"Chaplin became increasingly miserable there and would expensively return to Los Angeles for most of the shoot." "Even the famous chicken gag had to be reshot there." "For one take they used a double." "You could obviously put a double into a chicken costume." "I mean, one chicken looks like another." "Not true." "Apparently the double-- You could see it was a double." "It just didn't move like a chicken, like Charlie moves like a chicken." "The miners are starving." "They're so hungry that Mack Swain begins hallucinating." "Was ever there a more perfect animal imitation than Chaplin 's?" "His ability silently to convey thought, even a bird's thought inspired a young Richard Attenborough when he saw the film in rerelease." "He was able to convey the most extraordinary thoughts and intricacy of thoughts, and debate and reaction purely by physical, and not just facial but physical reaction to things." "It was an experience I had never even considered in that here was somebody who could not only hold my attention absolutely, but deny me the choice of laughing or crying." "I mean, he dealt with me as this figure on the screen." "I thought it was the most magical thing I'd ever seen in my life." "And it was that occasion, no question, I want to be an actor." "If I could do what he could do in relation to an audience I want to be an actor." "That's how it started my love of him." "The Tramp was, as usual, the outsider, especially when it came to love." "It looked as if he would not get the girl." "Or maybe it was that the girl did not get him." "Georgia Hale had replaced Lita Grey in the film." "In real life, Chaplin naturally began having an affair with her." "The discontinuities between his Tramp character and Chaplin's own  vast worldly success were not much remarked." "Except by Chaplin, who once rather bitterly noted the irony  that he had become rich by playing the poorest of men." "Johnny Depp had to duplicate one of The Gold Rush's most famous moments in his movie Benny  Joon." "Approaching the roll dance, when you see the thing it's very simple." "It's so difficult." "It's so difficult." "I mean, the coordination." "It's something that Chaplin just did in an instant." "He just came up with it like that." "It took me about, I don't know, a good three weeks to a month of really working on it." "It's not just in this." "It's in this, you know." "It's all in here." "Chaplin's head and, you know, the little glances, the side glances." "The Gold Rush is the one film in which the Tramp ends up a millionaire." "Maybe it's Chaplin 's acknowledgment of his own equally astonishing rise." "Six years after the company's founding, Chaplin had finally delivered a hit  to his United Artists partners." "Meanwhile, Lita, seen with him here at a premiere had delivered their second son, Sydney." "But the marriage was not going well." "The Circus, maybe Chaplin's most purely hilarious feature  was not going well either." "Its production was haunted by unimaginable problems." "It was in '28." "I was 5 years old, and I went to see the film." "It must have been The Circus." "I was amazed." "I laughed, and it moved me even though I was a 6-year-old boy." "And then I started to imitate Chaplin." "I stole the bowler hat of my father, his trousers and with the ink I put the moustache on, and I mimed Chaplin." "With this picture, self-consciousness enters Chaplin 's universe." "It's his first exploration of his own art, the art of being funny." "When he tries to be funny, he isn 't." "When he doesn't try to be funny, he is." "The scene also comments on his supposed old-fashioned qualities." "The bits that don't work here in 1927, did work for him a decade earlier." "The clown in this scene is played by Henry Bergman  who worked with Chaplin for decades." "He represents classic, highly stylized, commedia dell'arte comic values." "Chaplin represents a more naturalistic variation." "He's going to exaggerate, of course but there's also something real about him something that works for the movies  that most seemingly realistic of all media." "And in the film, Chaplin had to play this pantomime but when he saw the clown with a real arrow he was frightened he could be killed." "Then he did this-- I show you what he did." "That means, "I cannot do it, because there is a worm in the apple. "" "He was a master in pacing." "He knew exactly when after one gag he has to top it with an even bigger gag or if he suddenly has to go into total opposite." "It was never gag for the sake of the gag." "It was always the gag for the sake of revealing something about the character or something about the story, or revealing something about the plot." "In The Circus, Chaplin's plagued by an endless array of animals all irrationally bent on assaulting his dignity." "It's true that he mastered the cinematic art so well that you don't see it." "You don't see it." "It just flows in the film and it goes." "It's just so natural, everything." "Chaplin 's routine with the magician 's table is one of his most masterfully orchestrated gag sequences  yet he would go on to top it in this very film." "The Circus, it's just a wonderful good time." "The jokes and the execution of them are so brilliant and so uncluttered by anything that can date it." "Social ideas and satire on the mores of the time date all the time." "This stuff is so beautifully done, and it's as fresh as could be." "Another example, say, would be the movie Singin' in the Rain." "That will be as fresh 500 years from now as it was the day it came out." "Sometimes his gags were simple little throwaway moments." "Sometimes the gags were as familiar as this nightmare of entrapment." "Though perhaps only Chaplin would have thought of this awful logic:" "A barking dog threatening to awaken a sleeping lion." "Surely the Tramp's endless on-screen problems reflect Chaplin's off-screen problems as he struggled to finish The Circus." "The Circus isn't even mentioned in his autobiography." "It's a miracle that that film got made, for a start because everything happened." "All the disasters in the world happened with it." "The whole set was completely destroyed by fire and then what the fire didn't destroy, the firemen destroyed." "Then he had the most messy and disastrous and horrible divorce." "The shooting had to stop for nine