Thanks!

There's a lot to unwrap re: Charlie Chaplin....

1) I remember seeing "The Gold Rush" while in high school and being transformed...I never knew a silent movie could be so funny and profound at the same time. I was similarly transformed by Keaton's "The General". We used to visit Pauline Kael's Berkeley Rep Theater in the early 70s to see more.

2) I subsequently watched several of his films and had my boys watch them...I became very moved by "The Great Dictator" and now consider it perhaps his greatest work. No one uses the pathos formula anymore, though I thought Cheech Marin's "Born in East LA" came close.

3) It appears Chaplin was at least a Communist sympathizer, at a time when many didn't know the evils of Stalin. Conventional wisdom now is that HUAC was an 80/20 thing, 80% harmless Socialists, 20% bonifide Communist threats (the Julius/Ethel Rosenburg variety). HUAC was the tool of McCarthy/Nixon/J.E. Hoover and others who also presented a threat to our Country. Folksinger Pete Seeger said that Stalin's death was the American Soviet-sympathizing wake-up call.

4) When Stalin died and his crimes became public, many rethought their positions. For Chaplin, it didn't help that he had some questionable affairs with women (and apparently pulled a Matt Gaetz w the teenager), yet he was respected by his Hollywood peers.

5) In any case, later in life when he settled down with Oona (and the politics more or less resolved), you'd think the US would've honored him as he so deserved. Certainly a genius on many levels.

PS-Just commented also on your John Wayne piece...though politcal opposites, Chaplin/Wayne did a pretty good moviedom tag-team on Hitler in WW II (and this is what I like about America!)