Charlie Chaplin Returns to America from Exile
The History Hour
BBC
4.4 • 912 Ratings
🗓️ 22 April 2017
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Charlie Chaplin's son on his father's political views and his rocky relationship with his one-time adopted home, America. Plus the Hubble telescope produces the first clear pictures of the furthest galaxies; shaking off colonialism with the world's first festival for black artists; Japan launches a new way of learning the violin and tragedy in Latin America when American missionaries flying over Peru were mistaken for drug-runners.
(Photo: Charlie Chaplin as the Tramp in the 1925 film, The Gold Rush. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome this is the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson |
| 0:05.8 | the past brought to life by those who were there. This week how miscommunication led to an American |
| 0:11.4 | missionary plane being shot down over the Peruvian jungle. |
| 0:15.0 | See, I don't know if this is Bandido or if it's a, um, |
| 0:19.0 | Omego. Okay? Okay? |
| 0:21.0 | Okay. |
| 0:22.0 | No, say. Plus, the first clear pictures from the Hubble telescope. |
| 0:27.0 | We're basically viewing cosmic history on that one picture. |
| 0:31.0 | We're seeing galaxies out in the far reaches of the universe and |
| 0:35.7 | learning the violin the Suzuki way. That's all to come, but we're going to begin with a moment |
| 0:48.1 | which illustrates the conjunction between the arts and politics and it focuses on an unlikely source one of the all-time heroes of comedy. |
| 0:56.6 | In April 1972, the towering figure of the silent movie era Charlie Chaplin made a triumphant return to America after a 20-year |
| 1:05.2 | absence. One of the world's most successful early film stars the English-born |
| 1:09.4 | Charlie Chaplin had been living in Switzerland for two decades, having been exiled from his adopted home |
| 1:15.6 | because of his left-wing political views. Mike Lanchin has been to the family's former home in the |
| 1:20.6 | Swiss mountains to meet one of the actors children, Eugene. |
| 1:24.0 | My dad loved the walks around the garden. |
| 1:31.0 | He would have his newspaper and walk around outside. |
| 1:36.0 | I'm in the gardens of the impressive Chaplin Mansion, now a museum, |
| 1:41.0 | a white building set high above Lake Geneva. |
| 1:44.8 | My guide is Eugene Chaplin. |
| 1:47.0 | I was born here in Switzerland. |
... |
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