Anthony Hopkins on Chaplin

On Apr 15, 2:41 am, "Rollo" <garyjohnson... DeleteThis @hotmail.com> wrote:
> Someday someone needs to make a true film
> recreation of the heyday of American Vaudeville.
> Not the MGM musical versions where all everyone
> wants to do is reach the Palace but WWI always
> breaks out on their opening night. I'm thinking of
> tales of the boards that every entertainer of that era
> either recollected or put down in writing.
>
> Tops among them for me would be Rudy Blesh's "Keaton."
> Yes, I would agree that Keaton had a happy childhood
> but it was also very unconventionable and in Blesh's
> recreation, very colorful. Every subsequent biographers
> of Keaton tries to downplay these tales and say they
> were probably exagerated or they just dismiss them outright
> because they can't find a newspaper article to corroborate
> the fact that a small child was lifted out of a Kansas
> boarding house and deposited safely in the street a mile
> down the road.
>
> These biographers miss the total essence of Keaton's
> film work because factual or not his work is rife with
> autobiographical references to his vaudeville childhood,
> just as Chaplin's work is mainly a reference to his Victorian
> childhood.
>
> A history of Vaudeville could be told by following the Keaton's
> act. The star of this tale wouldn't be Buster but his dad, Joe.
> Starting out in medicine shows the Two Keatons enter vaudeville
> in it's infancy. With the birth of Buster the act becomes the
> Three Keatons and within 5 years they've hit the bigtime only
> to eventually end up back in the smalltime after Joe feuds
> with upper management. (A career arc that his subsequent
> film career would take) In between that time are Joe's constant
> attempts at publicity for the act, their fights with the Gerry
> Society,
> train wrecks, summers spent at the Actors Colony in Michigan
> and the constant parade of acts as witnessed by the young Buster.
>
> Gary J.

Yes, I think Keaton's early life could be used to frame an
entertaining view of Vaudeville at the turn of the last century.
The Keatons were only part of the picture, though, and that
film wouldn't really be about Keaton but about the world he
grew up in, so it wouldn't be precisely a biopic.

The trouble with _Chaplin_ is that it tried to be a character study
of an artist, and those things never work in film. Chaplin reveals
much more about himself in his autobiography than Attenborough's film
reveals, and obviously that isn't the whole story either.

Connie K.

On 16 Apr 2007 10:57:46 -0700, "constance.kuriyama@ttu.edu"
<constance.kuriyama.RemoveThis@ttu.edu> wrote:

>On Apr 15, 2:41 am, "Rollo" <garyjohnson....RemoveThis@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> Someday someone needs to make a true film
>> recreation of the heyday of American Vaudeville.
>> Not the MGM musical versions where all everyone
>> wants to do is reach the Palace but WWI always
>> breaks out on their opening night. I'm thinking of
>> tales of the boards that every entertainer of that era
>> either recollected or put down in writing.
>>
>> Tops among them for me would be Rudy Blesh's "Keaton."
>> Yes, I would agree that Keaton had a happy childhood
>> but it was also very unconventionable and in Blesh's
>> recreation, very colorful. Every subsequent biographers
>> of Keaton tries to downplay these tales and say they
>> were probably exagerated or they just dismiss them outright
>> because they can't find a newspaper article to corroborate
>> the fact that a small child was lifted out of a Kansas
>> boarding house and deposited safely in the street a mile
>> down the road.
>>
>> These biographers miss the total essence of Keaton's
>> film work because factual or not his work is rife with
>> autobiographical references to his vaudeville childhood,
>> just as Chaplin's work is mainly a reference to his Victorian
>> childhood.
>>
>> A history of Vaudeville could be told by following the Keaton's
>> act. The star of this tale wouldn't be Buster but his dad, Joe.
>> Starting out in medicine shows the Two Keatons enter vaudeville
>> in it's infancy. With the birth of Buster the act becomes the
>> Three Keatons and within 5 years they've hit the bigtime only
>> to eventually end up back in the smalltime after Joe feuds
>> with upper management. (A career arc that his subsequent
>> film career would take) In between that time are Joe's constant
>> attempts at publicity for the act, their fights with the Gerry
>> Society,
>> train wrecks, summers spent at the Actors Colony in Michigan
>> and the constant parade of acts as witnessed by the young Buster.
>>
>> Gary J.
>
>Yes, I think Keaton's early life could be used to frame an
>entertaining view of Vaudeville at the turn of the last century.
>The Keatons were only part of the picture, though, and that
>film wouldn't really be about Keaton but about the world he
>grew up in, so it wouldn't be precisely a biopic.
>
>The trouble with _Chaplin_ is that it tried to be a character study
>of an artist, and those things never work in film. Chaplin reveals
>much more about himself in his autobiography than Attenborough's film
>reveals, and obviously that isn't the whole story either.
>
>Connie K.

Here's an interesting quote from Bill Warren's contemporary review of "Chaplin":

"The reason we are interested in Chaplin's life is because it was
lived by this great movie artist -- not because he was a man with a
lot of wives, not because he was ousted by a country who feared him
because he didn't toe a political line and wasn't meltingly grateful
for everything. If those elements are interesting, it's because they
were part of the life of >Charlie Chaplin<. We're >far< more
interested in his career -- and that's precisely what's missing from
'Chaplin.'

"In one of far too many scenes of Chaplin at his home in
Switzerland in the mid-1960s, talking with the (fictional) editor of
his autobiography (Anthony Hopkins, in the year's most thankless
role), Chaplin says, "If you want to understand me, watch my movies."
But in this film, we >can't<. There are virtually >no< scenes of
Chaplin at work; those that are shown are there for other reasons, to
show how he became estranged from Paulette Goddard (Diane Lane,
excellent), or to show how he persevered in the face of obstacles.
We only see one scene of him directing another actor, and nothing
whatever of his careful working out of scenes, even though recently-
discovered footage of the real Chaplin showed just how he did that."