The Real Charlie Chaplin: Unravelling the little Tramp

In 1889, Charles Spencer Chaplin was born in the slums of Victorian London to music hall entertainers with Romani heritage. His parents fell on hard times so he was sent to Lambeth Workhouse when he was seven years old and, later, the Central London District School for paupers.

Aged 14, he signed with a theatrical agency in London's West End and went about shaping the comedic gifts that would make him a global movie star. In 1919, Chaplin co-founded distribution company United Artists, which gave him complete creative control over such seminal features as The Kid and Modern Times. From 1952 until his death in 1977, he lived effectively in exile, after the United States revoked his re-entry permit.

Peter Middleton and James Spinney, the British film-makers behind Notes on Blindness, an innovative documentary on the blind theologian James Hull, concede the impossibility of capturing Chaplin from the get-go with a quote from Chaplin's friend Max Eastman: "Enjoy any Charlie Chaplin you have the good luck to encounter. But don't try to link them up to anything you can grasp."

Pincer movements

Thus, Chaplin's politics, two of his four marriages, and J Edgar Hoover and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper's pincer movements against the artist are glossed over or omitted entirely.

Against that, The Real Charlie Chaplin contains some remarkable unearthed archival footage – including an in-depth interview Chaplin gave to Life magazine in 1966; the 1947 press conference for Monsieur Verdoux, in which reporters berated Chaplin for his communist sympathies; audio recording of a childhood friend, Effie Wisdom; an unsettling interview with his second wife, Lita Grey, whom he married when she was 16 and he was 35, and shots of the attic room at Parnell Terrace in Kennington, where Chaplin lived with his mother as she lost her mind.

It’s a fascinating delve or “kaleidoscope” as the film-makers have it. The film is as complete a portrait as we may ever get. That, as it turns, out, is not especially complete at all.