Approaching death himself and conceiving an excellent metaphor for the disillusions of his own happiness, Edgar Allan Poe published in 1849 a poem by the name of Eldorado, whose last stanza alludes to the folly of those men of centuries earlier venturing into the Amazon, searching for an imaginary city: “‘Over the Mountains / Of the moon, / Down the Valley of the Shadow, / Ride, boldly ride,’ / The shade replied,– / If you…
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Joe Franklin writes in Classics of the Silent Screen that “along with Griffith, Stroheim, Keaton and Fairbanks, Chaplin remains one of the half-dozen immortals of the American screen,” delimiting a pantheon that has since grown while retaining its primary figures, of whom Chaplin is one of the greatest.[1] By 1936 Chaplin had established an oeuvre that universalized the Tramp, the duck-footed vagrant with floppy shoes and a cane, so that as he approached the creation…
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As the congregants of a wedding walk to the riverside, accompanying newlyweds leaving by barge, a woman exclaims, “couldn’t she marry a local boy?” to which another quickly responds that “she always has to be different.” But the poignant difference is to be one of love. The marriage of Jean to Juliette, irrelevant to the world at large, is an event of gravity and import indicating not only the upset of the village, but the…