Charlie is No. 11?!
Charlie is No. 11?!
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Pictures & Picturegoer, 1918
Charlie is No. 11?!
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4/4/44: Charlie is acquitted of all charges in the Mann Act case
After the verdict was announced, Charlie was overheard saying, "I believe in justice. I have an abiding faith in the American people." Oona Chaplin, who was pregnant at the time (with Geraldine), fainted when she heard the news on the radio.
Chaplin's attorney, Jerry Giesler, later described him as "the best witness I've ever seen in a law court. He was effective even when he wasn't being cross-examined but merely sitting there, lonely and forlorn, at a far end of the counsel table. He is so small that only the toes of his shoes touched the floor."
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| Prosecutor Charles Carr shakes Charlie's hand. Jerry Giesler is on the right. |
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World Tour (1931-32) Revisited: Playing tennis in Nice
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RIP Roger Ebert
Below is a piece that Mr. Ebert wrote shortly after Charlie's death in 1977.
Look, there's Charlie Chaplin!
December 26th, 1977
Let me tell you two stories about Charles Chaplin, who died on Christmas Day. Both stories take place in Venice, where every one of Chaplin's dozens of films was shown during a tribute at the 1972 Venice Film Festival. Day after day, for two weeks, Chaplin's movies were shown at the Palace of Cinema, and day after day the parents of Venice brought their kids to the free screenings, and the kids laughed with delight at these moments that were filmed fifty years before they were born.
And then one day Chaplin himself came to Venice. He was a very old man, snow-haired and frail, but this was the first complete retrospective of his work that had ever been mounted, and so he felt he should come. And on a night near the end of the festival, they did something in Venice that had never been done before.
They turned out all the lights in the Piazza San Marco, that vast square in front of the cathedral, and they told the orchestras of the sidewalk cafes to stop playing "Volare" and go home. And they put up a gigantic movie screen at the end of the square opposite the cathedral and showed "City Lights" on it. And the square was filled with ten thousand people. Italians and tourists, Venetians and people from the mainland, old couples and young lovers and little kids sitting on their fathers' shoulders.
The movie is about the Tramp, the character Chaplin created in those dozens of short comedies, and then developed in the longer films like "The Gold Rush" and "Modern Times," and then turned into a savage satire on Hitler in "The Great Dictator."
The Tramp was always the same, with his tattered clothes and frayed dignity, his cane and his battered hat, and the nobility of his soul. In "City Lights," the Tramp fell in love with a blind girl who sold flowers in a little shop. And although he didn't have a penny to his name, he made it possible for her sight to be restored. At the end of the film, there is a moment when the girl and the Tramp meet again. She doesn't recognize him, of course, but then she reaches out her fingers and touches his face, and from the contours she knows who he is.
I had seen that moment before. But now, standing in the dark in Piazza San Marco with ten thousand other people, I felt the power of it so strongly that my eyes began to mist. And all of that enormous crowd was so quiet that you could hear the pigeons calling from their nests in the stones of the old buildings.
A single spotlight flashed out of the darkness. It shone across our heads and onto a balcony on the third floor overlooking the square. We all turned and looked at the balcony. The doorway was opened and an old man walked forward and stood on it. Charlie Chaplin. We did not applaud at once. We stood, still silent, in awe. The hush lasted three or four seconds, a very long time. And then we cheered and applauded and shouted "Charlie!" He raised his hand and waved to us, and then two people stepped forward to help him back into the room.
That is the first story.
I walked quietly out of the square and down to the landing in front of the Palace of the Doges. The vaporetto came - one of those little boats that run up and down the canals like buses. I took the vaporetto back out to the island of the Lido, where the film festival was being held, and I watched a little boy in his mothers lap as he looked through the Charlie Chaplin souvenir booklet she'd bought him.
I thought to myself that I knew a lot about movies, but that the secret of Chaplin's greatness, the reason why his movies seemed to speak to everyone in every country, was one I might be able to understand but would never be able to explain. The next day, in the dining room of the hotel on the Lido, I met some friends for dinner. I was seated so that I faced directly toward the dining room door. Half an hour or so after I sat down, I looked up and realized that Charlie Chaplin was standing there in the doorway. He was with a woman - his wife, Oona, I suppose - and a young man who was helping to support him. Maybe one of his sons.
I was the only person who had seen him. He looked around the room. He seemed unhappy in some way. I could not understand why. "Look," I said. "There's Charlie Chaplin." My friends turned to look. He saw them turn. He smiled. He did not know them, but he stepped forward one step, and smiled. Other people turned, and then everyone in the room knew that Charlie Chaplin was there in the doorway. Someone stood up and began to applaud, and then we all did. And Charlie Chaplin smiled again, and waved at us, and then he walked away.
