CHAPLIN: THE TRAMP’S ODYSSEY

Simon Louvish has proved himself adept at the comic biography with his studies of Mack Sennett, Laurel and Hardy, Mae West and the Marx Brothers. However, he has yet to top his revisionist take on W. C. Fields, and falls a long way short of that benchmark with this profile of Charlie Chaplin's screen persona.

With so many books already chronicling the reckless romances and the clashes with the American establishment, it makes sense to set the iconic Tramp character in his social and cultural context.

But Louvish devotes so much space to the plots of Chaplin’s 82 films that this often feels more like an accumulation of programme notes, particularly in its discussion of the prolific 1910s, when Chaplin churned out two-reelers for Keystone, Essanay and Mutual.

Drawing heavily on David Robinson’s magisterial Chaplin: His Life and Art, Louvish provides an acute insight into the London-born genius’s excruciating youth as the son of unstable, performer parents and his hard-knock apprenticeship in Britain’s music-halls.

He also captures the perfectionism that drove Chaplin to turn slapstick into a serious art. Yet he never quite succeeds in forging a link between that moment in 1914 when an exile desperate for approval and fame hurriedly assembled a costume — comprising a cane, Fatty Arbuckle’s baggy pants, Ford Sterling’s oversize shoes, a trimmed-down version of Mack Swain’s moustache and a bowler hat cribbed from Minta Durfee’s father — and those days in his Swiss retirement when he was “filled with disgust at the character that circumstances forced me to create”.

Clearly as besotted with the Little Fellow as the fans who created the first global superstar, Louvish fails to get behind “the mask before the man”. However, he succeeds triumphantly in persuading the reader to return to the glorious and now criminally neglected films.