The Essential Chaplin: Perspectives on the Life and Art of the Great Comedian

by Richard Schickel (Editor)

At age twenty-eight, Charlie Chaplin was a millionaire and one of the world's most famous personalities. He had grown rich playing the poorest of men. He was to go on playing unforgettable characters in timeless films, but now the psychology of celebrity began both to drive and to damage his creativity. Richard Schickel, the distinguished film critic, has called Chaplin the first victim of modern celebrity culture, “driven by his relentless ego, by his helpless need for an audience to dominate, to lead. All the tragedies of his life stemmed from those drives and needs.” Mr. Schickel is the rarest of Chaplin enthusiasts, an unabashed fan who can celebrate the object of his affection without looking away when his subject deserves a poking. In this indispensable collection of some thirty essays, he has selected the most provocative and insightful criticisms of Chaplin's life and work, from the great comedian's beginnings through his early features, his mid-life crisis, and his late films. The contributors include Andrew Sarris, David Thomson, Andre Bazin, Gilbert Seldes, Alistair Cooke, Frances Hackett, Robert E. Sherwood, Stark Young, Penelope Gilliatt, Edmund Wilson, Stanley Kauffmann, Alexander Woollcott, George Jean Nathan, Winston Churchill, Max Eastman, Graham Greene, Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Dwight Macdonald, Robert Warshow, Walter Kerr, J. Hoberman, and others. Mr. Schickel, the last critic to study Chaplin intensively (for his award-winning documentary of a year ago), offers a long Introduction.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography

320 pages, Paperback

First published July 25, 2006

About the author

Richard Schickel is an important American film historian, journalist, author, filmmaker, screenwriter, documentarian, and film and literary critic.

Mr.Schickel is featured in For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism. In this 2009 documentary film he discusses early film critics in the 1960s, and how he and other young critics, rejected the moralizing opposition of Bosley Crowther of The New York Times who had railed against violent movies such as Bonnie and Clyde.
In addition to film, Schickel has also critiqued and documented cartoons, particularly Peanuts.

Schickel was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964. He has also lectured at Yale University and University of Southern California's School of Film and Television.

Reviews

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This essay collection was a good critical overview of Chaplin's work. Includes an introductory biographical sketch, period reviews (written contemporarily to the earlier film's release), remarks by such notables as a pre-Prime Ministerial Winston Churchill and Frankfurt school social critic Theodore Adorno, and (my favorite) a found memoir of friendship penned by Masterpiece Theatre host Alastair Cooke who knew Charlie personally and recounts their interactions. A nice variety of opinions on the filmography, ranging from fawning adoration to some rather scathing critiques of Chaplin's long-winded later pieces. I would recommend this to fans of Chaplin, history buffs, enjoyers of social criticism, and students of film. Reading this book made me more interested in viewing all of Chaplin's films and also in reading more books about the influential/iconic comedian.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Schickel has assembled, organized, edited, and provided an Introduction to 33 essays about one of the greatest film actors, Charles Chaplin (April 16, 1889 - December 25, 1977). Their authors' diverse perspectives on his life and career provide an excellent supplement to Stephen Weissman's recently published Chaplin: A Life in Film as well as to Charlie Chaplin's Own Story (as told to Rose Wilder Lane) and Chaplin's My Autobiography as well as David Robinson's Chaplin: His Life and Art.

Weissman is among the contributors to The Essential Chaplin and in his essay, "Charlie Chaplin's Film Heroines," he observes: "It was the loss [of Chaplin's mother] and the scars it left that later shaped Chaplin's development of an alter-ego screen character whose core identity (in the feature length films) was the rescue and repair of damaged and fallen women. And of all his rescue films it was The Gold Rush which Chaplin later said was the one picture by which he most wanted to be remembered by posterity." (Page 66)

Note: In the "Afterword" to his biography, Weissman provides an especially interesting discussion of contradictory opinions about the legitimacy of Chaplin's Own Story that appeared in a series of 29 installments in the San Francisco Bulletin from July 5 to August 4, 1915. Weissman believes that Lane transcribed Chaplin's comments as accurately as she could. Robinson dismisses Own Story as "romantic and misleading nonsense." Weissman acknowledges that "Neither Robinson's theory nor mine is provable" and suggests that his reader take her or his choice.

The appeal and value of the essays will, of course, depend on what each reader seeks to understand about Chaplin, an immensely complicated person who was (as Schickel explains) "driven by his relentless ego, by his helpless need for an audience to dominate, to lead. All the tragedies of his life stemmed from those drives and needs." To Schickel's credit, he has selected essays that (together) trace the key influences on Chaplin's development throughout childhood and adolescence as well as during his early success on stage, his subsequent career in films, the controversies associated with his later years, and the period of recognition and awards he enjoyed just prior to his death.

[James F · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of over thirty essays and reviews about Chaplin and his films, by authors ranging from Winston Churchill to Theodore Adorno (there are two each by Andrew Sarris and Stark Young, but otherwise no authors are duplicated.). Some pieces are contemporary with the films they describe, while others look back from a later perspective.

The editor, Richard Schickel, is annoying; his Introduction almost turned me off from reading the book. A reverse snob, he overpraises the early slapstick films while taking a very patronizing approach to the later masterpieces. He also misses no opportunity to indulge in a very crude pop-Freudian analysis of Chaplin.

Fortunately, the first of the actual essays, by Andrew Sarris, was one of the best pieces in the book and kept me from abandoning it at the outset. As one would expect from a book with such diverse authors there is a good deal of unevenness in the quality of the pieces; but some are good and others are historically interesting, so the book is worth reading.

Unfortunately, there is a totally unacceptable number of typos, including words and whole lines omitted, as well as mistakes such as "can" for "cane" almost every time that prop is referred to, "that" for "than" dozens of times, etc. But no misspellings which aren't words, so apparently they ran spellcheck but did no other proofreading.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a collection of essays, by about 30 different writers, about Charlie Chaplin. Some chapters are reviews of individual movies, others are profiles of the man himself. There was some interesting material here, but unfortunately too many chapters were a slog to get through. These are by the writers who choose to present a psychoanalytical profile of Chaplin's Tramp character, or about the deep meaning behind what Chaplin is trying to convey in his films. I'm not saying that these analyses are without merit, only that I didn't find them interesting. For what it's worth, my favorite chapter was the one by Alistair Cooke, where he describes the friendship that he formed with Chaplin, and what it was like to spend time with him.

[Mark Schoen]

“Charlie Chaplin needed the movies. And, as it happened, the movies needed him.” In the 1920s, Chaplin was quite possibly the most famous man on the planet—a Narcissist with a capital 'N' and an Artist with a capital 'A.' Chaplin appealed to high and low brow tastes alike. He acted in, wrote, directed, edited, produced, and even composed his own films. And he did all this during an era when Hollywood functioned much like the factory in Modern Times, trapping its creative talent in a labyrinth of gears and cogs.

[Nathanial · Rating 4 out of 5]

chronological essays on chaplin as director, performer, cult figure, character, etc., from the early days of his silent movies on. the editor does a good job of framing each writer's wider context.

[RK Byers · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was really well done, especially for a biography.

[Bob Shair · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some essays more interesting than othersw