The Tauck Rhine River Connoisseur river cruise that I recently joined included an optional (but included) tour of the Charlie Chaplin home and museum in Vevey, Switzerland, between Montreux and Lausanne, where Chaplin lived during the last period of his life. It’s called Chaplin’s World. Visiting the home and museum was an amazing experience. It revealed to me much more of the genius of that great early film innovator than I had known before.
The museum itself, apart from its subject, was an amazing achievement. Known as The Studio, it was a huge structure, like a large warehouse, packed with fascinating, room-sized displays showing various aspects of Chaplin’s life and career. Many of them included full-sized mannequins, or perhaps they should be called full-color sculptures of some of the main figures of Chaplin’s life
, including Chaplin himself, his wife Oona, who was playwright Eugene O’Neil’s daughter, and Albert Einstein, who was a friend of Chaplin’s.
There were video screens incorporated into many of the exhibits, showing segments from Chaplin’s films, news footage of Chaplin, and home movie footage of the family at the house. There were also large and elaborate set-ups, and visual displays and bits of memorabilia.
One room was particularly mind-blowing. It was set up like a bathroom, with a sink and counter in front of a large mirror. Leaning over the sink, staring into the mirror with its tongue out was a quite realistic mannequin in the form of Albert Einstein.
Standing in this room, at some point, you realize that you do not appear in the mirror. Though you are standing next to the Einstein dummy, it appears in the mirror but you do not appear beside it. Then you realize it is not a mirror, but a piece of glass onto another room that is set up to be a perfect replica in reverse of the bathroom you are standing in. It is an exhibit that can really jar your senses.
The house, known as Manoir de Ban, is a lovely two-story building of a light gray chalk color, with pale green shutters and trim. It could be called a mansion, but it’s a relatively modest one. It’s surrounded by grassy grounds, called The Park, on a mountain slope overlooking Lake Geneva with the great Alpine peaks Dent du Midi and Rochers-de-Naye on the horizon beyond the lake. Some of the trees in the park are said to be a century old now. There’s a café on the grounds called The Tramp and a gift shop in what was once the garage for Chaplin’s Bentley.
The house is fully furnished, as if the Chaplin family were still living there. The living room of the house has a fine grand piano, a reminder that besides being an actor, director and writer of his films, Chaplin was also a composer. He wrote music for many of his 82 films. One of his songs, “Smile”, has achieved the status of a standard.
As beautiful as the house and grounds are, and as incredibly successful as Chaplin was by most measures, there is a tragic tone underlying the atmosphere of home because he lived there more or less in exile for more than 25 years after he was driven from the United States during the McCarthy era and the Red Scare.
It was felt by some that his 1940 movie “The Great Dictator”, which ridiculed Hitler, and carried a strong, moral and humanistic message, was considered too “pro-communist” by some in positions of authority at the time. It was Chaplin’s first talking film, and the highest-grossing film of his career, but it was to cause him trouble.
The story goes that when Chaplin left the U.S. in 1952 to travel to England, where he was born, the U.S. attorney general, James McGranery, had his passport revoked so he couldn’t return to the States. McGranery kicked Chaplin out because of his alleged associations with left-wing causes.
According to film scholar Roger Ebert, “In 1938, Hitler was not yet recognized in all quarters as the embodiment of evil. Powerful isolationist forces in America preached a policy of nonintervention in the troubles of Europe, and rumors of Hitler’s policy to exterminate the Jews were welcomed by anti-Semitic groups. Some of Hitler’s earliest opponents, including anti-Franco American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, were later seen as ‘premature antifascists’; by fighting against fascism when Hitler was still considered an ally, they raised suspicion that they might be communists. The Great Dictator ended with a long speech denouncing dictatorships, and extolling democracy and individual freedoms. This sounded to the left like bedrock American values, but to some on the right, it sounded pinko.”
The film was made before the full magnitude of the Nazi evil had been unveiled. Chaplin later said if he’d known that, he would not have been able to see him as a character in a comedy film.
If you see “The Great Dictator” now, you might wonder why anyone would see it as communist. But it was anti-fascist, and at the time the fascists were seen by many in America as a bulwark against the communists.
One of the video displays in the museum showed Chaplin receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1972 from the Academy in Hollywood. He was brought to the verge of tears as he threw kisses at the audience, restored to respectability after having been driven out of Hollywood. It was great to see that he lived to see his redemption in America.
He lived in Switzerland for the rest of his life. He died in 1977 at age 88.
The museum was opened in 2016. The idea for it was hatched in 2000 in a meeting between Swiss architect Philippe Meylan and Quebec museographer Yves Durand, a cinema and Chaplin enthusiast. As stated on the website, “A collective of entrepreneurs and artists, local stakeholders, as well as teams of architects, engineers, and designers, worked on the project’s design.”
Here’s a five-minute video about the museum.
For more information, see https://www.tauck.com
David Cogswell is a freelance writer working remotely, from wherever he is at the moment. Born at the dead center of the United States during the last century, he has been incessantly moving and exploring for decades. His articles have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Fortune, Fox News, Luxury Travel Magazine, Travel Weekly, Travel Market Report, Travel Agent Magazine, TravelPulse.com, Quirkycruise.com, and other publications. He is the author of four books and a contributor to several others. He was last seen somewhere in the Northeast US.
