Lynn’s book may well be a more-accurate accounting of Chaplin’s own life than is Charlie’s own autobiography, but Lynn occupies only a moderately notable place among the pantheon of Chaplin biographers. Is this the best Chaplin biography? No way. That mantle must be worn by any of the legion of substandard Chaplin biographies written in the last eight decades. Is Lynn’s book the worst biography of Chaplin? Not by a long shot. Yet, Lynn superficially discusses Chaplin’s oeuvre and inescapably reveals that his own preoccupation is with political history than with cinema history. The book is well and succinctly titled as Lynn on occasion swerves to a side topic of historical socio-political relevance to the time period or the facts currently being discussed and imbues the reader with additional insight that other biographers are prone to ignore. His tone of impartiality is lost often enough that the reader is left to wonder whether Lynn can be trusted to pronounce what is true and what is Chaplin fantasy. The truth of what Lynn observes and attempts to impart upon the reader is distorted by his kaleidoscopic political eyeglasses. Certainly, Chaplin did not discern the motives of those who sought to exploit his fame, accurately gauge the limits of his own intellect, or fully examine the merits of the moral and political positions that he tersely injected into his later films. Lynn takes several opportunities to imply to the reader his own political savvy when he points out how stupid Chaplin’s own political explorations were. The biography is curiously nasty in places, as conservative Lynn seems to want to punish the public memory of Chaplin for his liberal (and naïve) political positions of the 1920s through the 1950s. And it is not my choice that Kenneth Lynn be the one to presume to do that for me. Not withstanding Lynn’s academic credentials and the glowing quotations from reviews of this work that are reprinted on the cover of the paperback edition, Lynn seems less concerned with examining Chaplin’s life and work than with demystifying the Cult of Charlie. Yet, we suspect that he was also not the cold, tyrannical lout that Kenneth Lynn portrays him as - either at the studio or at home. Chaplin was not a sterling example of a family man. ISBN 0-8154-1255-X : 607 pages : trade paperback : $19.95Ĭharles Chaplin was not the easiest filmmaker to work for. Simon & Schuster : New York, New York : 1997

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