months because his wife divorced him." "And it was such an ugly divorce that he was frightened that she would, in fact, kidnap the film." "And so he had to hide the film." "Lita's 42-page divorce complaint was designed to ruin Chaplin." "It named the names of his lovers, discussed intimate sexual behavior and in book form, became an underground bestseller." "The divorce was quite ugly, and she got quite a bit of money my mother, and so they had nothing really to talk about." "Therefore, Chaplin did not appear in court." "He threw money at Lita." "The divorce settlement was the largest in American history to date." "Such was his popularity that most of the mud she threw ended up on her." "Chaplin nearly collapsed under the strain." "He fled to New York, where these pictures were taken and suffered a nervous breakdown." "He was having an affair with his leading lady the best friend of his wife." "So maybe that's why he never mentioned it as one of his favorite films." "She was Merna Kennedy." "In the movie, she loves Rex  the tightrope walker, played by Harry Crocker." "Trying to impress her, the Tramp decides to emulate Rex." "Though I always am so much in awe of and express my admiration for his sense of story arc and of how he subordinated everything to story, still I realize my visceral memory and reaction are to individual chunks." "So when I think of The Circus, that sequence on the tightrope with the monkey climbing on his head, that's the movie to me." "My father had an idea." "He said, "l have an idea of the Tramp being in a situation where he can't get out of. "" "Comedy is often a situation of a nightmare." "And this was a nightmare situation of a man on a tightrope." "Everything goes wrong." "He's falling off." "His pants fall down." "He's got a whole lot of monkeys around him who are biting his nose." "And the idea started off by that nightmare situation." "You'd have to say this is the best banana-peel joke in human history." "Also, the last scene in the film this beautiful scene with the horses, all these wonderful wagons and the dust and the light, and it's extraordinary." "He shot it and shot it and shot it, and looked at the rushes at 3:00 in the morning and said, "No, it's not" " His hat isn't quite right." "We've got to do it again. "" "And someone stole the wagons." "They weren't there." "This whole freshman course of students stole the wagons for their fire ceremony." "Chaplin rounded up the wagons and reshot." "The ending of The Circus is one of Chaplin's most beautiful." "He could be, whatever his critics might say a great pictorialist when he wanted to be." "But there's a larger symbolism to this sequence." "Chaplin finished work on The Circus just three days after the premiere of The Jazz Singer." "Sound was about to revolutionize the movies and everyone, Chaplin included, wondered if the Tramp a figure it was impossible to imagine talking  would survive the revolution." "He, however, was already writing his next movie." "It was City Lights, Chaplin's last fully realized, fully acknowledged masterpiece." "The Tramp's introduction, unconcernedly snoozing on the establishment's statuary, was the greatest of all his movie entrances." "The film had a score and a bit of gibberish talk but it was essentially a silent movie." "I've often said that it's much harder being a talking comedian on the screen than a silent comedian." "The example I always gave was the difference between chess and checkers." "It's like checkers to do it silently." "You can figure out the gags and painstakingly write them, and then execute them but as soon as you have to speak, you're plunged into a different reality that's much more complex and the demands become much different." "Even so, the demands of silent comedy were not that easily satisfied especially by Chaplin." "For unlike his competitors, Keaton and Lloyd, he did it all himself." "He never employed gag-writing teams to help hone his humor." "He always built up his routines on his feet in endless rehearsals like this one." "Later, in retake after retake, he would elaborate or simplify them." "In feature-length things you can't just do them alone with comedy." "So he brings in romance and sentiment." "When I saw City Lights, I realized what a deep filmmaker he was because I felt that that film said more about love than so many purportedly serious investigations of the subject." "Emotionally, it lives out feelings of real love." "You see what he feels for the girl and to what lengths he's willing to go." "If she can't see him, she's able to feel that love and she has no idea that it's some scruffy little tramp that's making her life beautiful." "The production was strained, particularly in Chaplin 's relationship  with his inexperienced leading lady Virginia Cherrill." "As h3 gr3w, he started having to construct stories." "He started having to involve, also his own emotional feelings with women and get deeper into himself." "And I think that must have made it a lot harder for him." "It must have been a greater struggle then to construct something because he tried to put another dimension into it." "And I think that's when he would have moments of struggling to find ideas." "He's always thinking, "What is logical?" "Is the gag logical?" "Is it right for it to happen?" And the stories about City Lights how he spent months trying to work out one little bit of business to make it plausible, to make it logical." "This is that bit of business." "How to make the blind girl misidentify her benefactor as a rich man." "It's the noises of a limousine door slamming, its motor purring off sounds resonant of wealth, that do the trick." "This is one instance where a soundtrack would have made Chaplin's job easier." "But he and Cherrill have to convey her misunderstanding and his all too clear understanding of what happened by brilliantly mimed thought." "Chaplin, whose mood at the time was erratic and angry shot on this picture for over a year." "I love the toying with the sentimentality, the way he makes you feel sentimental and particularly the scene where he's watching her he's in love with her, and she's at the fountain." "He had me going with the sentimentality and yet the moment happens when she sprays the water in his face and breaks it." "I thought, "This guy's the best. "" "The