Charlie Chaplin (inside lifebelt) and Stan Laurel (kneeling left) aboard SS Cairnrona
Credit: Popperfoto
Morecambe and Wise. Fry and Laurie. The Two Ronnies. French and Saunders. To these great comedy acts, could we possibly have added not Laurel and Hardy, but Laurel and Chaplin? That’s the tantalising question posed by the play Charlie and Stan, which begins touring later this month.
The two men had very different backgrounds. Laurel joined the successful family business by going into theatre in Glasgow, while Chaplin grew up in poverty in London: his father was absent, his mother committed to an asylum when he was 14. Yet both found their calling in the same comedy troupe, and the two performers travelled together to America, where they made their careers.
Andy Warhol was, from the start, concerned about fame, glamour and money, devoid of a philosophy of art – despite his book
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. And yet, it was Warhol, more than any of his contemporaries, who moved art from the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock to pop art, in the process replacing modernism, with postmodernism still playing itself out today.
The arc of Warhol’s life can be easily summarised: He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1928, the child of Czech immigrants. He was his mother’s favourite, his father being away for extended periods working in coal mines and on construction sites. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949, after which he moved to New York, where he became a highly successful commercial artist, producing window displays and adverts for large companies for a decade.
Although Covid-19 has closed many movie theaters, Hollywood continues to release movies. And among the most recent is Mank. It began streaming on Netflix on December 4th. The theme of the film is the rivalry between Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman), leading Hollywood screenwriter in the 1930s and 40s, and Orson Wells (Tom Burke), the creative spirit and star of Citizen Kane, a fictionalized account based on the life of William Randolph Hearst, Americaâs most powerful newspaper publisher of the era. The movie is considered by many to be the greatest film ever made, and a 1971 article by the late New Yorker movie critic Pauline Kael claimed âMank,â and not Wells, should get full credit for the film. Critics like the New York Timesâ A.O. Scott have already argued the pros and cons of Mank, calling it âa worthy, eminently watchable entry in the annals of Hollywood self-obsession,â but âunreliable as historyâ. One thing they seem to agree on is that