Chaplin: His Life And Art

Book was very interesting and informative on this live. Kept we interested throughout the read. Would recommend it to anyone who is interested in the subject.

One of the finest books on Chaplin ever written. A joy to read.

This exhaustedly researched bio leaves little out. It is not only a detailed review of Chaplin's life, but also provides insight into his filmmaking and the hands-on perfectionism he brought to bear on his work. Plenty of photos included.

Great read about complex man

Everything ok

It’s easy to think of Shakespearean or great dramatic actors and actresses as artists. I never thought of Charlie Chaplin that way. One of the best things about this book is that it shows how Chaplin turned slapstick and vaudeville into an expressive and creative art form. Chaplin had a great imagination for how simple everyday events had comic potential. Robinson gives many examples and they still produce a smile even just reading about them. But Chaplin was not alone in this. What made Chaplin unique in movie history was to portray through actions and facial expressions how these everyday comic situations were expressions of a much deeper human experience. Chaplin shows the “human comedy” in a way that made us laugh and at the same time provoked sympathy for the character and increased our awareness of the human condition. This combination done with no words was so powerful that people around the world in vastly different cultures could understand Chaplin’s work and came to deeply love the actor. Chaplin’s pantomime and comic skills along with his directing and writing skills transformed the nature of comedy in movies. It was a remarkable creative achievement and Robinson documents Chaplin’s development and life as one of the first and finest artistic geniuses in the history of film. When I was much younger growing up in a conservative religious home, I was given the vague impression that somehow Charlie Chaplin was not a good person. My parents and local community bought into the McCarthy era claim that Chaplin was somehow a Communist threat to America and they also knew enough superficial information to think that Chaplin’s personal life was a series of immoral actions. Robinson spells out in detail Chaplin’s personal life and the lunacy of the McCarthy era which treated Chaplin as “dangerous” and banned him from returning to the United States for twenty years. Chaplin’s affairs and marriages take on a different light when viewed in context and in the environment of Hollywood in the first half of the 20th century. His views on militarism and nationalism also look very different today. Judgments about Chaplin’s personal life are left to the reader but Robinson gives the reader all the relevant information. This is what a biographer should do. This is a well-written and thoroughly engaging book. Robinson has extensive quotes not just from Chaplin’s own letters and books but from those who worked with him or knew him. The result is that this is not simply a biography of Charlie Chaplin but of much of the early film industry. For me the book was not just enjoyable to read but opened up a much better understanding of how the early movie industry evolved. Robinson centers most of the chapters on one of Chaplin’s films and the reader can see Chaplin’s creativity and imagination develop over time and how a changing world and a changing industry affected him. I highly recommend this book.

to wordy, with descriptions

Well researched, but God is it boring!

Great book with complete details

This is a comprehensive book on Charles Chaplin, a thorough good read and highly informative.

Un libro de consulta extremadamente detallado sobre la vida de Chaplin. No sé si existe otra obra más extensa que describa con tanto detalle la vida de Charles Spencer Chaplin y sus trabajos en la época de los inicios del Cine. Recomendado para los estudiosos de Chaplin y de lo que ocurría en el mundo del cine norteamericano en su tiempo.

I am delighted with this book which is a well written, fascinating, at times moving, but scholarly account of Charlie Chaplin one of greatest film makers of the 20th century. It is very addictive & I been reading it at every opportunity. The author David Robinson tells us of Chaplin's meteoric rise in the entertainment business which took him from the slums of Victorian South London to the glamour of Hollywood, exile & beyond. His was a dazzling talent - a wonderful entertainer, comedian, actor & film maker. The book has been meticulously researched. Its almost 900 pages are full absorbing about Charlie, his life & times, the entertainment & film industries. All backed up lots of photos, reproductions of posters, letters & extracts from other documents, many of which come from the Chaplin official archive. One of the things I like most about Charlie is his genuine interest in other people & what motivates them. It helps to make his autobiography especially enjoyable. It's full of engaging stories of about the people he knew including South London stall holders, Ghandi, GBS, & Albert Einstein. I also believe it in large part contributed to his genius. David Robinson tells us that he inherited this ability from his mother Hannah Chaplin. I would certainly recommend this book & while I'm about, it his films too.

This is an excellent book, quite worthy of its subject. The best is the level of research - the first third of the book is packed with details of a shocking level of the Chaplin family and of the man himself and his life in South London. The depth here is almost forensic - sometimes we can see Chaplin around the pubs. The entry into an incipient Hollywood and the first shootings with the Mack Sennet company are also very good. Later, around 1918 and onwards, the level falls a bit. The story, how the life is told, doesn't seem to catch up with the actor / director. Many of his projects are dealt with and told with a couple of lines, if that. Years go without the reader knowing much of them, perhaps because of the frantic cinematic activity of the genius. And overall, the read is good, but there are two things, to these eyes, that impeded this very good book to earn the five stars. First, in the end I don't think we down't know the man himself. After almost 1,000 pages we know little of Chaplin. We know a lot of what he did, not how he was. There's an obvious human complexity, a multifaceted personality that we do not even start to learn about. Along many pages we read about trips, dates and excat times, cities hotels, people and business meetings; but we do not see the man underneath or what he thinks of all this. Is it not what a good biography shouls be about? Even with a larger than life character, shouldn't we know after reading 1,000 pages something of much deeper on how he really was? Secondly, the style sometimes let the story down. For instance, towards the end, the author is telling about Chaplin being in a recording studio dealing with some music and the writer simply says that "this is when I met Chaplin, and talked about this and that". Wouldn't it be better to make a call to a foot-note? It reads messy, because it is messy, quite un-elegant. In conclusion, a very good book, probably the best biography of this cinema icon, but that is careless at some points.