His childhood in London was burdened with desperate poverty the son of a struggling actress, he got his first acting job at fourteen, enjoyed success in the music halls, and, in 1910, sailed with the Fred Karno troupe for a three-year gig in the United States. The book’s editor, Paul Duncan, who also wrote or co-wrote ten of its fifteen chapters, states his aim in the first line of his introduction-“to show you how Charlie Chaplin made his films”-and he has access to an extraordinary trove of documents for the reconstruction, “preserved thanks to Charlie’s half brothers Sydney Chaplin and Wheeler Dryden.” The Chaplin family made these materials available to Duncan and his collaborators, but their involvement doesn’t seem to have inflected the substance of the book, which also ranges widely through Chaplin’s private life, including its lurid, scandalous, and criminal byways.Įven if the book were published without its images, solely as a collection of its wide-ranging texts, it would still provide crucial visions of Chaplin’s artistry and its inescapable coalescence with his life.

It’s an apt tribute to the filmmaker, whose artistry transcends the cinema and spans world-historical dimensions. The most un-put-downable movie book of the season is also the most un-pick-uppable one: “The Charlie Chaplin Archives” (Taschen), which is the size of a small suitcase and weighs in at fourteen pounds, packed tightly with five hundred and sixty pages’ worth of thick and glossy paper bearing a treasure trove of superbly printed images alongside a relentlessly fascinating collage-like textual biography of Chaplin. “It was really my father’s alter ego,” Chaplin’s son has said, of the silent-film character, “the little boy who never grew up.” PHOTOGRAPH BY HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY

Charles chaplin my autobiography