What had I seen in his eyes, in the moment when no one else knew he was in the doorway? How can I possibly know? But did I see the child born in London in 1889, the child of the drunken father who died a few years later, and of the mother who carried him on stage in her arms, the mother who later went mad? The child beaten in orphanages? The child who could never remember a time when he had not performed on the stage? The child who became the single most famous performer of the twentieth century, and who had just been cheered by ten thousand people as he stood on a balcony overlooking Piazza San Marco, and who now, less than a day later, was standing in the doorway of a hotel dining room . . . afraid he would not be recognized?
Of course the Tramp was universal. We were all kids once.http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19771226/PEOPLE/70925002
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Charlie & Paulette at a preview of King Vidor's STELLA DALLAS (one of my favorite films), 1937
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| Hollywood magazine, Oct. 1937 |
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Gracie Mansion, New York City, April 6th, 1972.
Mayor John Lindsay presents Charlie with the keys to the city as well as the Handel Medallion, the city's highest award for the performing arts. Lindsay called Charlie "a great citizen of the world." Always the comic, when a photographer yelled for Charlie to "smile," he shot back: "I'm afraid my teeth would fall out," cupping his hands under his chin to catch their fall.
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Photo by George Maillard Kesslere, 1923
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Ad for Chaplin-Mutual Specials, 1918
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| Moving Picture World, Feb. 1918. Photo by Hartsook. |
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Charlie & Douglas
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With Josephine and Victoria, 1957
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THE CIRCUS (1928)
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With future Supreme Court justice Frank Murphy aboard the SS President Coolidge, 1936
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THE TRAMP, released April 11th, 1915
This film incorporates, for the first time in a Chaplin film, the classic fade-out ending in which the Tramp shuffles off down a lonely road as the iris closes behind him.
This film was released the day my mother-in-law was born. She is 98 today and still going strong.
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Charlie the fisherman
A couple more photos of Charlie with tuna he caught off Catalina Island. I believe that's his friend, Edward Knoblock posing with his own fish in the top photo and holding the other fin in the bottom photo.
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| c.1921. Charlie is on the left. |
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| c.1923 |
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Monsieur Verdoux press conference, Gotham Hotel, NYC, April 12th, 1947
Held the day the after the disastrous premiere of Monsier Verdoux in NYC (where members of the audience booed and hissed at the screen), this press conference was described by George Wallach, who recorded the event for WNEW, as "more like an inquisition than a press conference." However, Charlie was ready for them, and kicked off the proceedings by inviting the journalists to "proceed with the butchery."
Here are some snippets:
Question: Mr. Chaplin, according to a report from Hollywood you are a personal friend of Hanns Eisler, the composer?
Chaplin: I am. I am very proud of the fact.
Question: Are you aware of the fact that his brother is the Soviet agent, so attested by...
Chaplin: I know nothing about his brother!
Question: Do you think Mr. Eisler is a Communist?
Chaplin: I don't know anything about that. I don't know whether he is a Communist or not. I know he is a fine artist and a great musician and a very sympathetic friend.
Question: Would it make a difference to you if he were a Communist?
Chaplin: No, it wouldn't.
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Question: Now, Mr. Chaplin, the Daily Worker, October 25, 1942, reported you stated, in an address before the Artists Front to win the war, a Communist front group: "I'm not a citizen, I don't need citizenship papers, and I've never had patriotism in that sense for any country, but I'm a patriot to humanity as a whole. I'm a citizen of the world. [with heavy sarcasm] If the Four Freedoms mean anything after this war, we won't bother about whether we are citizens of one country or another. "Mr. Chaplin, the men who secured the beachheads, the men who advanced in the face of enemy fire, and the poor fellows who were drafted like myself, and their families and buddies, resent that remark. And we want to know now if you were properly quoted.
Chaplin: I don't know why you resent that. That is a personal opinion. I am--four fifths of my family are Americans. I have four children, two of them were on those beachheads. They were with Patton's Third Army. I am the one-fifth that isn't a citizen. Nevertheless, I-I-I've done my share, and whatever I said, it is not by any means to be meant derogatory to your Catholic uh-uh-uh-GIs.
Question: It's not the Catholic GIs, Mr. Chaplin, it's the GIs throughout the United States!
Chaplin: Well, whatever they are, if they take exception to the fact that I am not a citizen and that I pay my taxes and that seventy percent of my revenue comes from uh-uh-uh abroad, then I apologize for paying that 100 percent on that 70 percent.
Question: I think that is a very evasive answer, Mr. Chaplin, because so do those veterans pay their taxes too!
Chaplin: Yes?
Question: Whether their revenue comes from elsewhere or not!
Chaplin: The problem is--what is it that your are objecting to?
Question: I am objecting to your particular stand that you have no patriotic feeling about this country or any other country.
Chaplin: I think you're...
