Charlie Chaplin and the Business of Living

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Adam Gopnik reviews Joyce Milton’s “Tramp,” a biography of Charlie Chaplin, and reflects on the comedian’s grounding in British music-hall tradition, his leftist politics, and the childlike purity of his art.

That Charles Chaplin, who got this strange job first and held it longest, never went much beyond planning to cast himself in a movie about the life of Napoleon is, in a way, a tribute to his underlying sense of reality. Reading Joyce Milton’s new biography of Chaplin, though, which bears the title of “Tramp” , you wouldn’t know that there was much of anything peculiar or out of the ordinary about Chaplin’s career.

In a seemingly straightforward set piece, like the rescue from the orphanage van, in “The Kid,” what is startling is how much life Chaplin gets out of the Victorian clichés by adding a stumble here and a flat-footed skid there, and by making them part of a beautifully orchestrated pattern of assertion and withdrawal, a pattern possible only, perhaps, in a medium as fluid as the movies.

 

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