CHARLES CHAPLIN
(1889 – 1977), British-American



"The sophisticated intelligence and skills he brought to slapstick comedy forced intellectuals to recognise that art could reside in a wholly popular entertainment, and not just in those self-consciously 'artistic' products with which the cinema first tried to court respectability. In the 1910s and 20s Chaplin's Tramp, combating a hostile and unrewarding world with cheek and gallantry, afforded a talisman and champion to the underprivileged millions who were the cinema's first mass audience."
- The Oxford History of World Cinema

"The apparent simplicity of Chaplin's art should never be confused with lack of technique. For Chaplin, his other self on the screen has always been the supreme object of contemplation, and the style that logically followed from this assumption represents the antithesis to Eisenstein's early formulations on montage."
- Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema

FILMOGRAPHY *
1921 The Kid
1923 A Woman of Paris
1925 The Gold Rush
1928 The Circus
1931 City Lights
1936 Modern Times
1940 The Great Dictator
1942 The Gold Rush ("Daddy"version)
1947 Monsieur Verdoux
1952 Limelight
1957 A King in New York
1967 A Countess from Hong Kong

*Only feature-length films are listed. For a full filmography including his shorts, click here.

Indisputable proof that time traveling is real.

Uh, when I went to post that it said that I had already posted it.

Even MORE indisputable evidence of time travel.

I'd have thought the Great Dictator would be red

Nope.

I think the only one I was on the fence with was A Woman of Paris unbolded, but yeah The Great Dictator just went way too overboard with the message being shoved down our throat. Probably cuz Chaplin wasn't sure how to get his feeling across by the progression to sound, especially working with the idea of turning war into a comedy, yet still spreading his love everyone theme around. For a better ww2 era comedy, take Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be instead.

And THE RULES OF THE GAME

Confused Matthew should do a review of his early films and complain about the lack of dialogue (and how NOTHING HAPPENS).

I love The Great Dictator but I agree that that speech in the end felt forced in and it's the weak point of the film for me. Still that film has too many awesome moments. Especially the globe scene.

Did you guys not see the time traveler?

I did. It was pretty stupid.

While I admit that is pretty weird, it's still rather stupid. If you were a time traveler in the 1920s, who would you fucking talk to on your cell phone? How would you even get a signal?

Why would you bring a cell phone with you anyway? Besides time displacement equipment only works on organic material, that is if time traveling works in the Terminator way, and just for fun lets say it does.

First of all I want to get this out of the way: I don't think it's really a time traveler. But I think it's fun to talk about anyway.


Other time travelers, obviously.


If you can travel in time I'm sure you can figure this shit out. Maybe it's a walky-talky?