Volume 44, Number 12 · July 17, 1997
Perseverance to the Point of Madness
By Michael Wood
Charlie Chaplin and His Times
by Kenneth S. Lynn
Simon and Schuster, 604 pp., $35.00
Tramp: The Life of Charlie Chaplin
by Joyce Milton
HarperCollins, 578 pp., $32.00
Charles Chaplin died in Switzerland in the early hours of Christmas Day, 1977. Just over two months later, the coffin containing his corpse was stolen from a cemetery in Vevey. The goal of the body snatchers, it turned out, was to make money rather than provide a metaphor for Chaplin's art and life, but they were more successful in the second project than they were in the first. At the end of Modern Times (1936), Chaplin as the tramp, accompanied by Paulette Goddard as one of the cinema's most engaging and implausible waifs, walks away from the camera down a road which has since been endlessly reproduced in films.
Review, 4998 words
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