Charlie Chaplin’s Comedy Career

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1040, 2 August 1930, Page 25

Charlie Chaplin’s Comedy Career

“I SHALL NEVER TALK IN PICTURES” WILL “CITY LIGHTS” FAIL It is nearly three years now since the last Charlie Chaplin film had a formal presentation. The film was “The Circus,” and (for the benefit of the latest generation of filmgoers) Mr. Chaplin in it touched his topmost pinnacle of comicality. Ponderous people have written sheaves about what they call the pantomimic genius of Mr. Chaplin. He has been variously reported to be In the throes of a masterly represents tion of Hamlet and of a dramatisation of the French Revolution. That is the inevitable fate of a comedian who has made the whole world laugh. . . If you travel into the utmost fast nesses of the Alpes-Maritimes you hear the village “comic” addressed as “Chariot.” Charlie in the last ten years has been the world’s touchstone of humour. Fifteen years ago—and this, again, for the newest audiences of films — Charlie began to make us shrill with laughter in cinemas, remarks a London critic. For years after that fie progressed in picture after picture until we came to regard his name as a synonym tor joy and his baggy trouts ers as an ample excuse for laughter. Charlie, too, amassed an enormousfortune from the world’s guffaws, ano that had its inevitable repercussion. He suffered a succession of woes There were suits brought against him by the revenue authorities of the United States for the recovery of un-