Charles Chaplin

Chaplin had kept silent on screen for years, and the voice he finally found in 1940 was aimed squarely at Hitler. He made the most humane film of his career as a satire of a world with five more tragic years still ahead, and it ends by reminding us that we think too much and feel too little. — Adenoid Hynkel rules Tomania and means to rule a great deal more. A Jewish barber, meanwhile, comes back to the ghetto after twenty years in a military hospital, unaware that anything has changed, and when he reopens his shop he gets in the way of stormtroopers who have come to smash its window. Chaplin wrote, directed and plays both men, because the dictator and the barber have exactly the same face. — Nominated for Best Picture | Oscars | 1941 Nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Charles Chaplin) | Oscars | 1941 Nominated for Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Jack Oakie) | Oscars | 1941 Nominated for Best Original Screenplay | Oscars | 1941 Nominated for Best Original Score | Oscars | 1941

Charlie Chaplin plays an old clown trying to convince a young dancer that life is worth living, and for the only time he shares the screen with Buster Keaton. The film brought him his only competitive Oscar, though he had to wait twenty years for it. — Calvero was once the biggest comic in the English music hall, but by 1914 he’s a drunk nobody in London will hire. One evening he comes home to find his neighbour unconscious after trying to take her own life. Terry is a dancer, convinced that her legs are paralysed and her career is over, and getting her back on her feet gives Calvero back something he had lost as well: his sense of his own worth. — Best Original Music | Oscars | 1973

Chaplin struggles, quite literally, to keep up with a machine in a slapstick world where people become parts of the production line, and the result is one of the sharpest satires of the cult of productivity and life after the industrial revolution. It’s absurd, timely and still hilarious. — The factory line runs at such a hellish pace that one model worker suffers a nervous breakdown and goes completely mad. From there he’s shuttled from hospital to prison and from prison to unemployment, caught in the cogs and wheels of modern industry. It goes on like that until he meets a beautiful girl and helps her give the police the slip.

It never drops off the lists of the greatest films of all time, and one look explains why. Charlie Chaplin’s tramp falls for a blind flower girl who believes he’s a millionaire, and with nothing more than his eyes he’ll have you laughing and heartbroken in the same moment. — A hapless young tramp loses his heart to a blind flower girl whose family is about to be evicted. She thinks he’s rich, and he lets her go on thinking it. Then, that same night, he pulls a drunken millionaire out of the river and is instantly adopted as the man’s best friend.