movie's brilliant subplot:" "Henry Myers is a millionaire who 's benign when sober but madly suicidal when he's drunk." "And then, of course, the guy with all the money who's got all the possessions and all the money in the world and is on the verge of suicide all the time because his feelings are unrequited in love." "It's such an interesting exploration of all those feelings in a nonverbal way." "It's one step removed from music." "For me, it's his best picture." "The intertitle says it all." "The job, as what was once called a "white wing" cleaning up after animals on the street, is demeaning." "But it tells us Chaplin will do anything to help the girl." "And it leads to what may be one of Chaplin's greatest sight gags." "I began to be impressed with the fact that he was such a good actor as well because the serious side of that movie he handled with legendary brilliance." "Well, my favorite picture of all time, I guess, is City Lights." "I've seen it 40 times or more." "I think it's very funny, incredibly touching and the end is just hard to...." "I get choked up now even thinking about it." "When she recognizes it's him that's helped her regain her sight and everything, it's murder." "Beautiful picture." "The Tramp has secretly paid for the operation that restores the girl's sight." "Three days after City Lights premiered, an exhausted Chaplin embarked on a world tour." "As usual, the crowds were enormous." "As usual, no door was closed to him." "In London, he met George Bernard Shaw." "More important to him, he met Gandhi." "As the world-wide depression deepened  Chaplin made the Mahatma's political and spiritual concerns his own." "Chaplin moved on to Berlin in what many have said  was his most enormous popular reception ever." "Yet it was tainted." "The Nazis, just two years before taking power issued vicious anti-Semitic attacks against him." "Chaplin was not a Jew, but he was reluctant to say so." "He thought that would implicitly support the anti-Semites." "Immediately on his return to America he met Paulette Goddard, the second of his great loves." "Even now, the grapevine is enough alive so that people say:" ""He could be a difficult man to work for or be married to and he often confused the two statuses. "" "As he did with Goddard, planning to star her in his next picture." "A former showgirl, she was a lively, lovely companion." "Among her accomplishments, she effected a reconciliation between Chaplin and his two sons." "Oh, she was absolutely adorable." "I used to sleep with her until I was about 8." "And my father said, "You can't sleep with Paulette anymore. "" "I said, "Why can't we sleep with Paulette?"" "Chaplin 's great recreational passion was tennis." "Here he's about to play a charity match against Groucho Marx, among others." "He played almost daily on his court at home." "It was after those matches, drinking Cokes, sharing a snack  that his friends thought him most relaxed, reminiscent and expansive, especially about politics." "Mankind, he thought, was being turned into animals blindly serving the factories, the machinery  that were supposed to serve it." "In its most aspiring moments, Modern Times  was about a Marxist concept:" "the dehumanization and the alienation of labor." "No doubt about it, Chaplin was a leftist of a devoted and radical kind." "In fact, the first time we ran the picture together I was so taken with it that I about fell off the chair." "He told me later that he wondered about that whether I was putting it on, and he said, "I soon discovered it was not so. "" "Attention, foreman." "Trouble on bench five." "Check on the nut-tighteners." "Nuts coming through loose on bench five." "Attention foreman." "Charlie did not know how to notate music and he didn't know how to extend musical ideas." "And they needed somebody to work with him." "The fellows who were in charge, Alfred Newman and Eddie Powell knew my work from New York, and they brought me out here." "And I went to work for Charlie." "And he really had a wonderful instinct for music." "They were simple little tunes, and my job was to take them down to alter them when I thought they needed altering." "And that's what I did." "We worked five days a week, sometimes six and it was altogether quite wonderful, you know." "He became this sort of a surrogate father for me." "What you feel sometimes with a thing like the eating machine you see an investment in a prop, in a shot, in an idea." "So we have to let this really play and we have to do it." "And it's about twice too long, maybe, the eating machine." "There's nothing in film like the feeding machine." "It was just absolutely wonderful." "The man is reduced to something less than the sum of the parts, you see." "He's just an animal, which is being fed by a machine." "Few people know that table, which goes around Charlie was manipulating that himself." "It wasn't somebody else doing it." "He was the guy with gadgets underneath the table and he would make it turn around and all that sort of stuff." "The man was simply incredible." "And he also manipulated that mouth-wiper that comes and hits him in the face and hurt him and just made his face puff up and his mouth puff up." "He was amazing." "Sometimes you feel something akin to pretension in the agenda of Modern Times, and it's a little off" " It's distancing." "At the same time, when I watch Modern Times, I'll sit there and feel slightly superior, which with a great master part of you is urging, "How can I get a leg-up on this guy and feel at least even with him?"" "But then there'll be a sequence and you'll think:" ""That was so smart and so efficient. "" "Nothing was smarter or more efficient than this sequence." "The ever-helpful Tramp picks up a red flag and before he knows it, he's innocently leading a Communist demonstration." "There's something prescient in the sequence." "Within a decade, Chaplin himself would be cruelly red-baited." "In a strange way, Modern Times is a bit of a throwback." "Because if you look at it, it's really a collection of four two-reelers." "The film was certainly not all politics, all the time." "Goddard was cast as the waif opposite the Tramp and much of the comedy was as innocent as any Chaplin had ever done." "In Modern Times, it is brilliant and you're following the story, and it kind of