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The John Batchelor Show

BECAUSE EVERYONE NEEDS A LAUGH THANKS TO THE LITTLE TRAMP. 2/8: Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided by Scott Eyman (Author)

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

Society & Culture, Arts, News, Books

4.52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 12 May 2024

⏱️ 9 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

BECAUSE EVERYONE NEEDS A LAUGH THANKS TO THE LITTLE TRAMP. 2/8: Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided by Scott Eyman (Author)

https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Scott-Eyman/dp/1982176350

Bestselling Hollywood biographer and film historian Scott Eyman tells the story of Charlie Chaplin’s fall from grace. In the aftermath of World War II, Chaplin was criticized for being politically liberal and internationalist in outlook. He had never become a US citizen, something that would be held against him as xenophobia set in when the postwar Red Scare took hold.

Politics aside, Chaplin had another problem: his sexual interest in young women. He had been married three times and had had numerous affairs. In the 1940s, he was the subject of a paternity suit, which he lost, despite blood tests that proved he was not the father. His sexuality became a convenient way for those who opposed his politics to condemn him. Refused permission to return to the US after a trip abroad, he settled in Switzerland and made his last two films in London.

In Charlie Chaplin vs. America, Scott Eyman explores the life and times of the movie genius who brought us such masterpieces as City Lights and Modern Times. “One of the finest surveys of the man and the artist ever written” (Leonard Maltin) this book is “a sobering account of cancel culture in action.” (The Economist)

1940 THE GREAT DICTATOR

Transcript

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0:00.0

Have you ever felt like escaping to your own desert island?

0:04.0

Jane Gaskin did exactly that, trading in the family home to begin a new life in the

0:09.1

tropics.

0:10.1

But she soon discovers that Paradise has its secrets.

0:13.4

I'm Alice Levine, and this is the price of Paradise,

0:18.0

the island dream that ends in kidnap, corruption, and murder.

0:23.0

Wish you were here.

0:24.0

Follow the price of Paradise Now, wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm John Batcher with the new book Charlie Chaplin versus America by Scott

0:39.1

Aeman.

0:40.7

When Arts, Sex and Politics collided, Charlie Chaplin arrives in America with the Carno Group.

0:47.0

My notes say 1910 and 1913.

0:50.0

At first, America overwhelms him, he comes to New York and the vaudeville halls, but he comes to love it and

0:57.5

travels with the burlesque, the vaudeville, including the Marx brothers and Stan Laurel is mentioned.

1:04.8

Stan Laurel knew Charlie in London at the time.

1:08.0

This is the Laurel and Hardy.

1:10.1

What did he make of him?

1:11.0

What was his opinion of the young Charlie Chaplin?

1:14.0

Laurel thought Chaplin was prodigiously talented

1:17.8

uh... and studied him carefully on stage. He thought Chaplin was strange as a human being.

1:23.5

He wasn't like the other vaudevilians.

1:25.1

He didn't mingle particularly with the other vaudeviliants.

1:27.7

He didn't go out scouting around for girls after the show.

...

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