charlie chaplin Tagged Articles at Cinematical

One day, a man named Morace Park is surfing around eBay, looking for antiques, when he's intrigued by an item listed as an "old film." Housed in a funky antique tin, the man bids and wins it for the super-reasonable price of £3.20. He buys and sells antiques, so when the package arrives, it sits around for a bit. When he finally gets around to opening it, he unfurls some of the film to see what it is. The title reads: Charlie Chaplin in Zepped.

Yes, folks, as a story in the Guardian attests, this is a forgotten film that there's no record of. Almost seven minutes long, the short "is a mixture of footage of Chaplin and exuberant animation that reminded Park of Monty Python sequences." Park's neighbor John Dyer says: "It starts with live shots of Chaplin. It then turns into a dreamscape. We see a Zeppelin bombing attack. And then we see Chaplin taking the mickey out of the Zeppelin, at the time a powerful instrument of terror." They deduce that the film is a propaganda piece from the first World War. Park and Dyer have traveled to Los Angeles to learn more about the short, with filmmaker Hammad Khan recording their journey for a documentary.

One has got to assume that whoever sold it never bothered to open the film and see what this "old film" was. Just goes to show you -- old cinematic junk on eBay can lead to stunning discoveries, and never be so lazy as to not see what a film is before selling it.

Once again, we're sending some love to our warped friends over at Worth1000 for their latest brilliant photoshop contest. This time they asked readers to take any celebrity and place them in a different time period. So, for example, above you see WALL-E making a cameo in a Charlie Chaplin movie (my personal favorite). Or, you could take, say, Charlie Chaplin and photoshop him into an image from 2009. Get the idea? Folks were all over the place with this one -- from Marilyn Monroe starring in The House Bunny to Casablanca starring George Clooney, Nicole Kidman and Christian Bale, you'll no doubt find some fascinating imagery in this particular contest, even if some of them are just so very wrong. Check out our favorites in the gallery below, and the rest over at Worth 1000.



[via Superpunch]

As a fresh 35mm print of Charlie Chaplin's quintessential 1947 thriller Monsieur Verdoux begins circulating through revival houses around the country, it seems like a good time to remind people that while the late actor is mainly known as a star of the silent screen, he definitely didn't die with it. Although the greatest slapstick artist of all time initially rejected the development of sound film, mocking it with hilariously exaggerated voices in City Lights, he eventually adopted it after realizing that resistance was futile. However, he refused to simply throw in a few lines of dialogue to accompany his beloved tramp shtick, choosing instead to take his career in a fresh direction. While Chaplin made many sound films over the course of several decades, only two of them really qualify as classic talkies (except for Limelight, which deserves a category of its own). Late flops like A King of New York don't really hold together, but Chaplin's initial forays into the world of sound film display his talent as a composer of distinctive prose.

His first work of this era, The Great Dictator, remains a masterpiece that broadened the potential of his tramp character with a modified Prince and the Pauper tale applied to World War II, and Chaplin doing double duty playing both a Jewish barber and an exaggerated Adolf Hitler (or "Hinkel," rather). Monsieur Verdoux, in which he plays a frustrated man whose losses during the Great Depression lead to a twisted scheme where he marries, murders and robs rich women, represented something else altogether: Chaplin's only brooding melodrama, the occasional laughs are almost incidental.

Yup, she's at it again. Not long ago, Jessica Alba recreated several memorable scenes from classic horror movies for Latina Magazine. Now she's back, and in honor of her upcoming comedy The Love Guru, the actress posed for a photo as comedy legend Charlie Chaplin for the June issue of Allure magazine. It's actually a pretty funny photo, considering Alba's pretty pregnant under all those clothes. Definitely not as bad as those horror shots; in those pics, the gal barely looked like she was trying. Here, at least, she widens her eyes and does a little something with her mouth. Eh? Can you tell I'm reaching here? Let's not even touch the fact that she's posing as Chaplin to promote The Love Guru. I think we should make a rule right now: No one is allowed to pose as a comedy icon unless, ya know, that person also happens to be kinda funny on the big screen.

Check out Alba's last "recreation stint" in the gallery below.



[via People]

One of my personal heroes is the writer James Agee (1909-1955), who worked as a film critic for Time Magazine and The Nation between 1942 and 1948. He went on to write a new kind of fictional non-fiction book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, as well as a novel, A Death in the Family, that was published after his death, and which won him a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. He wrote the screenplays for The African Queen (1952) and The Night of the Hunter (1955) as well as numerous other articles, stories and scripts. But it's his film criticism that I most admire. I re-read it every year or so, and it always re-charges my batteries.

