FASCINATION ABOUT THE SILENT COMEDY GENIUS AND LAVISH LIFE

Charlie Chaplin produced audiences chuckle, but he also manufactured us sense. His films typically balanced delicately, as poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti observes, on “a fine line involving sentiment and sentimentality.”  Buster Keaton may not have elicited just as much laughter or emotion as Chaplin, but his comedy was at least as Imaginative –