peters out." "It doesn't go anywhere." "It's just a brilliant trip and each skit is very funny and brilliantly executed." "And it goes along on the momentum of his genius the fact that he's funny and the bits are funny." "We talked politics, we talked just about everything because he had a real knowledge of these things." "He had a mind like a super attic." "We went to Musso  Frank's for lunch every day five days a week." "We were driven there in Charlie's car." "And we had a table which was reserved for us, and we'd sing." "There was a thing called "I Want a Lassie. "" "And it was a tune Charlie knew and I knew, and we'd sing to that tune." "And the people in the place would look and say, "What's that?"" "And then they'd suddenly see it was Chaplin and they had great prospects for their evening conversation so they listened." "I think people sometimes don't understand about the fact that a man like Charlie, who was a millionaire can do this poverty-stricken Tramp." "Yet he did it, and there was never anything more convincing in films I think, than the way he did it." "And that's a great tribute to him." "Despite the film's casual construction, some critics thought Chaplin  was beginning to take himself and the world too seriously." "But still, in the end, he was able for the last time in movie history  to find an open road into a better future." "This time with a pretty girl on his arm." "I really still love Charlie." "He was not just like a father to me, which he was in some ways but I admired him very much for the constancy of his point of view." "He really had a feeling for those who lead ordinary lives and are sometimes shortchanged by circumstances." "After Modern Times' release in 1936  Charlie and Paulette took a vacation cruise." "Charlie never saw a newsreel camera he wouldn 't play to." "What was supposed to be a short Hawaiian vacation  would soon stretch into a three-month tour of Asia." "Back home, people began to wonder if Charlie and Paulette were actually married." "They later claimed that they were married  though there's no record of the nuptials, somewhere in Asia." "Still later, when their relationship began to come apart  they found themselves denying rumors of divorce." "For the moment, though  they were obviously delighted with one another's company." "And Chaplin was beginning to plan his biggest and most problematic movie to date." "The Great Dictator opens on the Western Front during World War I." "It is Chaplin's first all-talking production." "In it, he would play two characters." "One of them would be a Tramp variation an innocent Jewish barber serving bravely, if ineffectually in Tomania's army." "Breech secured!" "Stand clear!" "Ready!" "Fire!" "Behind-the-scenes footage, shot by brother Sydney has recently been discovered." "On The Dictator, I remember, he had a thing where he pulled the gun." "He fired this Big Bertha sort of a cannon." "And I was out there, and I let out a big, "Ha, ha, ha! "" "And he said, "Cut, cut! " I thought he was gonna be sore as hell." "He was absolutely thrilled that somebody laughed at it." "Chaplin threw their famous resemblance right in Der Führer's face." "His pictures were now banned in Germany but that's not what motivated his portrayal of the dictator Hynkel." "For his comic German accent, he drew on his vaudeville training." "Most comedians of his era could talk "Dutch. "" "You know, I really started to see movies when I was 13 after the World War II." "I lived in Czechoslovakia, which was occupied by the Nazis." "Suddenly comes The Great Dictator and there was a liberation, because single-handedly Chaplin reduced this monster into a pathetic ridiculous, venomous clown." "You can say that, you know, the Allies liberated Europe physically but The Great Dictator, Chaplin, liberated us spiritually and made you think also, because suddenly you realized watching:" ""How is it possible that this pathetic creature had such a power over good German people?"" "Millions of people followed him died for him, for this insane lunatic." "It's almost as if he made that film because he felt that Hitler had become his rival in reaching out for everybody." "The Hitler character, he had a strong relationship to the early Tramp, who's a troublemaker, who's primitive." "And the other person, the barber, is more his human side." "It's interesting, the relationship between the two and how they get confused." "I think it was a very brave film to make." "I don't think that many people were being openly critical of what was going on at the time, and he was one of the" "Maybe not the only one, but he was one of the few." "Come here, you!" "Attacking a storm trooper, huh?" "Grab him!" "You'll hear from my lawyer." "Come on!" "Why, you" "He bit my finger!" "The barber and Hynkel will eventually exchange roles." "The Jewish barber pays a comic, balletic price for the accident of his birth." "His creator, asked once if he was Jewish made this superb reply, "l do not have that honor. "" "I love the whole film, and I think that this scene when he plays with the globe and it's just perfect metaphor for the sick dreams of every dictator." "Out, Caesar of Nuris, emperor of the world." "My world." "That scene was written." "Every single movement was written down." "Whereas all the scenes where he does that pretend German were improvised." "I would have thought that that would be written to make it sound like German but he just apparently said to the camera, "Roll. " And then went on and just rambled on in this almost perfect German." "It's an idea he'd had for a long time." "Some smart guy said, "Oh, that was my idea. "" "But then there's actually footage of him way back in home movies doing it." "In the home movie, he was dressed in a Grecian outfit." "It just was so perfect for Hitler." "The globe dance, I could watch it for hours and hours." "Rewind, once again." "It's absolutely incredible." "Literally, I could watch it for weeks and never get bored." "I mean, just the metaphor." "It's just endlessly, endlessly brilliant." "People just fall down dead over an alleged metaphor but I don't find it funny or a brilliant metaphor." "Some would agree with Woody Allen." "Some would not." "But at a time when 90% of America opposed war and half the country was to some degree anti-Semitic  this