From Amazon.com
Indispensable for any Chaplin fan and important and highly intriguing for anyone who cares about film history, this three-volume series offers the outtakes and unreleased tracks of the Little Tramp's storied career. Archivist Kevin Brownlow and David Gill meticulously and ingeniously piece together previously unseen footage from Chaplin's private collection, demonstrating in part 1 how painstakingly the director developed gags in such short films as
The Cure and
The Immigrant. Part 2 is less essential, but offers the famous behind-the-camera intrigue of the making of his classic
City Lights, a film in which pokey perfectionist Chaplin makes Stanley Kubrick look like a caffeinated, indie tyro rushing through production. Part 3 demonstrates how Chaplin recycled ideas he discarded early in his career for use in later film. It includes a historic first--one of the first extended sequences Chaplin shot trying to break out of the Little Tramp mold. Doubly amazing is how fresh and funny and effective Chaplin's filmmaking remains today, nearly a century later.
--David Kronke
On the DVD
The story behind Unknown Chaplin
Two bonus shorts: the making of The Count and Chaplin Meets Harry Lauder
Chaplin biography
Interactive menus
Scene selection
