Charlie Chaplin Retrospective: at the Pacific Film Archive

So for my final field trip I decided to see some of the Charlie Chaplin films that are being shown at the the Pacific Film Archive right now. My favorite film was The Kid. In this film Chaplin plays his usual character "The Tramp," while he takes care of a small orphan boy played by Jackie Coogan (who later became Uncle Fester in The Adams Family). It's a great movie because it's characteristically funny because it's a Chaplin film, but it's also very heartwarming. Everyone should go see it!

Here's what the PFA has to say about the Retrospective.

Everybody knows Chaplin’s Tramp. The little figure with the greasepaint moustache and oversized shoes, the bowler and cane of a down-at-heels gentleman, vies with Mickey Mouse for the title of world’s most famous movie character. But how well do we really know Chaplin’s films? The Tramp’s status as a beloved American icon can too easily overshadow the real achievements of Charles Chaplin (1889–1977), which in many ways ran counter to the American mainstream. The Tramp character, first seen onscreen in 1914, was importantly an outsider, a tweaker of the established order; throughout his career, Chaplin managed to combine Victorian sentiment with sharp social critique. His empathy for the poor and downtrodden, rooted in the acute hardships of his own London childhood, continued even through the years of his extraordinary success—at twenty-eight, he was already a millionaire, with complete control over his own productions. Later, as anti-communist paranoia rose in America, his leftist views (along with personal scandals including a trumped-up paternity suit) drove him into exile in England.