in America. His Behind the Music, rise-fall-rise trajectory is tied to his poverty-stricken childhood after he was abandoned by vaudeville parents—a father who ran off with a chorus girl, a variety-show mother who disappeared into the mental house, leaving Chaplin to be carted off to a London workhouse as a young boy. A Freudian take, which also works to explain Chaplin’s distance from his own children, his fondness for exceedingly-young wives (three out of five were teenagers), and his inability to feel loved by individuals, only the crowd. An impossible childhood sets the stage for Chaplin’s eventual downfall, allowing him to be scapegoated by the FBI as a communist sympathizer, one with a prurient interest in young starlets, in the 1950s. In the beginning, Chaplin shoots from the slums to the silver screen: acting for the Karno Company at age fifteen, acting out the American immigrant fantasy at age nineteen, crossing the Atlantic with Fred Karno’s Mumming Birds in a rat-infested cattle ship, finally leaning against the steamer guardrails at the first sight of land to cry (via another silent film panel):
“America! I am coming to conquer you. Every man, woman and child shall have my name on their lips!”
Six years later, every man, woman and child seemed to be imitating him, and Chaplin had enticed the bigwigs of Manhattan into the bowery nickelodeons, just to catch a glimpse of “the little guy” on film. His subsequent reversals of fate take place against his victimization at the hands of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI’s media stooges. And the final inversion: his resurrection into the good graces of Hollywood, when “The Man Hollywood Loves to Hate” is given a standing ovation at the 1972 Academy Awards, two decades after his de facto exile from America at the hands of the U.S. Justice Department.
Chaplin’s blacklisting as a suspected communist, ironically, grew out of his association with Adolph Hitler. Both were born under the black sun of eclipse (or so the film encourages us to believe), in the same month, four days apart. Both grew up adoring single mothers and hating their drunken fathers; both grew up dirt poor on the streets of London and Vienna. Both became little men who carried a cane. Mesmeric performers, employing exaggerated gestures and heightened appeals to emotion, driving their audiences to Beatle-esque frenzy. As foils for one another, the advent of sound marks the end of Chaplin’s silent-film career, but the beginning of Hitler’s radio-broadcast oratory. “Just think,” Chaplin says: “he’s the mad man and I’m the comic; but it could’ve been the other way round.”
Both were high priests of imitation. Chaplin’s ability to spawn imitators through silent-film technology, his onscreen charisma in the first half of his career was apolitical, lovingly subversive, and democratizing. The Nazis, whose propaganda machine Michael Taussig described as a project to control mimesis—to regulate every form of political symbolism, mechanical reproduction and imitation—spawned legions of goose-stepping Führer clones. The effect of Chaplin’s charisma on crowds was benign, but powerful. Like Hitler, or Walt Disney, he was also a control freak. Someone who wrote, directed, produced, edited, starred-in, and scored, every film he made in his UA studio—“He even trie[d] his hand at make-up.” And, the Real Charlie Chaplin reveals, his actors were instructed to mirror him exactly, as if they were extensions of Chaplin’s body.
And then there’s the mustache. The “toothbrush,” a minimalist reaction to the prodigious facial hair of a bygone era, wasn’t associated with a wildly popular figure until Charlie Chaplin donned stage whiskers (now, of course, it’s all but taboo, associated with a wildly unpopular figure). There’s speculation as to whether Hitler’s toothbrush mustache was inspired by Chaplin’s. He certainly followed American film, and Chaplin’s career. When Chaplin finally introduced his first speaking role in 1940, a decade after the major studios had converted to sound, it was as The Great Dictator. Hitler screened Chaplin’s first motion picture with sound, a mockery of himself, twice.
Though The Tramp wasn’t Jewish, the Führer decried “the Jew Chaplin,” and banned Modern Times and The Great Dictator in Germany—but he was said to have laughed, or cried, at his films in private. Before, but especially after the Dictator, neither man could escape comparison with his doppelgänger.
