THE SMART TRICK OF THE SILENT COMEDY GENIUS AND LAVISH LIFE THAT NOBODY IS DISCUSSING

Charlie Chaplin designed audiences giggle, but he also manufactured us sense. His films normally balanced delicately, as poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti observes, on “a fantastic line between sentiment and sentimentality.”  Buster Keaton may not have elicited just as much laughter or emotion as Chaplin, but his comedy was not less than as Inventive