Schickel explores the love-hate between Chaplin and the masses-and the clips are great CHARLIE: THE LIFE AND ART OF CHARLES CHAPLIN Directed by Richard Schickel Warner Bros. Opens February 13, Landmark Sunshine FIRST ICON ON YOUR SCREEN Charlie, Richard Schickel's clip-and-chat portrait...

(DOCU) A Warner Home Video release of a Lorac Prods. production. (International sales: MK2, Paris.) Produced by Richard Schickel. Directed, written by Richard Schickel; editor, Brian McKenzie. Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Special Screening), May 21, 2003. Running time: 132 MIN....

It is easy to foresee what people will find to criticize in Monsieur Verdoux. There is a fairly complete list of them in an article in La Revue des Temps Modernes which goes about as far as anything could in misrepresentation. The author of the critique expresses herself as profoundly disappointed by Chaplin's work because to her it seems ideologically, psychologically, and aesthetically incoherent. "Monsieur Verdoux's crimes are dictated neither by a need for self-defense nor in order ...

[Before The Gold Rush, Chaplin] made very few films that took the Tramp out of contemporary city or country life. Tramps are, after all, a by-product of industry, urban or rural. Evidently (we can deduce after the event), Chaplin's unconscious saw at once, in those stereoscopic pictures, the advantages of the novelty of putting the Tramp into a context that, so to speak, had no direct relation to Trampdom, the possibilities for the "epic" that he was seeking. And, presumably, he saw the...

I could write many pages … about the richness and quality of [Monsieur Verdoux] as a work of art, in fact, of genius; and as many more trying, hopelessly, to determine how Chaplin's intellect, instinct, intuition, creative intelligence, and pure experience as a master artist and as a showman, serve and at times disserve one another: for intellectually and in every other kind of self-exhaustion this seems incomparably his most ambitious film. And since the film is provocative of so much that ca...