The Real Charlie Chaplin

The imaginative opening to this film reminds people how popular Charlie Chaplin was and serves as perfect introduction to others: a phenomenon that is debatable if an individual film star has ever achieved again. At the heigh of his fame he was the most recognised face in the world. Albeit his tramp character was and that attracted to what may be cosplay today with people dressing like him and also copycat comedians we see at the start of the film.

The real Charles Chaplin remained something of an enigma even when his career dipped and his personal and political life began to be exposed through the press and the FBI investigations. He came through these scarred for sure but his body of work remained pretty much untainted. This documentary tries to pry open the character of the man, away from the tramp myth.

Overall there isn’t that much in the documentary that Chaplin enthusiast won’t know. The grinding poverty of his early life in London, the music halls and then US tours that got him noticed by the fledgling Hollywood producers, and superstardom. However this isn’t aimed at the specialist more at anyone who has even a passing interest in Charlie Chaplin. And they are well served with clips and commentary that more or less chronologically tells his story.

What does lift it above other documentaries and will be of interest to the specialists are the interviews the team have recovered and home movies that do shed a little more light on Chaplin the man. Only a little more as Geraldine Chaplin comments, the only person who could possibly have opened up Chaplin’s true character was his fourth wife Oona who was a prolific writer but destroyed almost everything and there is no record of her speaking about him. We still though have records of his interview in his later years when he had retired to Switzerland and he sheds some more light on himself and the creation of the tramp.

This isn’t a hagiography director/writers Peter Middleton and James Spinney cover his highly controversial relations with women and his run ins with the US political establishment that eventually effectively exiled him. And it’s here where the documentary steps up and then down.

Both the 1966 Switzerland interview and his 1947 press conference to publicise Monsieur Verdoux are dramatized albeit with the figure of Chaplin mostly hidden or distorted. These run against the grain of the documentary without adding much value to these important documents.

The other interviews are around the book that his second wife Lita Grey and his family. But the most telling and interesting is one with Effie Wisdom who knew him as a boy and met him again after he became a star, on the latter occasion telling him that he’s lost his London accent.

This provides insight into the drive of the man who could not forget his poverty and who would do almost anything to ensure he and his family never had to go what he went through in late Victorian London.

This drive would see him take control of his career which bled into his family life with his son commenting that this made for a difficult home life with he and his sisters leaving home when the opportunity arose.

Ultimately this is a comprehensive, well researched and compiled documentary about a very complicated man. A man that with the passing of time, we will now probably never truly understand.

The Real Charlie Chaplin is released in cinemas, on Altitude.film and digitally from Friday 18th February