Legendary silent screen superstar Charlie Chaplin is finally ready for his close-up.
Sixteen years in the making, Chaplin’s World has opened above Lake Geneva, Switzerland. A cross between a movie museum and theme park, this $50 million-plus celebration of Chaplin’s work, life and legacy is Europe’s top new visitor and cultural attraction.
Born in London in 1889, Charles Spencer Chaplin rose from an impoverished childhood to a vaudeville career in British music halls, which led, by 1914, to a contract in Hollywood, where Chaplin attained fame and fortune with his cane-twirling, mustachioed “Little Tramp” character wearing a bowler hat, tight jacket and oversize shoes.
In 1952 he relocated from the U.S. to Corsier-sur-Vevey in the French-speaking Swiss canton of Vaud, where the actor-director-writer-composer-producer spent the last 25 years of his life with wife Oona O’Neill (the daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill) and their eight children in the 1842-built, 32-room, four-level mansion called Manoir de Ban.
In an interview with The Washington Times, their son Michael, who is now 70 and still lives nearby, described Chaplin’s World as partly a recreation of “the atmosphere and spirit of family life.”
“It’s very ingenuously done,” he said. “There are clips that come out of the wall that show 16mm films my mother used to shoot when we were kids. There’s the sitting room and the piano where he composed his music, and the library where he worked,” said Mr. Chaplin, who co-starred with his father in 1957’s “A King in New York.”
The other main attraction is the 530,000-cubic-foot “Studio,” where the self-guided tour begins in a movie theater showing a montage of a half-century of Chaplin’s films. The montage ends with a black-and-white scene from “Easy Street,” and (spoiler alert!) the screen rises like a curtain to reveal a recreation of the urban set from that 1917 silent film.
“Chaplin left us most of the technical drawings of his decors,” said Chaplin’s World co-founder Yves Durand. “He was very perfectionist.”
In the “Easy Street” set, Mr. Durand said, “we talk about Charlie’s childhood in London … and his arrival in the States for the first time in 1911. So people will walk in this [set] he used … in 21 of his movies,” including 1918’s “A Dog’s Life.”
The sets offer visitors an interactive quality. In “The Gold Rush”’s rebuilt Klondike cabin, as the Little Tramp cowers beneath a table, museumgoers can step on the floor to make the shack teeter, just as it did in this 1925 prospector comedy, while a fan blows to simulate a blizzard. The “Modern Times” set features the assembly line that swallowed the Tramp. Visitors can lie down inside its cogs and wheels, near an uncannily lifelike waxen Paulette Goddard, who co-starred in the 1936 classic.
Fans can also sit in the barber chair from Chaplin’s 1940 anti-Hitler satire, “The Great Dictator.” Made before the U.S. entered World War II, the film played a part in Chaplin’s subsequent fall from American grace as Washington later revoked the British citizen’s legal documents for re-entering the U.S. after he’d set sail for London to attend the premiere of 1952’s “Limelight.”
A music hall set from “Limelight” is recreated along with wax figures of Chaplin as Calvero, the clown who loses his audience, and “Limelight” co-stars Claire Bloom and Buster Keaton, Chaplin’s silent screen rival.
The 34.5-acre property offers stunning views of Lake Geneva and the Alps, which ticket buyers can enjoy while promenading around the well-preserved gardens that include cherry blossom and sequoia trees. A souvenir shop retails in Chaplin-esque bowler hats, DVDs and books about the clown prince of comedy.
The nearby four-star Modern Times Hotel is the world’s only Chaplin-themed hotel.
Chaplin’s World reveals the man behind the star, the humanist behind the comedian, and a good time is guaranteed to all.
L.A.-based film historian/critic Ed Rampell co-authored “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book.”
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