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Lita Grey would have turned 115 years old today. If she had lived long enough. She didn't. But she survived marriage to Charlie Chaplin. Read what this babe said about his sense of humour here ........

As I write this, it is late afternoon in Australia and after midnight on the American East Coast. I have put together some thoughts from two Anglican priest's homilies in the morning here, with ideas of my own and with images from the 1930's. Father Grant Edgecumbe this morning added the ideas: “Be Salt. Be light. Share a joke.” to tell his congregation of some ways to live out the reputed Assisi maxim: “Preach the Gospel ……… Use words if necessary." “Faith is relational.” said Father Michael Bowie in his homily in his national heritage church across a large city...

Throughout history, many dictators have expressed their admiration for the cinematic medium. While some have it as a tool to spread propaganda, others have marvelled at the magic of the movies. According to many reports, Adolf Hitler was also a cinephile and one of the films he allegedly watched multiple times was directed by none other than Charlie Chaplin. In fact, many historians have discovered that Hitler’s idea about war was deeply informed by the cinematic medium since he mostly experienced it through newsreels and documentary clips that were shot on the battlefields. In addition to those, Hitler’s close associates...

VIDEOIt's Great Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson milking all the laughs he can out of an umbrella prop in his comedy competition with Charlie Chaplin.

Back in the previous century, when I was the youngest employee at a small newspaper, the topic of horror movies came up in the lunchroom. The twice-my-age-and-then-some ladies seated around me were tutting about one particularly nasty one — or so they'd heard — which had just been released. Movies like that, they all agreed, surely inspired some viewers to commit actual crimes, or at the very least, desensitized others to such real life violence. I can take or leave most horror movies, but I couldn't help myself. Pointing to the paperback murder mystery one of my colleagues had in...

Charlie Chaplin was one of the pioneering film making greats in Hollywood but could no longer live in America in the time of Joe McCarthy. The scale of things in America as opposed tp Chaplin's country of birth, England, may have helped him to get the star power that enabled him to do things like establish United Artists and thereby be independent. Not possible now? (Some bid stars can become producers but only as part of a team of producers not as sole producer/director.) To some people in America Chaplin was a communist. When forced to leave America he went...

This week's movie date takes us back to the dawn of Hollywood, and a December night one hundred years ago - 1917 - at about four in the morning, when an automobile doing 60 miles per hour down Wilshire Boulevard crosses over to the wrong side of the road and hits an oncoming car near the intersection with Vermont Avenue. Everyone survived with minor injuries, except the driver of the speeding vehicle who was killed instantly. Because of his huge size, it took five hours to get him out of the wreckage. And, when they identified him, a stellar screen...

A statue showing a young girl holding up what appears to be a laptop -- complete with USB ports -- has sparked a frenzy among conspiracy theorists. The statue, 'Grave Naiskos of an Enthroned Woman with an Attendant' is in The J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California. 'I am not saying that this is depicting an ancient laptop computer,' said YouTuber StillSpeakingOut. 'But when I look at the sculpture I can't help but think about the Oracle of Delphi, which was supposed to allow the priests to connect with the gods to retrieve advanced information and various aspects.' In...

After nine decades in the business, the former collaborator of Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles is still looking for his next great role. The earliest surviving footage of broadcast television in America is a fragment of "The Streets of New York," an adaptation of playwright Dion Boucicault's 19th-century drama, aired by the experimental New York NBC affiliate W2XBS on August 31, 1939. All that now remains of the hour-long program is a silent, 11-minute kinescope, filmed off a TV screen and archived at the Paley Center For Media. And there, in those primitive flickering images, you can catch...

MI5 investigated whether Charlie Chaplin was actually a Frenchman called Israel Thornstein, previously secret files on the Hollywood film star have revealed. Intelligence officers could find no trace of the actor's birth in Britain despite Chaplin always claiming he was born in London in 1889. The mystery surrounding his origins emerged when the US authorities asked MI5 to look into the comic actor's background after he left America in 1952 under a cloud of suspicion over his communist links.

We give Google grief on occasion around here, but the Chaplin mini-movie on the splash page of the site today is very well done, IMHO. A little Friday fun, anyway!

HOLLYWOOD -- 33 years after his death, a 1928 film clip from a Charlie Chaplin movie premier that appears to show a woman talking on a cell phone is sparking debate and controversy. .... more at link

Perhaps she really is a time-traveller, sent back through the decades to make a jaw-dropping cameo appearance. Or maybe she was a maverick genius, secretly testing out advanced technology for the government and caught on camera at the wrong moment.

Lost Charlie Chaplin film bought on eBay for $5 A lost Charlie Chaplin film has been discovered in a can of nitrate film bought on eBay for £3.20 ($5). Morale Park from Henham, Essex, purchased the tin simply because he liked the look of it. He was amazed to discover its fragile contents: a previously unknown seven-minute film Chaplin film called Zepped. His interest was piqued, he said, when he could not find any mention of it on the internet. The film features footage of Zeppelin airships flying over England during the First World War, and out-takes from three pictures...

If you want to write for Hollywood, study this picture. This faded lobby card from Charles Chaplin’s The Kid is the best lesson you’ll ever have in how to write for the movies. Despite its age, it illustrates many of the essential elements you’ll need to keep in mind today as your write your Hollywood screenplay. It’s a visual reminder of the kind of movie that producers, studios and – most importantly – audiences are looking for.

The British left-wing writer George Orwell gave the government a list of 38 suspected or actual communist sympathisers in 1949, including the comedian Charlie Chaplin, The Guardian reported. Orwell, author of the political satires Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, who would be 100 years old on Wednesday, sent the list to a friend, Celia Kirwan, who worked for the information research department, a section of the Foreign Office, The Guardian said. Kirwan had asked for Orwell's help in countering waves of communist bloc propaganda in the intensifying Cold War, the left-of-centre Guardian reported. Among those singled out for suspicion by...