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most dynamic, the most important person who has ever lived has been terribly deformed by tradition. ... No one would prevent me from considering him as a splendid man, virile, full blooded, to whom one turns instinctively when one is in trouble. ... If I could produce a film on the story of Christ, I would show him welcomed with delirious joy by men, women and children; they would throng round him in order to feel his magnetism. Not at all a sad, pious, and stiff person, but a lonely man who has been the most misunderstood of all time".
In search now of a theme, he chose one he had formerly called The Clown and now renamed The Circus, in which Charlie found himself lonely amid the exuberant gaiety of circus folk. Charlie's clowning was never so filled with grief as in The Circus. The framework of the film, its circus background, caused Chaplin to revert to a farcical comedy derived from his earlier days; but this serves only to point the deep sadness of the little clown, which pervades the whole film.
Here Charlie is presented as a Don Quixote without exuberance or fire, Lewis Carroll's White Knight, adrift in the incomprehensible callousness of life. Only his essential resignation enables him to go on living in the alien world. Insensibly, as the film progresses, he becomes the essence of goodness up against all the evil and stupidity of the world. Charlie has shed for all time his precociousness, his malice, his knavery.
The making of this film coincided with Chaplin's divorce from Lita Grey, and was indeed interrupted by the repercussions of the case and its effect on Chaplin. Certainly, in the presentation of Charlie in The Circus, Chaplin seems to be compensating himself. The film is heavy with the strain and fatigue he was undergoing at the time of its making, as for so long before. Charlie has lost his zest, his optimism, and has acquired instead an intense and resigned sadness. The lyrical quality of his work is concealed beneath a bitter philosophy, the poet overlaid by the satirist.
His next film, City Lights (1931), released at a moment when wild enthusiasm for the new talking pictures was sweeping across the continents, presents once more the complete personality of Charlie, and what has clearly become the reiterated and significant symbols of Chaplin's work — the idealist tramp with his unquenchable love, compassion, chivalry and goodness; the Girl, in this case blind, who is complementary to him, in need of his devotion and herself submissive, feminine and unattainable. The eccentric millionaire upon whom their fates depend is a new form of the deus ex machina, changing the social forces that beset and overwhelm them according to his incalculable whim.