The doc situates The Great Dictator and the arc of Chaplin’s career in the history of motion picture sound, against the virtues of silent ambiguity. For years, Chaplin resisted making talkies, sensing his artistic strength lay in the quiet indeterminacy of The Tramp. As Mackie narrates, with the advent of audio, “Suddenly the Tramp’s greatest strength becomes his weakness. He can’t talk. What language would he speak? What dialect?” A particular voice would pin him down. Chaplin knows The Tramp can’t survive the transition to sound; by breaking his silence, he’s “putting his creation on the altar.”
When he did sacrifice The Tramp, the first audio of Chaplin on film was delivered in the voice of a Jewish barber, mistaken for dictator “Adenoid Hynkel.” The barber undermines this parody of Hitler and his hateful rhetoric, in a decidedly un-comedic, sincere monologue at the film’s conclusion. The speech, by a Jew dressed as Adolph Hitler, an oration in favor of humanity and democracy, was so idealistic that FDR begged Chaplin, who had his reservations about the film, to release the picture. The president also invited Chaplin to deliver the Dictator speech at his inauguration. Then he was asked to repeat the speech at a fundraiser for the Russian war relief effort. Invited to talk for four minutes, he spoke for forty. Soon the silent comedian was sounding off in other public speeches, declaring himself in favor of the little guy, not anti-communist, but “pro-communistic.” By 1947, at a press conference in the Gotham Hotel, most of the questions were not about Chaplin’s film premiere, but his communist sympathies. He’s prepared to be laid low. “Let the butchery proceed,” a tape recorder intones.
“I have never been part of a political party in my life, I have never voted in my life,” he refutes a jingoistic reporter. “I am not a communist.” But it’s another journalist, identified as a woman named Grace, that gets to the crux of the matter.
“Mr Chaplin, I think you have a perfect right to your own individual beliefs. But, I have one quarrel. You have stopped being a good comedian since you’ve been bringing messages […] You have stopped being a good comedian since your pictures have been bringing messages. You fail the public.”
Whether you agree with Grace’s assessment of Chaplin’s duty as comedian, her assessment of political messaging in art and entertainment is au currant. In snippets of The Great Dictator speech, we feel the wind going out of Chaplin’s sails as he delivers his first spoken words on celluloid, earnestly, after reels of slapstick comedy. The script makes for a beautiful inauguration speech (when we hear snatches of FDR’s), but Chaplin’s first words on film sound like the first nail going into Chaplin’s coffin. The difference between his silent film work, the thoughtful voice in Chaplin’s interviews on tape—which is all we’ve seen and heard thus far—and his speaking role at the end of The Dictator, where we see and hear him simultaneously for the first time on film, feels politically awkward. The Real Charlie Chaplin makes viewers now, as in 1940, respond to the same stimulus, by withholding Chaplin’s acting voice until this moment.
The trickster’s first speaking role onscreen, laudably, was to identify himself with the world’s most persecuted minority in 1940. Maligned as a communist sympathizer for his ‘socialist’ appeal to humanity in the Dictator, Chaplin begins to embody the scapegoat himself (“Let the butchery proceed”). An influential Hollywood gossip columnist named Hedda Hopper, who hated Charlie Chaplin almost as much as she hated communists, attracted the attention of J. Edgar Hoover. The two worked in tandem to dismantle Chaplin’s career, a symbiotic relationship the film alliterates as “Hopper and Hoover.” Hoover feeds Hopper intel, which she duly feeds to the Hollywood rumor mill in her column, which the FBI then quotes in return, using the circular media logic that came to define Dick Cheney’s playbook during the War on Terror, and more recently, the FBI’s War on Disinformation. “The machine feeds itself,” Mackie warns.
In the end, it wasn’t the FBI’s intel campaign against Chaplin that got him exiled, or the three failed trials orchestrated by Hopper and Hoover, trying to link him to a pregnant starlet. In the midst of his imploding reputation, Chaplin married the woman he would spend the rest of life with, Oona O’Neill. He was fifty two; she was seventeen. When they left the country to attend a film premiere, the United States simply announced that Chaplin might not be welcomed back. “Unless,” the Attorney General announces in a tone familiar to millennial ears, “he can prove his moral worth,” according to the priorities of 1952—which were concerned most of all with rooting out communism, seizing on Chaplin’s sexual impropriety like Al Capone’s tax evasion.
