Tramp
Tramp

Author: Joyce Milton

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2014-07-01

Total Pages: 608

ISBN-13: 1497659167

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Charlie Chaplin made an amazing seventy-one films by the time he was only thirty-three years old. He was known not only as the world’s first international movie star, but as a comedian, a film director, and a man ripe with scandal, accused of plagiarism, communism, pacifism, liberalism, and anti-Americanism. He seduced young women, marrying four different times, each time to a woman younger than the last. In this animated biography of Chaplin, Joyce Milton reveals to us a life riddled with gossip and a struggle to rise from an impoverished London childhood to the life of a successful American film star. Milton shows us how the creation of his famous character—the Tramp, the Little Fellow—was both rewarding and then devastating as he became obsolete with the changes of time. Tramp is a perceptive, clever, and captivating biography of a talented and complicated man whose life was filled with scandal, politics, and art.

Unhomed
Unhomed

Author: Pamela Robertson Wojcik

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2024-04-23

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 0520390369

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In this rich cultural history, Pamela Roberston Wojcik examines America's ambivalent and shifting attitude toward homelessness. She considers film cycles from five distinct historical moments that show characters who are unhomed and placeless, mobile rather than fixed—characters who fail, resist, or opt out of the mandate for a home of one's own. From the tramp films of the silent era to the 2021 Oscar-winning Nomadland, Wojcik reveals a tension in the American imaginary between viewing homelessness as deviant and threatening or emblematic of freedom and independence. Blending social history with insights drawn from a complex array of films, both canonical and fringe, Wojcik effectively "unhomes" dominant narratives that cast aspirations for success and social mobility as the focus of American cinema, reminding us that genres of precarity have been central to American cinema (and the American story) all along.

City Lights
City Lights

Author: Charles J. Maland

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-07-25

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 1838715088

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In 1967, Charlie Chaplin told, 'I think I like 'City Lights' the best of all my films.' Based on archival research of Chaplin's production records, this work offers a history of the film's production and reception, as well as an examination of the film itself, with special attention to the sources of the final scene's emotional power.

Film Clowns of the Depression
Film Clowns of the Depression

Author: Wes D. Gehring

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2014-11-21

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 0786483520

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The 1930s are routinely considered sound film's greatest comedy era. Though this golden age encompassed various genres of laughter, clown comedy is the most basic type. This work examines the Depression decade's most popular type of comedy--the clown, or personality comedian. Focusing upon the Depression era, the study filters its analysis through twelve memorable pictures. Each merits an individual chapter, in which it is critiqued. The films are deemed microcosmic representatives of the comic world and discussed in this context. While some of the comedians in this text have generated a great deal of previous analysis, funnymen like Joe E. Brown and Eddie Cantor are all but forgotten. Nevertheless, they were comedy legends in their time, and their legacy, as showcased in these movies, merits rediscovery by today's connoisseur of comedy. Even this book's more familiar figures, such as Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, are often simply relegated to being recognizable pop culture icons whose work has been neglected in recent years. This book attempts to address these oversights and to re-expose the brilliance and ingenuity with which the screen clowns contributed a comic resiliency that was desperately needed during the Depression and can still be greatly appreciated today. The films discussed are City Lights (1931, Chaplin), The Kid From Spain (1932, Cantor), She Done Him Wrong (1933, Mae West), Duck Soup (1933, Marx Brothers), Sons of the Desert (1933, Laurel and Hardy), Judge Priest (1934, Will Rogers), It's a Gift (1934, W.C. Fields), Alibi Ike (1935, Brown), A Night at the Opera (1935, Marx Brothers), Modern Times (1936, Chaplin), Way Out West (1937, Laurel and Hardy), and The Cat and the Canary (1939, Bob Hope).

Charlie Chaplin, Director
Charlie Chaplin, Director

Author: Donna Kornhaber

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2014-03-05

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 0810129523

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Charlie Chaplin was one of the cinema’s consummate comic performers, yet he has long been criticized as a lackluster film director. In this groundbreaking work—the first to analyze Chaplin’s directorial style—Donna Kornhaber radically recasts his status as a filmmaker. Spanning Chaplin’s career, Kornhaber discovers a sophisticated "Chaplinesque" visual style that draws from early cinema and slapstick and stands markedly apart from later, "classical" stylistic conventions. His is a manner of filmmaking that values space over time and simultaneity over sequence, crafting narrative and meaning through careful arrangement within the frame rather than cuts between frames. Opening up aesthetic possibilities beyond the typical boundaries of the classical Hollywood film, Chaplin’s filmmaking would profoundly influence directors from Fellini to Truffaut. To view Chaplin seriously as a director is to re-understand him as an artist and to reconsider the nature and breadth of his legacy.

On Hobos and Homelessness
On Hobos and Homelessness

Author: Nels Anderson

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 9780226019673

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Nels Anderson was a pioneer in the study of the homeless. In the early 1920s Anderson combined his own experience "on the bummery," with his keen sociological insight to give voice to a largely ignored underclass. He remains an extraordinary and underrated figure in the history of American sociology. On Hobos and Homelessness includes Anderson's rich and vibrant ethnographic work of a world of homeless men. He conducted his study on Madison street in Chicago, and we come to intimately know this portion of the 1920s hobo underworld—the harshness of vagrant life and the adventures of young hobos who come to the big city. This selection also includes Anderson's later work on the juvenile and the tramp, the unattached migrant, and the family. Like John Steinbeck's Depression-era observations, Anderson's writings express the memory of those who do not seem entitled to have memory, whose lives were expressed in temporary labor.