April 16th is the birthday of Charlie Chaplin, born in 1889, whose movies transcend the movies and made the medium an inescapable part of history. The character of the Little Tramp may well have been, for decades, the most recognized person on the planet; it’s worth noting that, starting in 1914, the year he came to Hollywood, he directed almost all the films that made his name and his fame. He directed two features, though—forty-four years apart—in which he does not star but makes only brief cameos. In the 1923 melodrama “A Woman of Paris,” he presents a lost innocent who, thrown to the wolves of the big city, survives by adopting the cavalier mores of her new milieu. Despite its European setting, the film is Hollywood Babylon made into drama; its behind-the-scenes decadence and power plays were both masked and suggested by stars’ frolicsome on-screen pantomime. His consummate artistry, the film suggests, is inseparable from the troubadours’ voluptuous riot.
Chaplin’s last film, “A Countess from Hong Kong,” starring Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren, treats the same theme more exotically and more radically. Here, wealth and power are taken for granted; the stumbling block is the need to keep up appearances, and Chaplin makes clear that the severe old-world manners of frankly pleasure-loving aristocrats are of a kind with the severe artistry of deft performers such as Chaplin himself. They do it all and make it look easy. If Chaplin is the crucial artist of the twentieth century, it is, in part, because he also embodied, perhaps more boldly and more radically than anyone else, the paradoxes of twentieth-century art.