The Chaplins retreated to Switzerland, where exile may have saved The Tramp from himself. He was forced to be a father and spouse. Though their age differential is shocking, according to one of their children, Oona was the only person on earth who understood Charlie Chaplin, the one behind the mask. The insecure man who pretended he was a rebel and a radical politically, a friend says, to impress others; someone who made people think he was a profound reader by reading the first page of every book, learning Greek, studying philosophy and Yoga: “Charlie was always acting.” Always reenacting, compulsively.
In The Kid (1918), Chaplin undoes the most traumatic event of his youth, rescuing himself as a young boy from the English workhouse. He played an immigrant, in The Immigrant (1917). He recreated the London slum of his youth in his United Artists studio. In Limelight (1952), he appeared as an aging comedian once renowned for playing a beloved Tramp character, whose public has now abandoned him. The love scene in City Lights (1931) is set where Chaplin met his first love—he shot the same scene for 531 days, and went through three actresses, before rehiring the first. The impression is that of a man psychologically fixated, engaged in neurotic, and artistic, repetition.
The Real Charlie Chaplin doesn’t shy away from Chaplin’s real issues, but neither does it wallow in a-historicist judgement. Without verbal moralizing, it rescues the stories of the women in Chaplin’s life repeatedly and whenever possible (Oona, whose light and loneliness we sense only in silent home movies, destroyed most of her journals). Chaplin’s third wife Lita Grey—whom he discovered on set when she was twelve, and married at age sixteen—the only wife whose voice survives on film, is central to the portrait of her ex-husband, his penchant for mental cruelty in unhappy relationships with barely-legal girls. The most expensive, acrimonious divorce in Hollywood history at that time begins to sound like the Depp-Heard trial, replete with a letter in Chaplin’s defense from thirty artists and intellectuals, including André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Yves Tanguy. The relationships—the trials, the pain, the past, aren’t denounced by the narrator; like the ambiguities of life, they simply exist. The players, like Lita Grey, speak for themselves. Or in the case of Chaplin and the women whose words are lost, don’t. Let the viewer judge.
In the end, life in Switzerland feels bittersweet; the ring of alps surrounding what has since become Chaplin World, a theme-museum, begins to feel like a prison. The actor is excommunicated from the audience he loves as he struggles to adjust to the rhythms of family life and relate to his children—the saddest moment in the film, aside from Chaplin’s own childhood, or the fate of several women in Chaplin’s life, beginning with his mother—may be his daughter explaining that her only desire as a child was to have a private conversation with her father, one-on-one. When she finally does, she finds a man tormented “by doubts, all his life”—the fear of poverty, the fear of losing his parents, or the people who came to replace them. Meanwhile, the Chaplin home movies from this time, where The Tramp comes back to life for the camera, gobbling meadow flowers, making faces for his children—are idyllic works of private cinema in their own right.
If a lengthy review can spoil an entire film with words, rest assured—the real magic in The Real Charlie Chaplin is onscreen. As Chaplin put it,
“Talking is an artificial thing, you know. Whereas movement is as near to nature as a bird is to flying. A voice is very beautiful, but not as great as silence. Somebody just looking.”
The newly-recovered archival footage is very beautiful, and assiduously presented.
From the first sonogram of motion of pictures coming to life—"This is what movies look like in 1889”—an amorphous blot of light vibrating against the darkness, contrasted with early recordings of birdsong; to the distance between Hitler’s bombastic oratory and Chaplin’s quiet pratfall ballets; to the tension between the narrator’s voice and her silent subject: this film’s greatest appeal lies in “just looking.”
At a flash in the pan, scenes from film’s infancy, often derided as the primordial-ooze in the evolution of cinema, which a handful of physical actors elevated to a singular art form. Even my five-year-old chortled at his first screening of Modern Times. As a ten-year-old, the promo still of The Real Charlie Chaplin is enough to make him laugh. In his silence, Chaplin remains timeless.