Agee could pry apart a movie and lay bare its inner workings in an astonishingly tiny amount of space and with an extraordinary use of language. Best of all, when reading the book Agee on Film in order, you get a sense of the movie critic's beat, and all the time spent watching, thinking about and writing about bad movies. It reminds us that the majority of movies have always been bad, and even when the present moment seems like it probably contains the worst lot of movies ever produced by man, it probably doesn't.

This isn't the most amazing news I've ever heard, but it got me thinking about auctions and Ebay and what not (plus it is a slow news day), so I thought I'd mention it. Yesterday at an auction in L.A., a hat and cane set once used by Charlie Chaplin was sold for $139,250, the new record for such a set. I'm not sure how many sets there are -- surely he went through quite a few in his many years as the Tramp -- but that is a lot of money for something that isn't a one-of-a-kind. I'm surprised that things like this can net such prices, particularly give how much the market for auctions has widened since the internet and Ebay came along. (Maybe I'm just bitter because I could sell an old comic book or a signed copy of a book for a lot more before online auctions made everything a lot less rare.) I'm also shocked that people still trust or care about authenticity when scandals like the Queen Mary Marilyn Monroe exhibit happen.

I guess I'm just not a big enough fan of anything to buy expensive props or merchandise or souvenirs or whatever. Once in awhile, I will purchase movie-related clothing, like my The Fisher King t-shirt and my Adaptation long-sleeve with script excerpt on the back, provided they are relatively cheap. But then, I'm not the geek that some people are. The only thing of this sort that I would spend a lot of money on is a painting commissioned for the original Star Wars poster, which was never used, only because it was done by my father.

What is the most you've ever spent on Ebay or at an auction for something movie-related?

 

Sunday (April 16) was Charlie Chaplin's birthday; he was born in 1889. Back in those days, no one associated April 15 or the days surrounding it with burdensome thoughts of income tax. Nowadays, many of us have spent time in the past week scrabbling to pull together tax forms and to find money to pay any taxes due. Tax time can certainly make you feel like The Little Tramp. Just be grateful you don't have to eat your boots.

While I like Modern Times and a few other Chaplin movies, my favorite Chaplin experience was seeing The Gold Rush (pictured above) in a theater a few years ago with a live accompaniment from The Asylum Street Spankers. The Austin band managed to slip the Cantina song from Star Wars into a Charleston dance number, and played the "I wish I was an Oscar Mayer Weiner" jingle during a certain sequence involving potential cannibalism. It was great fun and a charming accompaniment.

After you pay your taxes, or dance with joy about a refund, go rent Modern Times or The Gold Rush. And if you want to pair one of those films with some Chaplin hommage, you've got dozens of choices, from Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd. to Johnny Depp in Benny and Joon. I like Eddie Izzard's characterization of Chaplin in The Cat's Meow, myself.

Okay, movie buffs, take a good look at the picture to your right. Looks like an ordinary, black and white shot of an old Time Square movie theater sign, yes? Not quite. James Lileks came across a series of news photos of this theater sign for the film Limelight - which didn't star Charles Brade, perhaps because he isn't a real person. Limelight is a real film, and it was released in 1952 - starring, written, and directed by Charlie Chaplin (and with a cameo by Buster Keaton, to boot - making Limelight the first and only film to star both silent film icons). So why does this newspaper photo proclaim the film to star Charles Brade? Could it be...McCarthyism?

Lileks examined the full photo of the image at right, along with several other shots of the same theater, and notes that the word "Brade" is clearly airbrushed onto the photos. In fact, in one of the photos, you can see the front of the marquee at an angle, and it still has "Chaplin" on it. In 1952, when Limelight was released, Chaplin took a trip to Europe. While Chaplin was overseas, J. Edgar Hoover, who had long had it in for Chaplin for his "un-American activities", negotiated with the INS to have his reentry permit revoked. Interesting related trivia: because of Chaplin's McCarthyism troubles, Limelight didn't screen in Los Angeles in 1952 and thus was not eligible for the Academy awards. The film finally screened in Los Angeles 20 years, in 1972, and in 1973, a year after receiving an honorary Oscar and receiving a standing ovation, Chaplin was awarded his only competitive Oscar for Limelight's score.