New Angles on Two Cinematic Legends, John Ford and Charlie Chaplin

‘John Ford’By Joseph McBride and Michael WilmingtonUniversity Press of Kentucky, 348 pages‘Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided’By Scott EymanSimon & Schuster, 432 pagesNeither John Ford nor Charlie Chaplin need the basic recapitulation of lives and careers by reviewers pontificating about these two legends of the cinema, who have been the subjects of many books. What about the biographer/critics who still have something to say about Ford and Chaplin?Joseph McBride has been a screenwriter, a film historian, biographer, and, most importantly, shared the company of John Ford. In short, Mr. McBride provides an inside narrative while pursuing his work as a scholar who teaches at San Francisco State University.“John Ford” is an expanded edition of a book that appeared in 1974 in collaboration with Michael Wilmington, who died in 2022 after what Mr. McBride calls a “distinguished career writing about films,” including work as lead reviewer for the Chicago Tribune. This new edition retains a focus on 14 key films, but adds material about Ford’s silent films and treatment of his Irishness and comedy, as well as an expanded version of an interview with Ford conducted on the day in 1970 when he decided to retire. Plans to do more work had fallen through and Ford was “even more cantankerous than usual” as Mr. McBride struggled to complete his first Hollywood interview.Mr. McBride’s situating of himself and Ford in the beginning and ending phases of their Hollywood ventures illuminates their frustrating yet revealing exchanges:You don’t like to give actors a lot of instructions do you?“No.”Some directors do, though.“Do they?”Chaplin and Lubitsch — people like that acted out all the parts.“I’d like to see them acting out. It must have been funny.”It seems to have been hard work to get Ford to open up, but he wanted to give the youngster something.The author of well-received biographies of John Ford, John Wayne, Cary Grant, and other famous Hollywood figures, Scott Eyman presents his book as the culmination of a fan/scholar’s hegira: “It took me a long time to write a book about Charlie Chaplin. To be precise, slightly less than sixty years. I started collecting Chaplin films when I was twelve years old. My first purchase was an 8mm Blackhawk Films print of Chaplin’s two-reeler Easy Street. It cost me $9.95–a small amount of money to affect a life.”Does Mr. Eyman have to be autobiographical? Yes, because who tells Chaplin’s story and why matters to Mr. Eyman in his intense involvement with an elusive artist. “Try as I might,” he admits, he could not see how Chaplin achieved his effects: “I slowed the film running through my Argus projector down from eighteen frames per second to half that, to see if I could catch the split second when Chaplin transitioned from one expression to another, one emotion to another. I wanted to see if I could catch him in the moment of calculation. It was impossible. He was quicksilver, shifting instantaneously from one mood to another.”So what new angle was available to Mr. Eyman? It was the “process by which Chaplin segued from the status of beloved icon to despised ingrate; focus on him being converted from one of America’s prized immigrants to a man without a country,” living and working abroad after the U.S. attorney general revoked Chaplin’s re-entry permit in 1952.The politically liberal Chaplin, accused of communist associations, and then hit with a paternity suit even though blood tests confirmed he was not the father, is presented — though Mr. Eyman does not put it this way — as experiencing just the kind of quicksilver transformation that the 12-year-old Eyman wanted to slow down so that he could analyze the subtle motions of Chaplin’s art. How Chaplin got caught in the wheels of political turmoil is the gravamen of Mr. Eyman’s biography. Joseph McBride and Scott Eyman approach their subjects from the inside and outside, providing, in the process, a stereoptical view of two filmmakers who turn the world cinematic even as that world exerts its pressures and forces them into a retirement that reels them away from an audience that has watched their every move. Mr. Rollyson, author of the forthcoming “Ronald Colman: Hollywood’s Gentleman Hero,” has interviewed Joseph McBride on the podcast “A Life in Biography.”

New Angles on Two Cinematic Legends, John Ford and Charlie Chaplin

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