My Autobiography, by Charles Chaplin

I thought that this book would be long-forgotten, perhaps even out of print, but being very nosy, and having found out that Chaplin's story would be a very interesting one, I was determined to read it.

It's a Penguin Modern Classic! It's a wonderful read! I recommend it for the vivid account of Chaplin's early years and how he felt on his sudden rise to fame.  In the early part of the book a vanished London - small, horse-drawn and grimy - comes to life. The neglect of children in those days would astound nearly anyone. Charlie was homeless when his mother was taken to an asylum for the insane, and then a bullied workhouse boy. He had only his talent for dancing to save him, and thank God, it did save him.

Then there are the very early years of Hollywood when there was plenty of space and building a new studio was quite affordable. The fun and adventure of creating a new art form with lively-minded people in a great climate, with money coming in in an unprecedented fashion, feels as miraculous now as it must have been at the time.

I feel as though I have read hundreds of books of 20th century anecdotes of famous people meeting each other, so was not so interested in those, and they take up a lot of the middle part of the book. I find W R Hearst particularly boring, but I suppose you have to take him as an example of a big shot American, for whom all things were possible.

The difficulties of Chaplin's later years make the book interesting again. He had developed hugely since his slapstick clown days, when he worked without a script partly because he was "unlettered". Chaplin read voraciously in an effort to understand the world - including economics - and hold his own with anyone he met, and he clearly managed to do so. He wrote a script to a later film called Monsieur Verdoux which sounds very black and very modern.  The American film censors had a field day with it - and Chaplin's account of their efforts to change it both amuse and appall.

He was often a lonely soul, having been wounded in childhood by hardship and by loneliness he could not quickly recover, and spent a lot of time alone. Only in older age did he achieve personal happiness, and with a much younger woman.

Chaplin loved to learn new words, and in this book he displays his wide vocabulary, and the effect is sometimes too self-conscious. Oooh look, there's another posh word, you think. In the Reader's Digest, in the 60s and 70s, there was a new vocabulary section called It Pays to Increase Your Word Power, which was for the millions of people like Chaplin who wanted to make up for a poor education, or for being an immigrant with a different mother tongue.. I'm not sure you meet people with such aspirations very much these days and lack of aspiration is a problem. If I am wrong I hope someone will tell me so.

Recently I read an article about groups of London children who spend the nights on night buses. All they need is an Oyster card and they can ride all night, legit, and that's what they do, because their homes aren't safe to go home to. It would be great to think that things are better for children than they were, but we'd be deluding ourselves.

Please see further information in Modern Times

Modern Times

When we were children there was a TV show on Saturday nights which showed clips from silent movies. Usually the extracts just showed one comic sequence from a longer film. Last night we went to see the whole of Modern Times, a Charlie Chaplin film, which was an hour and a half long, the longest silent film (apart from The Artist) I have ever seen. The sound track was played live by the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

The film was an anachronism - made in 1936 when other directors had long abandoned silence and mime - but Chaplin believed his Tramp character just wouldn't work with dialogue. It also tells a tale of American life during the Depression era - unemployment and strikes, hunger and theiving, abandoned children.

It was Chaplin's story. His early life, his London childhood, was terrible, as bad as it could possibly be, with a father who abandoned his mother, his parents having at first made an uncertain living on the stage, the mother becoming unemployable and the children having to go into  the workhouse, and the mother eventually sinking into madness. The father became an alcoholic.

 Charlie was nearly always on his own; he was a street child like the character Goddard plays in Modern Times. He joined a troupe of boy dancers who went around the music halls doing clog dancing. So he survived, and then worked up a comedy act of his own.

He was clearly a talented dancer! The way he moves during the sequence where he goes mad with spanners in his hands is beautiful - it tells of a sensitive nature being wounded by brainless, repetitive work, which is exactly what he wants to say.

Then there is an amazing sequence of blindfolded roller-skating, too, graceful and thrilling.

The joy of dancing is an individual joy, and this individuality is what the Tramp cannot surrender. Here he goes into the men's room to have a smoke, but the factory boss spies on him through a huge screen (shades of Big Brother). So a political question is posed through this film - how far must men surrender their individuality to benefit the economic system? Chaplin is clearly not on the side of capitalism. He sees that if it is allowed to rage untramelled, many people will lose their souls or their sanity, and that, judging by the depression, strikes and unemployment, it doesn't do its job of keeping the population fed, and hopeful of leading decent, fulfilling lives.

There is a scene where the Tramp character inadvertently ingests a large amount of cocaine, in which his expressions of surprise are hilarious - this leads to his decisively defeating a group of jailbreakers single-handedly. Apparently Chaplin worked out the comedy sequences on set with the cameras rolling, and they took days and days.

In early films the Tramp's character was brutal and mean, but by this time Chaplin had developed the character into a sweet-natured and hapless clown. However, he does cause other people to have accidents - I'm thinking of the waiters and the In/Out doors, and the mechanic trapped in the machine.

Here you can see Chaplin going through the machine.

He also wrote a soundtrack to the film. The music we had last night must have incorporated the themes he wrote - "Smile" being one of them. I kept expecting him to sing - but when he does sing it's a gibberish comedy number. Chaplin wrote "Smile" - a classic song of about covering up your sadness and hardship - and that's what he says to Goddard just before the last shot.

Fascinating that he was one of the richest and most successful men in the world, but was making films that harked back to the terrible times of his boyhood.

I would like to see ALL of the Chaplin features. He was a wounded man and an artist.