The Real Charlie Chaplin (2021)

Pearl Mackie: Self - Narrator

Quotes 

• Narrator : Why is Chaplin fever spreading across the world? What is it about the Little Tramp? Well, he's funny. he can take any situation and make it silly. But, it's more than that...

• Narrator : People demand to know: who is the *real* Charlie Chaplin?

• Narrator : The Tramp will make Chaplin more famous than any king, queen, or emperor. More famous than any artist, philosopher, or religious figure. Famous in a way that no one has been before.

• Narrator : To the millions of migrants dreaming of a new life, the Tramp is someone without a nation, someone who has no language; but, who speaks to everyone.

• Narrator : In a society sharply defined by class, the Tramp not only stands up to the Man, he gives him a kick up the ass for good measure.

• Narrator : Chaplin makes the Tramp. And the Tramp makes Chaplin. You can't see one, without looking at the other.

• Narrator : The Tramp defies the boundaries of identity. He blurs gender and sexuality. He upends authority and class. He's a nobody - and he belongs to everybody.

• Narrator : In a world divided by bitter conflict, the Tramp can make you laugh, whichever side you're on.

• Narrator : Chaplin and Hitler are born within four days of each other. They both grow up adoring their mothers and resenting their drunken fathers. Both have known poverty. One plays a Tramp on screen, while the other is homeless on the streets of Vienna. Both are driven by a passionate intensity and ambition, laced with self-pity. Sound threatens Chaplin's art, but is the making of Hitler. They are both mesmeric performers. They know how to command a crowd through exaggerated gestures and heightened emotional appeals. Both illicit intense, almost physical reactions from their audiences. Chaplin makes them laugh, Hitler drives them into a frenzy. And then, of course, there's the mustache.

• Narrator : In London, with Mahatma Gandhi, he discusses poverty, exploitation, and the misuse of the machine. A film is taking shape in Chaplin's head.

• Narrator : Within a few years, Chaplin has built his own studio, founded a distribution company, liberated himself from dependence on financial backers. He follows no schedule. He doesn't even follow a script. He starts with a vague idea - and replays it again and again and again, until it becomes funny.

• Narrator : When you ask for the real Charlie Chaplin, a thousand voices reply... Some are louder than others... Some are hidden. Some struggle to be heard. And others, remain silent.

• Narrator : Hedda Hopper's Hollywood gossip column is read by 32 million Americans. She has the power to make or break careers - and she hates Communists. She tells Hoover, "I'd like to run every one of those rats out of the country and start with Charlie Chaplin." The files show that Hooper's and Hoover's relationship is more or less circular. Hopper fills her columns with gossip about Chaplin that's been fed to her by the FBI. The FBI then quotes those columns in its file against Chaplin. The machine feeds itself.

• Narrator : In the pages of his memoir, Chaplin revisits once more the streets he wandered as a boy. The streets he haunts as an old man. The streets he returned to time and again - as the Tramp. His old Lambeth neighborhood, he rebuilt it in his Hollywood studio. The gates of Kennington Park, here Chaplin met for a date with his first love. It's where the Tramp meets the flower girl. And the attic of number 3 Pownall Terrace, where young Charlie watched his mother's health ebb away. It's the attic room in "The Kid."

• Narrator : If Chaplin isn't finished with the past, the past *certainly* isn't finished with him.

• Narrator : When Chaplin and Hitler look at each other, what do they see? The Nazis hate Chaplin. They label him a Jew and use him in their anti-Semitic propaganda... Neither can escape comparisons with the other. And so, as Hitler celebrates his 50th birthday with a military parade through Berlin, Chaplin is working on a script for his latest film. He begins filming the week Britain declares war on Germany. In it, Chaplin collapses the distinctions between himself and Hitler, as the Dictator, Adenoid Hynkel.

• Narrator : Through the FBI's lens, Chaplin becomes not only a Communist, but a foreign subversive, a homosexual, a Jew. It tells us a lot more about the FBI, than it does about Chaplin.