Kyle Chrichton gives an excellent thumbnail portrait of Charlie Chaplin in the following words:—
"When I went up to see him I was filled to the ears with that solemn nonsense of Charlie being a sad, Hamlet-like creature, and it took me half-an-hour to realize that he was grinning like a baboon because he felt good and not because he was trying to make the most of a dopey guest, "He may be really one of those pathos fellows, but I can testify that when he is steamed up about a new picture he is no more like Hamlet than Tony Galento is like Pavlova, When he gets going he will talk the leg off any man alive. And all the time he is looking at you with the smile of a kid who has said something funny and is tickled that youre getting it. If that isn't enough to floor you, he starts on his mimicry, in which field he has probably never had_an equal on this earth.
"Chaplin has his life organized perfectly. If he wants to go to bed and sleep for two weeks, he does it. If, after two years of loafing, he decides suddenly to start on a picture, he can have his staff round him in two hours, for he has kept them on the pay roll during the intervening period, When he wants to see somebody, he gets in touch with him, and then proceeds to tell everything. Old big mouth, is how Paulette Goddard refers to him affectionately.
"When he talks ubout his new picture, you get an idea of what has made him a screen genius. Everything he does is in terms of movies. If there is a funny line, the action that accompanies it is even funnier. For a full-length picture it means he must have hundreds of situations and gags. His mind throws them off in an endless stream, "The man's imagitation is fabulous and the present theme of the little Jew who is mistaken for the dictator and is forced to carry on in that capacity is made to order for him."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.