The Unseen Alistair Cooke (review)

The grainy footage of Charlie Chaplin is jumpy, but starkly revealing, as though a prototypical cinema verite director had provoked a satyr with multiple personalities. Close-ups catch the 44-year-old Chaplin in lunatic facial contortions: with bulging eyes he rolls out his tongue, he bares his canines and turns his forefingers into horns against his curly graying head, he thrusts his forefinger forward in a "hey-you" gesture as his stare turns menacing. Playful mugging, or something deeper?

This, the only extant footage of Chaplin in secluded repose, comes from a home movie shot by Alistair Cooke, the British/American journalist, television host, and bon vivant, whose life Rachel Jardine commemorates in her even-handed documentary, The Unseen Alistair Cooke. The title alludes to a cache of 150 reels of 8 mm film—spanning three decades—discovered in the basement of Cooke's Fifth Avenue apartment block after his death in 2004. The reels contain precious footage of the North American outdoors shot from a moving car—the Canadian wilderness, Yosemite National Park, the new Hoover Dam. Cooke recorded Americana. Among the cityscapes and signage is a drive-in waitress decked out as a drum majorette walking with a tray of milk shakes.

Cooke also filmed his celebrity friends, such as Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. The Chaplin footage, shot on board his yacht, includes Paulette Goddard, Chaplin's 22-year-old wife, reclining on deck "as trim and shiny as a trout." Like a fleeting experimental film exploring motion and light, an angled close-up of her head is framed against the glimmering Catalina Island sea. Cooke met Chaplin in 1933, finagling an interview through sheer chutzpah—as he later put it. Chaplin was taken with the 24-year-old's linguistic facility; they became fast friends.

Few were as deeply infatuated and conversant about American culture as Cooke, who spent more than 50 years exploring the country's hidden byways and cultural well-springs. He also wrote about politics, serving as the Manchester Guardian's chief American correspondent from 1947 to 1972. Cooke wedded his "jeweled observer's eye" to an objective style. He reported what he saw, but never what he thought of it, as evidence by his eye witness account of the moments immediately after Robert F. Kennedy's assassination (at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968): "There were flashlights by now and the button eyes of Ethel Kennedy turned to cinders. She was slapping a young man and he was saying, 'Listen, lady, I'm hurt too.' And down on the greasy floor was a huddle of clothes and staring out of it the face of Bobby Kennedy, like the stone face of a child lying on a cathedral tomb."

Like Cooke's own writing, Jardine's documentary is critically distant, but not without an eye for human drama. In one segment, Cooke's son, John Byrne Cooke, recalls a scene from childhood: his father taking great pains to film the boy's electric train set. Some 60 years later, the younger Cooke is astonished to discover that he doesn't appear in a single frame: "If I were visiting my six-year-old boy, I'd shoot the boy as well as the trains." Jardine uses this footage to illustrate the fact that Cooke warmed to the girls in his family, but never to the boys. Nor, apparently, did he evidence a sense of closeness to his parents. After immigrating to the U.S. in 1937, he rarely visited his parents in Blackpool; and didn't attend either of their funerals, claiming he was busy.

Cooke talked incessantly, but kept such feelings buttoned—save perhaps for two years of psychotherapy, which, if nothing else, benefited his writing. "I learned a great deal from old man Freud," Cooke said. "Trust your unconscious, it has a logic all its own." This revelation gave him "the courage to do the talks by sitting down and writing them. Whatever came to mind...