Comedian, actor, writer, producer, and director Charlie Chaplin, through the universal language of silent comedy, imprinted one of the twentieth century's most distinctive and lasting cultural images on the collective consciousness of the entire civilized world. In his self-created guise the Tramp, an accident-prone do-gooder, at once innocent and devious, he sported a toothbrush mustache, baggy pants, and tattered tails, tilting his trademark bowler hat and jauntily swinging his trademark cane as he defied the auguries of a hostile world. The Little Tramp made his first brief appearance in Kid Auto Races at Venice for Mack Sennett's Keystone company in 1914, and bowed out 22 years later in the feature-length Modern Times (United Artists, 1936). In between the Tramp films, Chaplin made countless other short-reel silent comedies, which combined a mixture of Victorian melodrama, sentiment, and slapstick, enchanted audiences worldwide, and made him an international celebrity and...