Little Tramp’s big life

Before he began work on the comprehensive new documentary “Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin,” filmmaker, critic and author Richard Schickel was given an edict by the Chaplin family: Don’t do a whitewash job on the Little Tramp.

“We want him to be seen kind of warts and all,” Schickel recalls daughter Josephine Chaplin telling him. “We are no longer interested, if we ever were, in presenting this portrait of a serene and perfect individual who happened to be a genius.”

Making the documentary, which opens Friday for a one-week Oscar-qualifying engagement at the Laemmle Monica 4-Plex in Santa Monica, was greatly liberating for Schickel. “We could do whatever we wanted. I think it makes the film more moving. You get a sense of the various mistakes he made with his marriages, his politics.”

“Charlie,” which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, has played at more than 40 festivals around the world and will be released next year by Warner Home Video on VHS and DVD along with a second wave of restored Chaplin classics such as “City Lights” and “The Kid.”

Narrated by Sydney Pollack, the two-hour plus documentary overflows with clips from “The Kid,” “A Woman of Paris” (Schickel’s favorite), “The Gold Rush,” “The Circus,” “City Lights,” “Modern Times,” “The Great Dictator,” “Monsieur Verdoux,” “Limelight,” “A King in New York” and various shorts such as “Soldier Arms,” “Easy Street” and “One A.M.”

There are also rare home movies and passionate and often moving interviews with Chaplin’s children Sydney, Geraldine and Michael; directors Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Milos Forman and Sir Richard Attenborough; and performers Marcel Marceau, Johnny Depp and Bill Irwin.

Schickel, who has been the film critic at Time for 31 years and is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times Book Review, believes that his film is the first good documentary produced on Chaplin. “ ‘The Gentleman Tramp,’ I think is very feeble and lacking in clips,” he says, relaxing in the small office he shares with his 13-year-old terrier, Preston. “There was an A&E; ‘Biography’ a few years ago, but that was the same thing. It was thin in clip materials.

“I don’t want to toot my own horn, but I don’t know of any biography films of a single individual that are more complete or richer in materials than it draws on than this film. It’s long. We made it longer than we originally intended by 35 minutes. It was a huge life.”

And though he does show Chaplin warts and all, he doesn’t really dwell on his personal problems. “It seems to me, as it always does when I am writing a book or making a film, that the only reason we are entitled to be interested in these people is their work. What difference does it make that they have many girlfriends or many vices or are drunks or homosexuals, all of those issues that preoccupy celebrity life these days, especially when you are talking about a figure like Chaplin?”

After all, he says, Chaplin’s greatest days were 70 and 80 years ago. “That would be dredging up all kinds of antique gossip about this guy.”

Despite Chaplin’s penchant for young girls, paternity suits and political woes, Schickel says, “his life came out rather well. He had a wife he simply adored. They had all of these children whom he had some difficulties with, but the same difficulties everyone has -- he wants her to go to college, she wants to go to ballet school, etc. Whatever those difficulties were, as time has gone on, and you talk to the children now, they are extremely affectionate about the old guy. He could be a difficult dad, but he was also an amusing dad.”

The rise of celebrity

Chaplin, along with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, was the first international celebrity. “And he had to deal with all that ad hoc,” Schickel says. “If you see the scenes where he was going to London for the first time [since his success] and totally mobbed -- which is also what happened with Fairbanks and Pickford -- he is in actual physical danger in those scenes.

“So he is having to deal with celebrity at a new and more intense level and much more than anybody had to deal with before. There was not yet in place the whole system, which includes security and press agentry and management of celebrity. He went around town without a lot of bodyguards. I think considering what he was dealing with, he did very well and that enlists my sympathy.”

The documentary also touches upon the seemingly endless discussion as to who was the superior silent comedian: Chaplin or Buster Keaton. Schickel believes any comparisons between the two are false ones.

“They are two great comedians that were roughly contemporary and roughly guys who made brilliant silent comedies in the 1920s, but that is just a coincidence. I don’t know why you have to make a choice between Keaton and Chaplin because in all other respects they are different.”

Schickel says that he had some “wonderful stuff” from Allen about the comparison he wasn’t able to get into the film. “He took the position, which I thought was kind of interesting, that comedians who do go for a bit of sentiment, if they fail it is an embarrassing failure. Chaplin has failure of that kind. But when they succeed, which Chaplin often does, then it is wonderful because there is some kind of simple identification with the audience. Woody was reluctant to make a choice, but he said, ‘I think Chaplin is the greater of the two and largely because he is not afraid of being sentimental.’ ”

Unlike Keaton and the other great silent clown Harold Lloyd, Chaplin didn’t employ gag writers; often the cast and crew would sit around and wait and wait for Chaplin to find the gag. “That is why the great Chaplin films are so great,” says Schickel, “because he took all the time he needed to make them as perfect as he could make them.”

His genius, says Schickel, was essentially kinetic. “There was nothing physically he could not do and he could do it quickly. He would move through any kind of environment with his wonderful characterization emerging.”

But when Chaplin began doing talkies with 1940’s “The Great Dictator,” he had problems with dialogue -- he wouldn’t shut up.

“There is stuff in his later films that is funny, but he doesn’t know when to stop. The speech at the end of ‘Great Dictator’ would be fine if it was five minutes shorter. You can say the same thing about ‘Monsieur Verdoux,’ which is the most problematic of his films. It was an attempt at a black comedy by a guy who has no blackness. He’s not Bunuel. I think his flaw is excessive talk and some of the talk is too gaseous. Some of the stuff in ‘Limelight,’ where he is talking with Claire Bloom, he talks and talks and talks.”

Still, he has a new found respect for Chaplin’s later films. “I had not really liked them and I began to like them,” he says. “There are places where you want to push the fast forward button, but there is a great spirit, certainly in ‘The Great Dictator’ -- and ‘Limelight,’ there is great sadness and sweetness in the movie.”

“Charlie” attempts to explain why Chaplin retired the Little Tramp after “The Great Dictator.”

“We invent big reasons why the Tramp disappeared,” Schickel says. “He couldn’t live in the modern world. It was too oppressive. There were no open roads for him to go down at the end, which is all true. But by then Chaplin was a man in his 50s. He was thicker, not moving quite the same way. I am not sure he was capable of doing the Tramp even if there had been a market for the Tramp.”

And, truth be told, Chaplin’s British accent didn’t sound like it should be coming out of the proletarian Tramp. “His voice was somewhat off-putting,” says Schickel. “It sounded upper class and educated. I remember Sydney [Chaplin] said to me that, ‘Every time we went to England, the closer the boat got, the more English his accent became.’ ”