Charlie Chaplin, the director of his mid-career film The Circus, was a libertine and a rake. A diminutive ladies’ man, he was having multiple affairs as the film was in production, going through a divorce settlement with his underage wife, and facing back taxes totaling six or seven figures. He was also at odds with the inevitable avalanche of the sound era, which was coming as the (apparent) demise of all that he had worked for. It was a heady, pressure-packed time in his life; and yet he managed to make this colorful circus film as authentic as any other Chaplin film, and moving in the vein of The Tramp,…
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A lone waif plies the strand and searches for firewood, pottering with a walking stick until a group of children, running wildly to her, calls her back home as one explains that “there’s a man here. He came on a big motorcycle. He says Rosa is dead.” Returning with the waif, the children find their mother in tears bartering with an oafish, swarthy gentleman, who in exchange for 10,000 lire has bought the very waif called by the children. A woman more lugubrious than woebegone, having spoken to the strongman whose name is Zampanò, the mother says to justify her daughter’s competence that “she’ll do what she’s told. She just…