Question: You've worked here, you've made your money here, you went around in the last war [World War I], when you should have been serving Great Britain, you were here selling bonds, so it stated in the paper that I read, and I think that you as a citizen here--or rather a resident here--taking our money should have done more!
Chaplin: [pause] Well, that's another question of opinion and as I say I think it is rather dictatorial on your part to say as how I should apply my patriotism. I have patriotism and I had patriotism in this war and I showed it and I did a great deal for the war effort but it was never advertised. Now, whether you say that you object to me for not having patriotism is a qualified thing. I've been that way ever since I have been a young child. I can't help it. I've traveled all over the world, and my patriotism doesn't rest with one class. It rests with the whole world--the pity of the whole world and the common people, and that includes even those that object to my--that sort of patriotism.
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Question: Mr Chaplin, do you share M. Verdoux's conviction that our comtemporary civilization is making mass murderers of us?
Chaplin: Yes.
Question: Would you enlarge on that a little bit? I felt in the picture that that was the most striking line and I would like to have you enlarge on that.
Chaplin: Well, all my life I have always loathed and abhorred violence. Now I think these weapons of mass destruction -- I don't think I'm alone in saying this, it's a cliché by now -- that the atomic bomb is the most horrible invention of mankind, and I think it is being proven so every moment. I think it is creating so much horror and fear that we are going to grow up a bunch of neurotics.
Question: And your line at the end of the picture -- had the atomic bomb in it.
Chaplin: Well, it didn't have the atomic bomb in it -- it had weapons of destruction, and if the atomic bomb is in it, then it goes for the atomic bomb. I don't go all the way with science.
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Question: Mr. Chaplin, what was your reaction to the reviews for Monsieur Verdoux?
Chaplin: I beg your pardon?
Question: What was your reaction of the reviews--the press reviews--in New York on the picture?
Chaplin: Well, the one optimistic note is that they were mixed. [laughter]
--From Film Comment (Winter 1969)
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Catch Paulette Goddard in SO PROUDLY WE HAIL (1943) on TCM (USA) tonight at 8:00 EST
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Just a quick note...
If you visit this blog on a regular basis, you've probably noticed that I haven't been posting much lately. Unfortunately, that's going to be the case for the next 6 weeks. My husband and I are planning a cross-country road trip to Seattle to visit my husband's newborn grandson, so that's taking up most of my time right now, along with work. I'll try to post as much as possible the next 3 weeks, but after May 1st, I'll be taking a 3-4 week hiatus. During that time, I'll still be able to moderate comments and answer emails, but I won't be able to post anything. That's still a few weeks away, but I thought I would mention it.
I don't say this enough, but thanks to all of you who visit this blog everyday & to those who take time out to comment on something or send me a message (or both). Your support means a lot to me.
That's all for now.
Enjoy the rest of the weekend!
Love,
Jess
I don't say this enough, but thanks to all of you who visit this blog everyday & to those who take time out to comment on something or send me a message (or both). Your support means a lot to me.
Enjoy the rest of the weekend!
Love,
Jess
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A DOG'S LIFE, released April 14th, 1918
This was Chaplin's first "Million Dollar Comedy" for First National, as well as the first film he made in his newly-built studio on La Brea in Hollywood.
"Scraps," also called Mut (or Mutt), was discovered among 21 dogs from the Los Angeles dog pound that were brought to the studio. Mut became so attached to Charlie that when the latter left for a cross-country Liberty Bond tour, he pined away for him, refused to eat, and died. He was buried on the grounds of the Chaplin Studios under a small marker that read: “Mut, died April 29th - a broken heart."
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| Mut's "obituary" in Moving Picture World, May 25th, 1918 |
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Happy Birthday, Lita Grey Chaplin (April 15th, 1908 - December 29th, 1995)
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World Tour Revisited: Charlie arrives in Algeria from Nice, April 15th, 1931
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| The caption reads: Charlot arrives in Algiers |
There is something romantic about the name Algeria. It stimulates my imagination. I can visualize wild Saracenic tribes adorned in flowing colored togas.
I have a profound respect for their mode of living. They have the true meaning of life- these children of Omar Khayyam--with their camels and dates, so different from us victims of industry.
Owing to the mildness of the climate, Algiers has become a favorite resort for those seeking to escape the rigors of a European winter. As we approach its port, the city with its dazzling white terraces, its myriads of windows reflecting the glow of the African sun against a green hilly background gives one the impression of a cluster of pearls set in an emerald frame.
With all his Omar Khayyam philosophy, the Arab is an enthusiastic film fan, for when we arrived thousands were lined along the road all the way to the hotel.("A Comedian Sees The World," Nov. 1933)In order to avoid the hype surrounding their relationship, May Reeves traveled separately and arrived a couple of days later.
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