Chaplin Red Flagged (#29)

In this memorable scene, he picks up a red warning flag that has fallen off the back of a wagon, and finds himself inadvertantly at the forefront of a revolutionalry riot. Red has been the color of revolution since the bloody Reign of Terror.

Robert Downey, Jr. also an Aries (4 April 1965) portryed him.

Warren Beatty has already been cited as an example of Aries priapism; recently the number of his "conquests"has been extimated at 13,000. His most important movie project was the epic film REDS, which he wrote, produced, directed and starred in, and for which he won the Best Director Oscar

Aries pairings in movies are fun: Beatty and Julie Christie, McQueen and Ali McGraw (especially when they both spontaneously jump into the pond after he's released from prison), Steven Seagal and Kelly LeBrock already mentioned, Crawford and Davis. Surely a good deal of the intensity of THE GODFATHER is attributable to the presence of a gaggle of Aries natives: Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Richard Conte, Sterling Hayden, and Francis Coppola himself -- all Aries.

We could talk as long as we like about the Aries influence in Charlie Chaplin, the prototype of the 20c. Subject. Notice his perpetual parody of Aries masculinity. Soldier, cop, boxer, Casanova, caveman, strongman, hero. 

  I just ran across a rather different picture of the actor than we are used to, as a violent, tyrannical sociopath: ".....Chaplin is the lost twin of Adolf Hitler. Peter Ackroyd almost suggests as much. Both men first drew breath in April 1889. They had drunken fathers and nervous mothers. There were patterns of madness and illegitimacy in the family tree. They were short and sported an identical moustache. They had marked histrionic skills, each man ‘appealing to millions of people with an almost mesmeric magic’. They were despotic towards underlings — and Chaplin’s The Great Dictator is less political satire than back-handed homage. Hitler watched it at a private screening — twice. 
….. Lenin said that ‘Chaplin is the only man in the world I want to meet.’ [Lenin and Hitleer, both Aries]
…..The theme of Ackroyd’s biography of Chaplin is the alarming contrast between the sweetness of the Little Tramp, the saviour of fallen women and lost children, and the monstrousness of Chaplin himself, who came across to every single person who ever met him as difficult, suspicious and angry. ….. Robert Florey, an assistant director, called him a ‘tyrannical, wounding, authoritative, mean, despotic man’. ….. ‘The violence of his anger was always so out of proportion to the object that had stirred him that I couldn’t help being frightened of it,’ said one of his sons.

Hannah, Chaplin’s mother….was certainly a lunatic. Records show she was incarcerated in various asylums, put in a padded cell and given shock treatments. ….. He survived, he said, by being suffused with ‘the exuberance that comes from utter confidence in yourself. Without it, you go down in defeat.’ Hence, his demonic arrogance; ….. 

‘Charlie married me and then he forgot all about me,’ was a frequent complaint cited in divorce hearings. He was always off chasing fresher meat, painting his private parts with iodine to ward off the clap. Louise Brooks was terrified to see his ‘bright red erection’ coming at her in the dark. 

…..As a director he was a dictator: ‘Do this, do not do that, look this way, walk like this, now do it over.’ He’d shoot 36,000 feet of negative and print 1,800 feet of it. He ordered 342 takes over a two-year period of a single shot in City Lights — the blind flower-seller handing over a bunch of violets to the Little Tramp. Was this perfectionism? A manifestation of obsessive compulsive disorder? Or was he behaving like a simple power-crazed brute? 
….. His sexual scandals, as revealed in numerous paternity suits, upset morality……Monsieur Verdoux, about a dapper Edwardian-era serial killer. is based on Landru, the famous French Bluebeard, also an Aries (12 April 1869