Silence is golden: Charlie Chaplin's The Tramp is 100 today

Political humour

Politics was something that Chaplin was increasingly accused of dabbling in. The accusations usually came from the American far right, an often-paranoid community that felt his films’ championing of the common man was, fundamentally, the thin end of the Communist wedge. When he made his next film, The Great Dictator, in 1940 – a superb parody of Hitler and his illusions of world domination – he was accused of going too far.

‘Chaplin Speaks!’ as the newspaper headlines had it, but the film’s barnstorming end speech also had the tramp, now a dictator’s lookalike, demanding social justice. Political pressure grew on Chaplin – something not helped by a couple of affairs with teenage girls – but when Nazi Germany declared war on the US the next year, the fuss died down. The tramp had actually been proved right, Hitler was, indeed, bent on global conquest.

After the war, and with a new Cold War beginning with Russia, Chaplin was again ‘up against it’. His first post-war film, Monsieur Verdoux (1947) didn’t help make Charlie any new friends in the press, as the script made a serial killer look just like a fairly ordinary guy. Alas, its icy brilliance was seen at the time as being mere coldness.

His second film of the new era was Limelight (1952), which featured Buster Keaton, another brilliant comic veteran of the silent era. The film was later described in Time Out as being “narcissistic... shapeless, overlong, overblown and... a masterpiece. Few cinema artists have ever delved into their own lives with such ruthlessness and with such moving results”.

But Chaplin had bigger problems than the critics – his refusal to ‘name names’ – i.e. to collaborate with Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee – ensured that Limelight was his last ever American movie. He and his new wife were forced into exile in Europe, with the words of Hollywood Reporter magazine ringing in his ears: “Wonderful to wash our hands of those dreary Chaplins, even though he did make a lousy 20-million-dollar fortune here. It’s almost worth it to be rid of such crumbums.”

Chaplin’s first proper UK effort, A King In New York (1957), wrung some bitter laughs from his exile, via some sideswipes at McCarthyism and the madness of the space age world – ultra widescreen movies, rock’n’roll, ranting adolescents – but it was only partially successful. It was however, as one French critic described it, “the film of a free man”, which is more than can be said for most movies, both then and now. Chaplin had escaped poverty at home and political repression abroad and was still making films at the age of 70.

It had been a remarkable run but it couldn’t last and didn’t. His next feature turned out to be his last. A Countess from Hong Kong, made almost a decade after A King in New York, achieved the rare distinction of putting on the same cast list ‘wild one’ Marlon Brando, Italian siren Sophia Loren, Hitchcock’s favourite blonde Tippi Hedren and Britain’s own Dame Margaret Rutherford.

Despite a few laughs, the odd acting blend didn’t really work on any level, as Chaplin, now in his late 70s, was somewhat out of touch. After the movie’s mixed reception he retired from film-making entirely, later dying in his Swiss home on Christmas day 1977. He was by then 88 years old, one of a handful of comedians whose every gesture – from shrugs to silly walks – had entered into the comic psyche.

Charlie Chaplin was also the first comic actor who had genuinely become a global legend in his own lifetime. ®