Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977)

Charles Spencer (Charlie) Chaplin’s movie persona, the Little Fellow, was one of the most widely recognized figures in the world in the 1920s and 1930s. A versatile writer/director and gifted actor whom George Bernard Shaw called “the only genius in motion pictures,” Chaplin was intimately related to the urban world; he was born and raised in a city,rift gold his films often used urban settings, and he first achieved fame when movies were primarily an urban phenomenon.
Chaplin’s account of his early years in My Autobiography (1964) reads almost like a Dickens novel. Born in London in 1889, his parents were both English music-hall singers. His father, an alcoholic, separated from the family in 1890, providing only minimal and sporadic support for his son before his own death in 1901. Ill health and an ailing voice ended Chaplin’s mother’s singing career in the middle 1890s. She was in and out of hospitals and asylums with physical and emotional problems for the next five years while Chaplin and his older half brother, Sydney, shuttled between a variety of urban homes and institutions. By late 1898, Chaplin secured his first job as a performer, and he continued working in the theater and in music-hall comedy troupes until he accepted a contract to join Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studio in 1913.
Working with three movie companies between 1913 and 1918, Chaplin appeared in 61 films, most of them one- and two-reelers, directing all of them after the middle of 1914. Shortly after arriving at Keystone, he began wearing the costume that became his trademark—a tight-fitting coat, baggy pants, floppy shoes, a derby hat, a narrow mustache, and a cane. The character Chaplin created—known variously as the Little Fellow, the Tramp, or Charlie—served as his comic screen persona in nearly all of his films through Modern Times (1936).
This persona became an almost immediate success in urban movie theaters, creating by 1915 what one movie commentator called a national case of “Chaplinitis.” Each contract he signed was more lucrative, and in 1918 he decided to build his own movie studio. This ensured him a high degree of financial and creative control that was solidified when in 1919 he joined movie stars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, and director D. W. Griffith, to found United Artists, a company that would distribute the films that each of the founders produced independently. All of the movies he made between 1923 and 1951 were distributed through United Artists.
Although Chaplin’s movies occasionally satirized rural or small-town life—Sunnyside (1919) and The Pilgrim (1922) are two examples—they more often had urban settings. Among his shorter films, Easy Street (1917), A Dog’s Life (1918), and The Kid (1921) portrayed urban poverty and working-class life in particularly effective ways. His feature films often had urban settings as well, contrasting different classes in urban society or depicting urban versus rural characters. A Woman of Paris (1923) poses rural simplicity against urban cosmopolitanism. Chaplin’s two greatest films focusing on urban concerns were City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936). The first contrasted the lower-class but humane world of the blind girl with the upper-class luxury and hypocrisy of the millionaire. The second comically portrayed the dislocations engendered by industrialism and the Depression. The Great Dictator (1940), Chaplin’s satiric attack on Hitler and Nazism, contrasted life in the palace with life in a Jewish urban ghetto. The central setting of Monsieur Verdoux (1947) was Paris,rift gold Limelight (1952) took place in London before World War I, and A King of New York (1957) used that city as the setting for a satire on advertising, wide-screen movies, progressive education, and McCarthyism.
Chaplin’s progressive political sympathies eroded his popularity in the early Cold War years. After having his reentry permit to the United States revoked while en route to England for the opening of Limelight in 1952, Chaplin settled on a Swiss manor, where he lived until his death in 1977. Although the baronial splendor of his final years differed vastly from the urban working-class world in which he was raised, Chaplin will be remembered for the Charlie persona at the center of his best movies. Just as Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone were mythic prototypes of the American frontier in the nineteenth century, Chaplin’s Little Fellow was a key mythic representative of the twentieth-century urban American landscape.