Seeing Charlie: Legal and Illegal Chaplin Screenings

Abstract

This chapter surveys representative groups from many categories, such as film societies, retrospective houses, hippy hangouts, public schools and libraries. Along with the aforementioned Bohemian and Beat artists, these groups of people played their parts in keeping Chaplin alive in America, for it was through his films and filmmaking that his reputation here slowly began to be restored. By the early 1960s, the talk in American filmgoing circles was again about Chaplin’s film mastery and not so much his politics. The efforts of film enthusiasts, many of whom were rank-and-file working-class Americans, moved mountains in terms of the steady reinvigoration of Chaplin as a founding father of the Hollywood film industry and of the concept of comedy as art.