Chaplin

Chaplin – 1992, Richard Attenborough

I count myself lucky to have grown up in a time when there was no internet and satellite TV was a rarity. In those days there were only a few people in charge of what was broadcast on the four TV channels available in the UK, and looking back, they made some good choices. According to my rose tinted recollection, every weekend afternoon of the 1980s and early 90s at least one of the following would have been on telly: a handful of Loony Tunes or Tom & Jerry cartoons, a Laurel and Hardy film, a Three Stooges film or least often but still occasionally, a Chaplin film.

All of those things form a ubiquitous part of my childhood which I’m sure is missing from the collective consciousness of anyone born in the UK after 1990. It may sound like a self satisfied justification of the prejudices every generation has toward the one that comes after it, but... maybe the reason kids nowadays are such poor idiotic saps is because they weren’t exposed to the excellent short films produced in the first half of the twentieth century, like wot I was when I were a young un. It taught me an appreciation of the simple things. There is a purity to slapstick that is all but lost nowadays. The only place it seems to appear any more with any quality are Pixar films.

It’s easy to either forget or be unaware of how important Sir Charles Chaplin is to the history of cinema. It’s only since I got round to Attenborough’s biopic that I first looked back at Chaplin’s life and work with any real interest. The story of Charlie Chaplin is similar to many a biopic; born into poverty, tragic upbringing, emigration to America, massive success that ultimately doesn’t bring happiness, years in the wilderness, eventual happy ending. There’s a lot of ground to cover in the life of Chaplin, and it certainly warrants a Ghandi style biographical epic directed by the great Dicky Attenborough.



Given Chaplin’s 140+ minutes runtime, it’s a good thing that the film gets better as it goes along. Charlie was born into theatrical family in 1889 and from a young age performed in the Music Hall, following in his parents footsteps. Times were hard and his alcoholic father was out of the picture, leaving Charlie and his elder brother to be raised by their insane mother. Chaplin’s early life is covered to the necessary extent, but it’s all very ‘Dickensian cockney workhouse Oliver Twist guvnah’. Maybe people really did used to sing Any Old Iron at the doth of a hat, but it’s a surprise that Attenborough turns Chaplin’s childhood into such a cliché.

Like all such films, things pick up when the subject’s career takes off and Chaplin makes his way to Hollywood. Rather annoyingly the film skips over how Chaplin was discovered; he literally goes from watching a silent film projected onto a sheet in a saloon somewhere in the Mid West, to wandering into the middle of a shoot in California after being summoned by the great Mack Sennet (well played by pre-career-meltdown Dan Ackroyd).

It’s Chaplin’s rise to become one of the most successful and powerful filmmakers of pre-golden era Hollywood that is of most interest to Richard, leading up to his eventual exile from the USA during the height of McCarthyism. Attenborough’s directorial style changes noticeably as the film progresses through each era of Chaplin’s life. Early on during the scenes in London he makes heavy use of George Lucas style wipes between scenes, which is very off-putting, but it doesn’t last long.

Robert Downey Jr does a great job of mimicking Chaplin’s physical performance and his portrayal of Chaplin as a young man is fine, but Rob was only about 27 when the film was made, so when he portrays the elderly Chaplin, he falls short. They should have used an older actor to play the older Chaplin, rather than trying to make Downey look like someone else.

Anthony Hopkins plays the role of a fictional editor who visits an elderly Chaplin in Switzerland to discuss his autobiography. This plot device allows the use of a reflective voice over that is in context with the life of Chaplin as it plays out on screen. It works quite well but I think it was a bit unnecessary. Milla Jovovich has a small role as Chaplin’s first teen bride. Chaplin liked them young you see, much like those other renowned creative talents Polanski and R Kelly. Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin is very kind to the subject when covering his four very young brides; Chaplin didn’t see what all the fuss was about and Dicky would rather dwell on Chaplin’s tortured genius than his controversial love life.

I liked this film, but I hesitate to recommend any film over two hours long unless I really enjoyed it, so instead, if you’ve got an hour to kill, you could do worse than watching one of Chaplin’s most celebrated silent works The Kid, which like a lot of Chaplin’s films is easily found online. Maybe the youth of today will do themselves the favour of stumbling upon it.

