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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted on: Friday, March 5, 2004

Charlie Chaplin disc set features documentary

By Terry Lawson
Knight Ridder News Service

There's only one place you can see the documentary "Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin," and that's in "The Chaplin Collection Vol. 2" (Warner), a seven-film, 12-disc boxed set that may be the bargain of this or any other year.

Shown only at film festivals and for seven days at a Los Angeles theater to qualify it for an Oscar nomination it didn't get, "Charlie" may be one of the best documentaries ever made about any film icon.

Beginning with footage from "Kid Auto Races at Venice," the 1914 short in which the Little Tramp first waddled onscreen, the documentary takes us all the way to his surprise appearance at the 1972 Academy Awards.

Written by critic and historian Richard Schickel and narrated by Sydney Pollack, "Charlie" is not only a superb overview and a thoughtful analysis of Chaplin's life and work, it offers perspective for anyone who has never seen the remarkable movies so lovingly restored and remastered for the box.

"City Lights," released as a silent film in 1931, is the collection's masterpiece, an eloquent melodrama about a working stiff who sacrifices everything to raise money to restore the sight of a blind flower girl.

This title, 1928's hilarious "The Circus" and 1921's sentimental slapstick marvel "The Kid" each has a 2-DVD set, with the first disc containing the digitally remastered film and the second crammed with extras. "The Kid" supplements include the 55-minute "My Boy" from the same year, which also starred little Jackie Coogan.

"City Lights" gives us rehearsals, discarded approaches to classic scenes and the famous 1931 appearance in Vienna where most people heard Chaplin's voice for the first time.

A double disc pairs the disappointing but fascinating "A King in New York," a 1957 drama that was interpreted as evidence that Chaplin was an anti-American communist, and 1923's "A Woman of Paris," a serious, Henry James-style drama in which the director only has a cameo.

The set is completed with a single-disc edition of 1947's pioneering black comedy "Monsieur Verdoux," in which Chaplin played a lonely-hearts killer, and the two-disc "The Chaplin Revue," collecting seven World War I-era shorts.