Patrick O’Connor

Seriously Funny

Chaplin: The Tramp’s Odyssey

By

Faber & Faber 412pp £25 order from our bookshop

In 1958 the Public Library in Hicksville, Long Island planned a retrospective of four early Charlie Chaplin short silent films (The Cure, The Fireman, The Pawnshop and The Floorwalker). A pressure group campaigned successfully to have the films banned from being shown, stating that Chaplin ‘was not worthy of being honored’. This occurred some five and a half years after the then US Attorney-General, James P McGranery, had opposed Chaplin’s re-entry into the United States, thereby effectively banishing him from the country in which he had lived and worked since 1910, and where he had created the most famous moving-picture personality of all time. 

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • Tarantino's latest film is 'a fairy tale about Hollywood, where fantasy is an industrial product and the boulevards… ,
    • 'I don’t think we’re here on Earth to be Happy. I think we’re here on Earth to help God. I am a messianic writer'.… ,
    • 'Darley’s book is not a mad dash through this most compelling and complex of English counties. Nor is it another ti… ,
    • 'Moser’s book offers such a gripping account of a profoundly damaged human being, trapped in a cycle of repetition,… ,
    • 'Ideas that I’d thought were set down in full continue to smoulder ... this book is only a snapshot of some larger… ,
    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    Follow Us