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When Falstaff, Shakespeare's greatest comic invention, is barred by Prince Hal, he protests: "Banish plump Jack, and you banish all the world." Banish Charlie Chaplin and you banish at least a part of the world—perhaps the best part. It came as no surprise when Chaplin, perennially adored in Europe, made this exit permanent. The enmity continued without the target. On the West Coast, his new film Limelight was boycotted by theaters, and RKO's Howard Hughes urged others to cancel bookings of the movie. The Saturday Evening Post called Charlie a "Pink Pierrot." Throughout the U.S. the Tramp became a pariah. Still he had his champions who refused to stop smiling merely because Washington was in an inquisitory phase. "Turn the laugh on them, Charlie," beseeched I.F. Stone. "This capital needs nothing so badly as one final well-flung custard pie."
Charlie flung the pie—badly. He called it A King in New York, a satire on a witch-hunting nation whose investigations cause a small boy (played by Charlie's son Michael) to rage: "There's no freedom here!" King Shahdov of Estrovia (Chaplin) quits the U.S. to "sit it out in Europe" until hysteria passes. It was Chaplin's first and only labor of hate, a film entirely without humor. Given this King, Americans winced when the Chaplin autobiography was announced. Would this be the final severance between Chaplin and the country he loved and resented? Instead, the book was a benign evasion. The bitterness was cloaked, the moral aphorisms indistinguishable from the titles in an old Biograph two-reeler. ("Sage or fool, we must all struggle with life.") It remained for the other side to signal its nonbelligerency.
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The signal has been too long in coming. Only now is Hollywood willing to reassess Chaplin's "disloyalty," to recognize that the British citizen paid millions in American taxes, helped found United Artists—one of the few old studios still functioning—and provided the aesthetic foundation for every film comedian since 1920. Conversely, only now is Chaplin willing to admit "great affection for the U.S. The unpleasant things have faded."
The negative of the picture seems obvious. Hollywood scarcely exists any more. To refurbish its image, the town has taken to celebrating its past, to awarding Gary Grant the Oscar he never won, to pretending giants still walk on Vine Street. But a more spacious interpretation is needed. This last great award to the last great clown extends beyond the pavilion. True, a few scraps of dirty snow still remain from the cold war. But the King was right. Although there was more to the cold war than hysteria, the hysteria at least has passed. America of the '70s has become a better region for the artist, a place where the old Tramp might feel free to caper and to rest. This Academy Award is more than workmen's compensation, greater than a statuette-shaped apology. It is a gesture Chaplinesque in implication.
A squint of the eyes and it might even look like an entire nation shaking off its bygone disappointments and its tragic errors, kicking out its legs and setting off once more on that long and hopeful road.
· Stefan Kanfer