Books in Brief: Nonfiction
Published: January 18, 2004
CHAPLIN
Genius of the Cinema
By Jeffrey Vance.
Abrams, $50.
''What Shakespeare is to Elizabethan theater, Dickens to the Victorian
novel, and Picasso to modern art, Chaplin is to 20th-century cinema,''
Jeffrey Vance writes in ''Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema.'' Charles
Chaplin (1889-1977) lived an extraordinarily rich and productive life,
turbulent, full of romance (and romances), and this gorgeous, unwieldy
slab of a book succeeds in being several books at once: filmography,
biography, critical appraisal and family album. Its chief interest is
its more than 500 photographs, many of them familiar images freshly
reproduced from original Chaplin studio negatives. Many more are
backstage shots: Chaplin with Einstein, Gandhi and George Bernard
Shaw; Chaplin in an inexhaustible variety of costumes, poses,
attitudes, situations; Chaplin in old age photographed by his fourth
wife, Oona. The captions are troves of film arcana -- for instance,
that Dean Riesner, 4 years old in 1923 when he played the bratty kid
in a pageboy in ''The Pilgrim,'' later became a screenwriter for Clint
Eastwood's ''Dirty Harry'' pictures. Vance, who has written books on
Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, is generous in quoting the many fine
writers who have interpreted Chaplin's art (chief among them Chaplin
himself), but his judicious text is as fascinating as the photographs.
''The birth of modern comedy,'' he writes, ''occurred when Chaplin
donned his derby hat, affixed his toothbrush mustache and stepped into
his impossibly large shoes for the first time.''
DAVID WALTON
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