Chaplin : the tramp's odyssey / Simon Louvish.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Includes filmography: pages 385-395.

Prologue : the king in exile -- pt. 1. The immigrant. Caught in a cabaret -- The kid -- The face on the bar-room floor -- A night in the show -- The tramp -- The fatal mallet -- A film Johnny -- His new job -- The champion -- Easy street -- The adventurer -- Shoulder arms! -- His trysting place -- Those love pangs -- pt. 2. The pilgrim. The bond -- The idle class -- Pay day -- A woman of Paris--a man of Los Angeles -- The gold rush -- The masquerader -- The circus -- City lights -- pt. 3. Modern times. His regeneration -- Making a living -- The great dictator -- Dough and dynamite -- Monsieur Verdoux -- Limelight, or The passion of vaudeville part 1 -- Limelight, or The passion of vaudeville part 2 -- A king in Vevey, a ghost in New York -- Epilogue : the king in repose.

Product Description : An Everyman who expressed the defiant spirit of freedom, Charlie Chaplin was first lauded and later reviled in the America that made him Hollywood's richest man. He was a figure of multiple paradoxes, and many studies have sought to unveil 'the man behind the mask'. But Simon Louvish's new book--following on from his five major biographies of comedy's classic stars, from W.C. Fields to Laurel & Hardy and Mae West--looks afresh at the 'mask behind the man'. Louvish charts the tale of the Tramp himself through his films--from the early Mack Sennett shorts through the major features (The gold rush, City lights, Modern times and The great dictator among others). He weighs the relationship between the Tramp, his creator, and his world-wide fans, and in doing so retrieves Chaplin as the iconic London street-kid who carried the 'surreal' antics of early British music hall triumphantly onto the Hollywood screen. Louvish also looks anew at Chaplin's and the Tramp's social and political ideas--the challenge to fascism, defiance of the McCarthyite witch-hunts, eventual 'exile'--and the Tramp's last mature disguises as the serial killer Monsieur Verdoux and the dying English clown Calvero in Limelight. This book is an epic journey, summing up the roots of comedy and its appeal to audiences everywhere, who revelled in the clown's raw energy, his ceaseless struggle against adversity, and his capacity to represent our own fears, foibles, dreams, inner demons and hopes.