#unknown chaplin

Day 29 – Favorite Documentary – 30 Day Charlie Chaplin Challenge

I have two. My answers will not be surprising to long time Chaplin fans. The Gentleman Tramp and Unknown Chaplin. Gentleman Tramp is a biography, and Unknown Chaplin is a “behind the scenes” doc. I baffled my family growing up with the number of times I have watched these. And I have baffled my kids equally as much. “Mom, you’re watching that again?“ Like his films, these docs are fun and…

“Cane In The Grate” (cut scene from “City Lights”), seen in phenomenol documentary “Unknown Chaplin” from 1983

“David later confessed that he was absolutely sick with excitement, realizing that we were seeing a film which Chaplin had shot and cut, and of which he had made a graded print – absolutely complete and perfect, in its own way – and which had lain on the shelf unknown to anyone outside Chaplin’s immediate circle for fifty years. It was pure cinema – no subtitles were needed, no sound effects could have improved it. The sequence was the essence of Chaplin’s art. For he, more than anyone else in pictures, could take the smallest object, the least promising prop., and turn it into a fabulously funny sequence”.

"The Search for Charlie Chaplin": Kevin Brownlow 2005 (pg 20-21)

The Count" - 1916 Out takes as seen in the documentary “UNKNOWN CHAPLIN”- Hidden Treasures.

This scene - Charlie and Edna eating ice cream and unbeknownst to him the ice cream drops down his shirt..

Virginia Cherrill who played the flower girl in “City Lights" gave an interview in the extraordinary documentary “Unknown Chaplin" - reflecting she said this:

“He was a great inspiration, he gave you so much of the spirit of what he was trying to get out of you, he acted out every part, this was his way of direction, we had no script, and Charlie would simply say in this scene I want you to do so and so and so, then he would show you exactly how he wanted it done., and it sounds ridiculous but you found yourself feeling he was you, how could he be a blind girl but he was if he was handing you a flower, you had the feeling that he was that person”