Chaplin Charlie

If you ve made the trip to downtown St. Petersburg to visit the Salvador Dali Museum, be sure to stop in this little diner for a quick bite. The surreal interior is the perfect conclusion to a day spent with Dali. Sketches of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Charlie Chaplin purchased from a none-too-talented street artist, black-and-white checkered floors that clash badly with baby blue walls, and a... 

Although particular filmmakers have been affiliated with hyperdrama— Luis Bunuel throughout his career, from Spain to Mexico to France—the genre is more often affiliated with humorists, such as Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers. Modern Times (1936) is a fable about industrialization and its explicit tendency to mechanize and dehumanize. The many set-pieces in the film have an internal logic, but they are so fabulist in their content that realism is actually beside the point. A similar quality infuses the majority of Chaplin s work. 

As a child in the 1930s, Tezuka had been exposed to the numerous American films that his father had brought home, such as Buster Keaton s and Charlie Chaplin s comedies, as well as several of the early Disney cartoons. He later admitted that much of his creative energies drew from his prewar exposure to those American works, added to the simple fact that he had survived the conflagration. Thus the atomic bomb always loomed large in Tezuka s mind. 

The Mack Sennett silent comedy Laughing Gas (1914) starred Charlie Chaplin as a dentist s assistant, pretending to be a dentist. 

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