FASCINATION ABOUT THE SILENT COMEDY GENIUS AND LAVISH LIFE

Charlie Chaplin designed audiences chuckle, but he also built us truly feel. His movies often balanced delicately, as poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti observes, on “a great line among sentiment and sentimentality.”  Buster Keaton may well not have elicited just as much laughter or emotion as Chaplin, but his comedy was not less than as creative –