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The Little Tramp |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Lloyd Eby |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/1998 |
| Size: 2,761 Words, 16,974 Characters |
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CHARLIE CHAPLIN AND HIS TIMES
Kenneth S. Lynn
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997
604 pp., $35.00
Charlie Chaplin was the first media superstar. Within a few months of his beginning work at the Essnay Company's studio in Chicago in January 1915, the country went mad about Chaplin. Lines formed in front of movie houses that were exhibiting his pictures. On Broadway, the Ziegfield Follies girls "sashayed onstage wearing mustaches, derby hats, big shoes, and baggy trousers, singing a song called 'Those Charlie Chaplin Feet,' " says Kenneth Lynn in his new biography, Charlie Chaplin and His Times. Tin Pan Alley songwriters cranked out a half-dozen songs with the Chaplin name in the title, and Chaplin became an early practitioner of the merchandise tie-in: Department and five-and-dime stores sold Chaplin lapel pins, socks, hats, ties, squirt rings, dolls, playing cards, and Christmas decorations.
Who was this man who, in the words of critic Gerald Mast, "was the first and greatest international star of the American silent comic cinema," "the first artistic genius of the cinema," and who "might truly be called a seminal figure of the century--if only because of his influence on virtually every other recognized seminal figure of the century"? Actress Louise Brooks--one of his many lovers--said that Chaplin "was the most bafflingly complex man who ever lived," a quote from Lynn's book that can be a suitable epigram for what Lynn has discovered and written about Chaplin's life and work.
A tempting subject
A historian who has written previously on Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Ernest Hemingway, among others, Lynn was drawn to Chaplin, he says, p...
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...t and best biker movie."
Do we really need an addition to the enormous literature already existing on Chaplin? Lynn thinks so, and his result bears out his claim. He is especially good on the early years of Chaplin's work in England and America and on the history of the film industry. Lynn has given us the best scholarship and history on Chaplin's life and work that we are likely to get. vbcrlf
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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