admittedly preachy film was undeniably courageous." "It was Hitler who seemed to be imitating Chaplin, not Chaplin imitating Hitler." "Chaplin came first." "Chaplin was famous long before Hitler was famous." "There's a little bit of Hitler in all of us." "That's the whole idea that Hitler is not some creature who came from outer space." "He's one of us." "I think the genius of the film is that Chaplin realizes a lot of Hitler in him that there's a lot of Hitler in anyone who dominates audiences and rouses the rabble." "There is no doubt in The Great Dictator that he felt he had to say something about this phenomenon, this issue of fascism and where the world was headed." "And when he does blatantly speak, he's the voice of a generation." "He's the voice of several generations." "What is he going to say?" "It's an imposing of a kind of self- importance." "It's very dangerous." "I happen to like the tone of his voice." "I liked being with him." "You must speak." "I can't." "You must." "It's our only hope." "You have a situation, World War II, and he speaks very clearly." "He makes statements on the world and the nature of government the nature of fascism." "It does sound like preaching." "It sounds like, "They expect me to make a comment, and I'm gonna do it. "" "The people at the time said, "He's too self-important." "He's got above himself. "" "I don't think it was quite that." "He did take life terribly seriously." "He thought a lot about things." "He would get terribly troubled by things that were going on in the world." "He was deeply distressed by the Spanish Civil War, for instance." "He genuinely felt he got an audience, he's got to say something." "It's not Hitler/Hynkel, it's not the Jewish barber." "Suddenly, Charles Chaplin's face comes through." "I'm sorry, but I don't want to be an emperor." "That's not my business." "I don't want to rule or conquer anyone." "I should like to help everyone if possible, Jew, gentile, black man, white." "We all want to help one another." "Human beings are like that." "We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery." "We don't want to hate and despise one another." "In this world, there's room for everyone." "The good Earth is rich and can provide for everyone." "Not one word has lost its significance." "It's as true now as it was then." "Pacifist public opinion, critical hesitation, counted for little." "In its initial release, The Great Dictator was Chaplin 's biggest-grossing film." "In World War II, he vocally controversially supported our Russian allies notably, at a Carnegie Hall rally, where he followed a waffling Orson Welles." "The next speaker was Charlie." "He came out, this natty figure walked to the center of the stage raised his hand said, "Comrades! "" "Well, the place came down." "He remained what he had always been, a restless, driven man." "But at 53, he began to find a measure of happiness when he met Oona o'Neill." "She was 16, the daughter of the playwright Eugene o'Neill." "A New York debutante, she was now both shyly and eagerly seeking a career as an actress." "For Chaplin, it was love at first sight, the last and greatest love of his life." "Within a couple of months, she was living with him." "This screen test for an unmade film called The Girl from Leningrad gives us a unique glimpse of her spirit in 1942." "Don't turn around so quick." "Hey, stop." "Not so quick." "But he had recently had and broken off an affair with Joan Berry a very disturbed would-be actress  who desperately broke into his home one night." "I came home, he was very strange." "He said, "Go to bed. "" "I went into bed, and what had happened is, she had broken in with a gun." "He talked her out of this nonsense, and she put the gun down and left." "He said, one day, he did the greatest piece of acting he's ever done in his life." "She pulled a gun on him, and she was going to shoot him." "He acted his way out of the situation till he got that gun out of her hand." "He could not act his way out of the law's clutches." "Here, he is humiliatingly fingerprinted." "The FBI had been keeping a file on him since 1922." "For some reason, J. Edgar Hoover held an implacable hatred for him." "The FBI conspired to charge him with a Mann Act violation." "The law ludicrously forbade the transportation of women across state lines for immoral purposes." "Chaplin, here shaking hands with the jury, eventually won that case." "Simultaneously, Joan Berry brought a paternity suit against him." "There were two trials and countless scandalous headlines." "Berry's lawyer had a field day." ""Lecherous hound, Cockney cad, a reptile"  were just some of the names he called Chaplin." "Blood tests proved Chaplin could not be the father but they were inadmissible under California law." "Chaplin lost the case also lost was much of America 's affection for its beloved Tramp." "You know, he supported that child." "He didn't make an issue of it." "He said, "Okay. " Paid for the kid, but it was not his." "Monsieur Verdoux would deepen the nation 's alienation despite this hilariously failed attempt at murder." "No, he won't" "What are you gonna do with that?" "Lasso him." "Don't be silly, you can't lasso a fish." "Any fool knows that." "Oh, yes, you can." "All you have to do is to place it over his head like that." "Then you pull it tight, like this." "What's that?" "A yodeler." "Oh, that ruins everything." "Certainly does." "Too bad we couldn't find a place all to ourselves." "Certainly is." "Orson Welles proposed the idea to Chaplin." "Based on the true case of Henri Landru, a notorious French wife-murderer." "Chaplin vastly expanded it into an indictment of bourgeois society." "Making Verdoux at that moment in his life when his own morality was so much in question, was great provocation." "It was the final pin that broke the camel's back." "It got him into deep trouble with all sorts of war veterans...." "And everyone, I think, came down on him for making that film." "Monsieur Verdoux is a bank official who gets fired after decades of service." "To support his wife and child, he takes to marrying rich widows and then killing them for their money." "It's a black comedy by a man who actually had no blackness in him." "I wonder how long he's going to keep that incinerator burning." "It's been going for the last