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It is a historic fact, with which Chaplin himself agrees, that the children of America first discovered him. They began imitating the funny little man with the big feet. "I am here today," announced the cardboard cut-out figure set up before theatres. It was enough to draw the kids of the whole neighborhood.
Not until the end of 1914, with the release of "Tillie's Punctured Romance," (the full-length comedy with Marie Dressier), did Chaplin's name become widely known. By 1915 he had become and was to remain the most popular figure in motion pictures. Children and grown-ups of almost all classes succumbed to the "Chaplin craze."
Middle-class elders, alone, held out. Ministers and teachers complained of Chaplin's "vulgarity" — objecting particularly to his "drunk act." Their complaints continued as late as 1921 when "The Kid" was shown, but without effect on the box-office. By 1925 he was an accepted tradition, already a legend, although periodically criticized for his not-so-"private" life.
As early as 1916, the intellectuals began to discover Chaplin. Except for some perceptive critics in the fan and trade magazines, Mrs. Fiske, the actress, seems to have been the first notable to write of him seriously. In Harper's Weekly of May 6, 1916, she called him "an extraordinary artist, as well as a comic genius," spoke of his "inexhaustible imagination" and "unfailing precision of a perfect technique." She also likened the mimic's vulgar buffoonery to a similar quality found in the broad comedy of such masters as Aristophanes, Plautus, Shakespeare, and Rabelais.
Louis Delluc, pioneer French film critic, who wrote glowingly of the new art of the cinema in general, compared Chaplin to Nijinski, "an inventor in his art as Nijinski in his." In a small volume offering a detailed, though esoteric, interpretation of the comedian, £lie