To think of Charlie Chaplin is to think of the movies. Yet this unique actor, director, and producer has added little to movie technique or movie form. He has been not a technician but a pantomimist, a commentator, a satirist, a social critic. His artistic problems have not been cinematic; they have been personal, always being solved by feeling. His importance lies not in what he has contributed to film art, but in what he has contributed to humanity. If he is negligible as a movie craftsman, if he has evolved no new formal aspects to enrich the medium, he has created many moments to enrich society. Chaplin will always be known for his social outlook, his insight into human nature, his pantomimic skill, his ingenious development of the incident, and his evocation of a mood. It is these qualities rather than any plastic contributions which have made him significant as a screen artist. (p. 226)

Since his first screen appearance in 1913, Charles Chaplin has made history. As a whole, his career during twenty-five years has been marked by ripening ability and a steadily rising reputation. Until 1918 his pictures were experiments in technique and style, containing all the external characteristics that Chaplin was later to synthesize, and revealing his growing awareness of aims. His films during the following years were mature, rich in insight and understanding. In recent years, since the advent of the talkies, he has used his genius humorously and pathetically to reveal the sores of modern life. Intensely conscious of modern social conditions, he employs his artistry on behalf of the underprivileged, speaking out for the individual against all forms of oppression. His social conscience has been the inspiration that has transformed his outmoded silent-screen technique and kept his work contemporary and meaningful. (p. 229)

Chaplin's Keystone films were, in the main, rapid-fire farces, as can be seen from their titles. They were not built around Chaplin's personality but rather employed his talents to carry out the usual [Mack] Sennett pattern. Incident followed upon incident swiftly, so that Chaplin's individual pantomime and subtlety were sacrificed for pace and action. These elements Chaplin was later to incorporate in his own films, but he adapted them to his personality and individual style. (p. 231)

Chaplin is David confronting the Goliath who makes life miserable for the weak until he is resolutely challenged. Battered, pursued, frustrated, lovesick, through his quick-wittedness and nimbleness Chaplin finally emerges from the conflict victorious—and alone. The sparks that fly from his many engagements are touched with deep humor, tender pathos, bitter satire, any of which he can achieve by the use of any prop at hand—an escalator, a mannikin, a violin, a carpet, or a clock. Gems of Chapliniana, [the Mutual pictures] reveal his increasing social awareness. The self-consciousness and groping that marked his Sennett and Essanay films are gone; he now has self-assurance and a ripened purpose. (pp. 234-35)

After 1918 his movies are fewer and longer, ever growing in complexity and profundity but springing from essentially the same sources that became apparent in his earlier years.

No longer concerned with mastering a technique, Chaplin now was free to develop his unique characterizations and subtle witticisms further, giving comedy emotional depth and satirical significance in his criticism of conventions, dogmas, and injustices in society. (p. 236)

The Idle Class (1921), Pay Day (1922), and The Pilgrim (1923) were thrusts at social inequalities. Sympathetic toward the working man, they tried to show that spiritual good is more likely to be found in a convict than in those who make convicts what they are. All three films were adroit expositions of Chaplin's credo, although they were not propagandistic in the common sense of the term and did not essentially differ from the points of view of his previous films.

After The Pilgrim Chaplin suddenly surprised everyone by directing a dramatic film in which he did not star. It is upon this film, A Woman of Paris (1923), that his reputation as a great director has often been wrongly based. In direction the film was neither brilliant nor remarkable, though many claimed it to be both. Its style was elementary; it had none of the remarkable camera work of the German school, then at its best, nor any unusual insight regarding movie continuity. The film's interest lay in psychological portraiture, in its honesty in depicting character, environment, and human relationships. What mattered most in the film was the motivation of the characters' actions—the petty quarrels and jealousies, the thinking processes. "I treated the subject," Chaplin said, "in the simplest possible manner." (pp. 240-41)

Chaplin stands out as perhaps the one unforgettable actor of the screen, the symbol of human struggle against regimentation and, now more than ever, for the rights of the individual.

Beginning as a slap-about comedian he has made himself a symbol of the spirit of the common man, readily recognized wherever mankind gathers—a humble and pathetic figure in search of beauty, the butt of jests, harassed by poverty, the law, and social forces that he can neither understand nor resist. He is the contemporary Don Quixote, venturing forth in a bewildering word to set things right single-handed, to take up the gauntlet for chivalry, honesty, beauty, and truth. (p. 247)