three days." "l know." "I haven't had a chance to put my washing out." "It's almost a mea culpa." "It's a statement about capitalism." "It's a statement that murder's the logical extension of business." "That when you're out to make a living, anything goes." "Verdoux expertly counting his money was a chilling but well-remembered comic motif in the film." "The Lydia scene is unique, though." "I think that's the first murder you see." "And going up the stairs and him talking about the moon." "The elegance of the shot." "And, oh, "Yes, my dear. "" "The way he says, "Yes, my dear," is like a snake." "He's just coiling around her." "Yes, my dear." "And you know it's going to come down, he's going to kill somebody." "That extraordinary moment, going up the steps and looking at the moon outside and reciting" "I forget exactly the words, but about the moon." "She says, "What are you doing?" "Oh, nothing. "" "What a night." "Yes, a full moon." "How beautiful, this pale Endymion hour." "What are you talking about?" "Endymion, my dear." "A beautiful youth possessed by the moon." "Well, forget about him and get to bed." "Yes, my dear." "And then he turns into a silhouette, goes out of frame, the music rises...." "Her feet were soft in flowers." "The night changes to day, and you know it's been done." "The vulgarity of his victims is often contrasted perhaps misogynistically so, with Verdoux's dandyish elegance." "The next thing is followed by the comic refrain of the counting of the money." "But it takes you by surprise because what seems simple with this man is suddenly translated into something so eloquent and elegant and absolutely horrendous behavior, but it's done absolutely beautifully." "A friend has told him of a poison that leaves no trace." "He decides to try it on someone  with whom he has no connection the police might discover." "It is one of the moral turning points in a film that took him four years to write." "And now for the experiment." "Even when he says, "Now for the experiment," with the poison when it dissolved to the young woman in the street, I was shocked." "He had the ability to shock you, slap your face, then pull you back." "You went with it because you didn't want to see him kill her and you knew he wouldn't do it but I was shocked by him thinking that way, "An experiment. "" "The first person you see is beautiful." "My goodness, he's going to kill her." "Quite a shower." "Yes, it is." "Can I escort you anywhere?" "Oh, thank you." "It's beautiful, but it's also a very ugly film in a way." "It's very disturbing." "It's almost as if he was pushing the audience, particularly after World War ll." "The worst war in recorded history." ""If I play a character like this, how far could I push you and you still love me?" "Will you still accept me?" "Am I even relevant in a world like this right now?"" "The criminal is eventually caught." "He will accept his fate." "But not before he broadens the indictment against him  to include most of humanity." "Humanity was profoundly uninterested." "Have you anything to say before sentence is passed upon you?" "Oui, monsieur, I have." "However remiss the prosecutor has been in complimenting me he at least admits that I have brains." "Thank you, monsieur, I have." "And for 35 years, I used them honestly." "After that, nobody wanted them." "So I was forced to go into business for myself." "As for being a mass killer, does not the world encourage it?" "Is it not building weapons of destruction for the sole purpose of mass killing?" "Has it not blown unsuspecting women and little children to pieces and done it very scientifically?" "As a mass killer, I'm an amateur by comparison." "It was a very interesting disturbing touch as he walks out." "It's like, if you watch him walk, his stomach is a little extended the walk is awkward, like a grotesque of the Little Tramp's walk." "It really is." "They lead him to the guillotine." "It's the end of the Little Tramp, the real end." "I can only imagine what it must have received when it came out." "No one liked it." "You know, as a man gets on in years, he wants to live deeply." "A feeling of sad dignity comes upon him, and that's fatal for a comic." "Sad dignity." "It was a feeling that Chaplin knew all too well in the late '40s." "He would turn 60 in 1949." "His old genius for inventing gags and developing them in sustained sequences had largely deserted him." "His audience was older too and standing on its dignity." "They were lost to him, as he had always feared they might be." "Calvero, his character in Limelight, directly  wearily projected his most despairing vision of himself." "What a sad business, being funny." "Very sad if they won't laugh." "But it's a thrill when they do." "To look out there, see them all laughing." "To hear that roar go up, waves of laughter coming at you." "But let's talk of something more cheerful." "Besides, I want to forget the public." "Never." "You love them too much." "I'm not sure." "Maybe I love them, but I don't admire them." "I think you do." "As individuals, yes, there's greatness in everyone." "But as a crowd, they're like a monster without a head that never knows which way it's going to turn." "It can be prodded in any direction." "Chaplin 's has-been character, depressed and drunken meets the dancer Thereza when he rescues her from suicide." "She is in despair because she cannot walk." "Old man and young woman will conspire to inspire one another." "It still to me is amazing that at 20 I worked with the greatest genius in movies and had been chosen by him." "It was certainly he that found me." "I was a young actress." "I was 19." "I was in a play in London." "And then I got a wire from Harry Crocker saying would I send photographs to Chaplin?" "And it seemed so unbelievable to me and I was so frightened by it, I did nothing." "And then about two weeks later, I got a telegram saying:" ""Where are the photographs?" "Charles Chaplin. "" "So I sent them off as quickly as I could, and, of course, from that moment on I wanted to be in Limelight more than anything." "Every day was a miracle." "I woke up every morning, could not believe that I was going to go and do this part." "On the other hand, I had no film technique whatsoever." "I didn't know anything." "So he eased me very gradually into it by