The silent era is born again online. I’m quite interested in watching some of the great silent films that paved the way for all the great movies that I enjoy, but not so interested that I would seek them out beyond a brief search on the web. Maybe I’ll work my way round to Max Linder one day.

Movies About Making Movies

The Stunt Man – 1980, Richard Rush

The Player – 1992, Robert Altman

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang – 2005, Shane Black

How many movies about making movies can you name (without including parodies or spoofs or documentaries)? Not many I’ll wager. Not because there aren’t many of them, there are so many that they constitute a sub-genre all of their own. Most are thrillers or otherwise dramatic films, often with comedic elements, the basis for which are either in-jokes about the film industry or satirising cinematic clichés. Movies about making movies can therefore come across as inherently smug. Maybe this is why they don’t make much money and don’t reach a wide audience.

There’s a wikipedia page titled ‘List of Films Considered The Worst’ which makes interesting reading. One of the films in the list, under the section ‘Star Vehicles’ is a film called ‘Burn Hollywood Burn’ about a director making a movie that is so bad he wished to discredit himself from it. BHB was so bad that the director discredited himself from it. This ironic affair highlights the difficulty in making a self referential film that is not self indulgent or uninteresting, and explains why when such films are made, they tend to be labours of love for those involved. The Stunt Man is one such heartfelt and earnest production.

The Stunt Man took at least ten years to get made. It was director Richard Rush’s magnum opus, such was his obsession with the film and it’s legacy that he eventualy financed and filmed a documentary about it’s production; The Sinister Saga of The Making of The Stunt Man. The Stunt Man is quite a good film, but it doesn’t warrant the devotion that Rush has for it. Sadly, the lack of success his great work achieved put Rush off directing, he only made one more film, and that was after a gap of fourteen years.

When it was released in 1980, The Stunt Man provided a somewhat groundbreaking insight into the world of film making. Rather cleverly the stunts and action sequences of the film-within-the-film that are being taken so seriously by the fictional director, are presented as screwball, madcap affairs played out to a comedy Buster Keaton style score. The satire is well layered and Rush probably deserved his Best Director Oscar nod, and Peter O’Toole wholly deserved his Best Actor nomination for his portrayal as the manic director. Unfortunately for them both, Raging Bull was also up for a couple of awards that year.



The Stunt Man is let down by a poor supporting cast, which is something that you could never say about The Player, with over 40 cameos by big names from over thirty years of Hollywood history. This one was also a labour of love; Robert Altman had made critically successful films without much financial success for years, and The Player, a film about a ruthless and paranoid movie studio executive, was drawn from the personal experience of many movie makers. It’s quite an average thriller really, but it stands out in the way it ridicules the people decide which films get made. It’s also clearly been made by a man who loves films, the famous 7 minute opening shot can be considered a short film in itself.



I love the way movie pitches are mocked. “It’s Out Of Africa meets Pretty Woman.”
The rest of the film doesn’t really live up to that shot. The Player has a deliberately unconventional ending and originality should be applauded, but ultimately it comes across as a little too pleased with itself.

The best movie about movies that I’ve seen is Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. It was written and directed by Shane Black. Shane Black wrote the screenplay for Lethal Weapon when he was in his early twenties and sold it for a quarter of a million dollars. He went on to command extravagant fees for a few lacklustre movies including a reported million dollars for a mere re-write of Last Action Hero (another movie about movies).

In a sense, all of Blacks screenplays were movies about movies because they adhered so rigidly to movie conventions (specifically action movie conventions). I once read the first act of Lethal Weapon online and it’s an excellent script, a masterclass in structure and narrative description, but it is far from revolutionary. Black’s style of writing ‘blockbusters’ eventually became boring to even him and he took a ten year break before returning with KKBB.

This one is the least explicitly about moviemaking (although the film industry does provide a background) yet it does the best job of holding up in front of the audience all the formulaic ingredients of Film (in this case Film Noir) and saying “This is how a film is written”. Yet at the same time, the satire and exposition is all part of the plot. The tone is perfect, it’s very clever without being smug and features excellent performances by Val Kilmer and Robert Downey Jr.

Movies about movies seem to be made by experienced directors toward the end of their careers, maybe because they feel they’ve got nothing left to lose. I reckon George Lucas is considering one to get back at the most obsessive of all the Star Wars fans.