The Real Charlie Chaplin, on Showtime

Enjoy this documentary while you can. It seems like it will only be a matter of time before Charlie Chaplin gets an Ansel Elgort-Woody Allen-style canceling. After all, he had a habit of marrying young women in their early teens. According to his second wife’s memoir, Chaplin was quite an abusive husband. He also financially supported his friend Fatty Arbuckle after the screen comedian was acquitted on notorious rape and murder charges. Of course, Chaplin’s stature as the first true mega-movie star and a genuine cinematic auteur should trump all that—but it doesn’t work that way under the current anti-cultural climate. Probably arriving just under the wire, Peter Middleton & James Spinney’s The Real Charlie Chaplin premieres this Saturday on Showtime.

Chaplin’s origins could be any humbler. After his father absconded and his mother was institutionalized, the young boy was literally consigned to a work-house. Eventually, he found success as a vaudeville performer in a particularly physical troupe. While on tour in America, he was signed to a film contract by Mack Sennett. Chaplin had a less than auspicious debut, but once he adopted his famous “tramp” persona, his career sky-rocketed.

By any measure, Chapin was the biggest, traffic-stopping star of the silent era. He was such a big star, he could still produce a silent classic like Modern Times in 1936, well after the industry adopted sound as a standard. He eventually went talkie with his classic satire The Great Dictator, which skewered Adolph Hitler mercilessly. However, much of the pro-Soviet sounding rhetoric he engaged in during this time would come back to haunt him. Yet, arguably, Chaplin’s antagonism with the HUAC Committee has ironically helped insulate him from criticism of his personal life.

Indeed, that was certainly true of prior bio-docs, like partisan spin displayed in Chaplin—Legendof the Century. Instead, The Real Charlie Chaplin does a decent job of presenting a comprehensive warts-and-all portrait of Chaplin that never whitewashes his problematic personal behavior. They still largely give him a pass on his political pronouncements, even though they happened at a time when the Moscow Show Trials were well in public record (but the Ukrainian Holodomor genocide story was still getting spiked in Western media outlets). Still, this is not hagiography, by any measure.

Chaplin—Legend of the Century

Charlie Chaplin was the Jerry Lee Lewis of silent cinema—several times over in fact. Fortunately, he lived in an era when men could simply marry the under-aged girls they might have impregnated and sweep the whole business under the rug. Of course, it was all dashed uncouth for J. Edgar Hoover to use that sort of thing against him. Chaplin’s loyalists keep up the PR fight, but it feels rather awkward in the post-Jerry Lee, post-Cosby era. At least, there is also a fair amount of old school Hollywood history in Anne Le Boulc’h & Frédéric Martin’s Chaplin—Legend of the Century, which premieres this Thursday on Chicago’s WWTW.

Presented by co-writer-narrator Laurent Delahousse, Legend was originally produced as part of France 2’s Une Jour, Une Histoire documentary series. The production’s Gallic crew and perspective probably helped secure the participation of Chaplin’s Francophone grandchildren. In fact, the film opens with the elderly Chaplin about to return to Hollywood to accept an honorary Academy Award after twenty admittedly comfortable years of exile in Switzerland. However, we are told J. Edgar was also gnashing his teeth ominously in his Federal Triangle lair.

After the bittersweet triumph of the Oscar ceremony, Delahousse and co-writer Laurent Seksik flashback to Chaplin’s early Dickensian years in late Victorian London. His father, such as he was, had once attained a measure of fame as a vaudeville performer. Clearly, his absence and failings and his mother’s subsequent mental health breakdowns had a formative influence on the young lad. Based on his stand-out clowning in a touring British variety show, Chaplin was signed by Keystone Studios, where he would eventually develop his celebrated “Tramp” persona.

Chaplin, Hoover’s bête noire, would become the first motion picture star to earn a million dollar contract. He would also marry two women under the age of eighteen, under rather hasty circumstances. The Laurents and the Chaplins try to dismiss this as part of his parental baggage, but it is tough for contemporary viewers to shake off the creepiness of it all. At least, his third marriage to eighteen year-old Oona O’Neil (playwright Eugene O’Neil’s daughter) would be the one to last.

Nobody will deny Chaplin’ cinematic genius. He even a few great talkies in him, including The Great Dictator, which slyly capitalized on the toothbrush style of moustache he shared with the rising Adolph Hitler. However, the narrative of victimization Delahousse and Seksik try to spin gets tiresome quickly. Still, Le Boulc’h, Martin, and editor Florent Maillent shrewdly incorporate vintage clips from his talking pictures that speak directly to each stage of his life.

Viewers watching Legend will get a sense of the sweep of his life, which is something. It is rather amazing how much Horatio Algerish success he attained. However, he was undeniably a complicated, highly imperfect individual. There might be documentary profile that better convey his complexities, but this is the one will be programmed on participating PBS stations in the coming months. It moves along at a good clip, but it obviously has it axes to grind, making more of a partisan piece than a documentary to recommend and engage with. Regardless, it airs this Thursday (11/14) on WTTW, repeating several times over the next three days.