starting the scenes where I was comatose on the bed." "I got very quickly used to being filmed and being in a film." "I liked the intimacy of it compared with the theater." "I still do." "His way of directing, from the beginning, was to demonstrate and he would demonstrate everything." "My hand here, there, look up, say the line, how to say the line." "It was fine with me because I worshipped him and I would have done anything that he wanted." "And also, when he played the young girl he was more young and girlish and feminine and charming than I could ever have been." "Sometimes he got very angry." "It's his prerogative." "Once, very much, but I think it was deliberate." "I had this very difficult scene." "I now look at it and marvel that I could do it at that age." "I'm walking, Calvero." "I'm walking." "I was terrified of it, as anybody would have been." "So he called me into his dressing room and he said:" ""Claire, we'll just go over the words." "I don't want any acting." "Let's go over the words. "" "So I kind of went over the words with him, the scene, and he said:" ""What is that supposed to be?" I said, "That's what you asked me to do. "" ""No, I didn't ask you to do that." "I want you to do the scene!" "I can't--"" "Whatever it was." "Of course, I started to cry which is what he was waiting for." "So we went out on the floor." "Everybody was ready." "They'd obviously been clued in to what was going to happen to this poor child." "And we did the scene." "It was wonderful." "Now is the time to show them what you're made of." "Now is the time to fight!" "Remember what you told me standing there by that window?" "Remember what you said about the power of the universe moving the Earth, growing the trees, and that power being within you?" "Well, now is the time to use that power and to fight!" "Calvero, look, I'm walking." "I'm walking!" "I'm walking!" "I'm walking!" "Calvero!" "He'd worked me up into that emotional pitch." "He knew what he was doing when he was angry." "I think he, at that point, was an older man and had many things he wanted to say in the film about love and about death and about his background in London about the music hall, about something he knew well:" "A young girl falling in love with an older man." "Chaplin, Oona and their growing family sailed for London and Limelight's world premiere in September, 1952." "I went before he did to set up some publicity things and everything." "He was going to come later." "Then he got from the State Department the right for a re-entry permit because his whole life he was English." "But the day he and Oona got on the boat, they said:" ""We're not going to honor it. " Well, of course, he got to London furious." "He sent Oona back to America, and he said, "Sell everything." "Sell the house, sell the studio, everything." "We're not going back there. "" "We have an idea of touring beautiful England and going to all the historical spots." "Naturally, we'll go to Stratford-on-Avon and elsewhere up to Scotland and Edinburgh and all that." "This is the first time that my wife has ever been abroad." "And so naturally, we're going to try and cram in as much as we can." "Grand." "One other thing." "Would you comment, sir on this proposed ban on your re-entry into the United States?" "I've already" " I can only reiterate what I said before." "I suppose" " I presume that that's already been published." "Thank you very much." "Thank you." "As the late Calvin Coolidge said when he terminated his presidency embarking to go home, waylaid by one of the pressmen who said:" ""Mr. President, won't you say a few farewell words to the American people?"" "He said, "Yes, goodbye. "" "Eventually, Charlie and Oona would have eight kids." "The last four of them born in exile." "Probably didn't work as hard as he did in America but I don't think he could be idle." "He definitely slowed down, and he'd go traveling." "He took us on trips to Africa, to the East." "The Chaplins settled in the Manoir de Ban in Switzerland, in 1953." "He would live out his life here, 24 more years." "He was never idle." "He wrote scripts rescored older films, wrote his autobiography." "And thumbing his nose at America, fellow-traveled with the Communists." "He even accepted a peace prize from the Soviet Union  then distributed the cash that came with it to the poor." "He created his own demise with America, I think, over time and was quoted as saying in a very embittered way:" ""The only thing I miss about America is Almond Joy bars. "" "Almond Joy and Mounds candy." "Uncle Sydney, he was great." "He was our funny uncle." "He was very, very eccentric, or we thought he was very eccentric." "He was married to Gypsy and they lived in a caravan because Uncle Sydney never wanted a house because he thought if he got in a house, he would die there." "And that depressed him." "He would get very depressed about a lot of things." "And he was extremely nostalgic for the past." "And he would watch the sunset and cry." "And he would look at little babies and say "Oh, if only I were that age. "" "He was really terrible." "And he and my father had a fantastic relationship extraordinary relationship." "The ideal relationship between brothers." "He twice interrupted his exile to make films." "A King in New York in 1957 and A Countess from Hong Kong in 1966." "His son Sydney worked with Sophia Loren." "Chaplin 's daughters also appeared in it." "But like A King, it was a critical and popular failure  which deeply depressed Chaplin." "He loved public and his kids were a great public for him." "And if we went to a restaurant, he had an even bigger public." "So in Switzerland we used to go to a restaurant, and he would always order truite au bleu." "It's a trout, and it's boiled live so it sort of looks at you." "And we would be horrified." "And he'd pick up the plate and he'd take this trout and he'd say:" ""Emma, Emma, darling. " And he'd kiss the trout on the lips, and we'd go:" ""Oh, Daddy, how horrible! "" "And by then, the whole restaurant would be looking." "So he was an entertaining father." "His audiences now were mainly accidental." "His most faithful camera was Oona's." "But the old man would take what he could get and do the old bits from his glory days." "It was as though he was surprised at his own work and would say:" ""But