Charlie Chaplin

For a good part of the 20th century Charlie Chaplin’s disheveled, mustachioed character might’ve been the most recognized figure on earth, but his legacy as a filmmaker has waxed and waned over the years. Certain assumptions have settled in, making it hard to see the films for what they are.

The story of Chaplin’s life is like a fairy tale. By age 25, he’d risen from the streets of London to being virtually synonymous with cinema, worldwide. Movies had fewer geographical barriers than they do today—language was hardly an issue—and Chaplin’s films hummed through those channels with ease, thanks to their broad appeal. His nameless character, “the little tramp,” was down on his luck but had a gentlemanly air and took pride in straightening his hat, buttoning his tattered, ill-fitting coat and dusting off the crumbs of whatever knocked him flat.

After only a few years in the business, Chaplin’s global embrace afforded him an independence that’s nearly unthinkable now. He controlled every aspect of his films—writing, directing, producing, editing and starring. He assembled a crew and a company of actors he reused on each picture, and he shot on his own back lot in Los Angeles. All filmmakers relied on distributors, but he gradually eliminated even that variable when he—along with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith—founded United Artists, a company that would distribute their self-financed films.

And yet today, discussion of Chaplin’s work is too often reduced to a single question: who’s better, Chaplin or Buster Keaton, a question that drastically limits the works of both. Books and movies about Chaplin are plentiful but they’re often preoccupied with either the mechanics of his productions or the starlets he slept with. Critic David Thomson’s new book The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood devotes an entire chapter to just that sort of amateur psychoanalysis, and Richard Attenborough’s 1992 biopic Chaplin is the kind of shallow, sexed-up summation any great artist can expect from Hollywood if he or she dies with enough skeletons in the closet. And Chaplin left behind plenty.

Unfortunately, Chaplin’s films are by comparison rarely discussed. Their apparent simplicity has created a myopic view of Chaplin as a talented performer with a vaudevillian pedigree, but a weak filmmaker who never harnessed the medium that brought him so much fame.

Yet you only need to watch his movies to discover contrary evidence. A good place to start is Chaplin’s first feature-length film, The Kid. As motion pictures neared the beginning of their third decade of existence, movies had outgrown nickelodeons and moved to larger screens. Serious films had begun to approximate the length of a stage play. The comedians, however, had focused on short films and were quickly reaching a crossroads: were they the pie-hurling makers of funny faces, best seen in small doses, or were they filmmakers?

Chaplin saw himself as the latter, and The Kid was the result of his ambitions—an hour-long blend of comedy and drama in which the tramp finds an orphan and raises him as his own. He shares the screen with 5-year-old newcomer Jackie Coogan, and the chemistry between them is the heart of the film.