he's good. " He would talk about him as "him. "" ""Oh, that's very good." "Oh, but that's, that's very good." "Oh, he's funny. "" "I never met Chaplin." "And only time I saw him in person was in Cannes." "When he was towards the end of his life, he was honored with a special award." "I was there." "The theater was packed!" "Packed to the roof!" "Electricity was enormous because nobody saw Chaplin in person for years." "And the award is given to him by French Minister of Culture, Monsieur Duhamel, who, at this time was also a very sick man who was walking with a cane." "So then suddenly the light goes out spotlight on the curtain, curtain opens and then they are standing there." "Theater explodes!" "Bravo, standing ovation, bravos one minute, two minutes, five minutes!" "Chaplin was visibly so moved by this reaction that he felt that he has to reward the audience somehow." "So he's looking around and suddenly he sees Monsieur Duhamel next to him with a cane." "So he grabs his cane and does few steps." "But in that moment, Monsieur Duhamel, being stripped of the cane starts to St. Vitus Dance because he couldn't" "Now, Chaplin sees it, and he just" " They just clasp each other like that, embrace, just to keep standing." "People in the audience who knew about Monsieur Duhamel's condition were petrified." "But most of the audience didn't know and they thought that this is a comic number to entertain them." "And they started to applaud and laugh!" "It was so surreal." "It was like Chaplin's films." "As the years wore on, more and more honors were heaped on him." "The world was bent on reconciliation." "Even the United States wanted to forgive and forget and remember." "That process was completed  when he received an honorary Academy Award in 1972." "He did come for the Academy Award, but that was only for financial reasons." "Because he's rereleased his pictures, and he came back and said:" ""Oh, that's very kind of everybody. " Two days at the Beverly Hills Hotel he says, "When are we going home?"" "I can only say thank you for the honor of inviting me here and, oh, you're wonderful, sweet people." "Thank you." "Chaplin had five more years to live in declining physical and mental health." "But one has to believe death held few terrors for him because he'd long since imagined his triumph over it." "His artistic immortality as well as the hard, simple fact of his passing." "Both occurred in the same Limelight sequence  which he shared with his great rival Buster Keaton." "I think he must have known he was the greatest." "But I think he had a problem wondering if everyone else still thought so." "I remember once, he was then very old, and I came with a boyfriend of mine very interested in cinema." "Not so interested in Chaplin." "He preferred Buster Keaton, which was not the thing to do." "We arrived, and he spoke with my father a bit about the silent films." "And then he went on to talk about Buster Keaton, and my father just...." "He got smaller and smaller and he shrunk, and he was so hurt." "It was like someone had stabbed him." "And he just became very, very quiet." "He didn't say a word during dinner." "And after dinner, he was thinking and he was looking into the fire and suddenly he peeped in a little voice." "He looked at my friend in the eyes and he said:" ""But I was an artist. " And no one knew what he was talking about." "And then he said, "You know, I gave him work. "" "It's so moving, with Buster Keaton and him together." "He's in the foreground." "Your eye's on him." "But he has Keaton perfectly placed." "He doesn't diminish him at all." "And it goes on and on...." "The two of them are going." "It's like jazz musicians taking off." "It was beautiful." "It was two men who had the greatest respect for one another." "I personally was moved because I knew that Buster had seen some hard times and here was Charlie, a multimillionaire still with his own studio and all that." "And there was Buster had had all that and lost it." "David Thomson once called Chaplin:" ""The looming, mad politician of the century, the demon tramp. "" "A harsh judgment." "Yet there was something demonic in him, quite visibly so in this sequence." "He was still driven by his relentless ego by his helpless need to dominate his audience now indifferent, even hostile." "If you're not curious anymore, you're not anxious to know how to grow as a filmmaker or a writer, artist, or whatever, that's death." "He, I think, felt that, and I think you have the results in Limelight." "There's something brave, sublime and without precedent in movie history about a man contemplating his own death on-screen." "He makes a peace with it too." "He accepts the passage." "Doesn't like it, but accepts the transition of being old and dying but also of him no longer having the energy of youth." "When that sheet is put over his face, with that beautiful music at the end that is the final image of Chaplin's there." "I was fortunate enough to be in that scene, silent." "And Buster was there." "And we're pulling back and Buster is muttering to Charlie, not moving his lips:" ""Good, Charlie." "Stay just where you are." "You're right in the center." "Hold it." "Don't move." "Yeah, yeah, that's it." "We've made it." "Yeah. "" "And I thought:" ""Boy, you, Norman, have been present at a moment in history. "" "And it was just" "It made you embrace your whole profession, so to speak." "You say, "This is what real greatness in this profession is. "" "The last years of his life, he very much withdrew into himself." "It was very hard for my mother." "She had a very hard time, really, looking after a man who'd been so vital and such a strong presence, suddenly, really, vanishing away." "But he seemed to be very much at peace with himself." "He kind of slowly drifted, drifted away and his death was just at the end of a very slow drifting away." "His was the face of his century." "His was the life of his century." "Through his will and energy, and yes, genius he encompassed, as much as one man can  the joy and the anguish of his times  their romance, their horrors and, of course, what laughter we could find in them." "He was a flawed man, a haunted man, a tormented man." "Which is to say, he was only human but with this uncanny ability to reflect and refract our humanity back at us."