Comic W.C. Fields once said of Charlie Chaplin: "He's the best ballet dancer that ever lived, and if I get a good chance I'll kill him with my bare hands." Fields, who started his career as a vaudeville juggler, knew something about movement. He was also, perhaps only half-jokingly, envious of Chaplin's enormous worldwide popularity.
Fields was not the only contemporary to compare Chaplin with a dancer, as the quotes from the famous that begin Masayuki Suo's excellent, if unorthodox, documentary "Dancing Chaplin" make clear. And it wasn't only for his endlessly revived dance of the bread rolls in "The Gold Rush" (which Suo obligingly shows in its entirety): Chaplin's Tramp, starting with his oft-imitated waddle walk, brought a dancerly precision, grace and panache to a style of comedy — silent-era slapstick once better known for its kicks in the pants and pies to the face.
Roland Petit's 1991 ballet "Chaplin Dances," which forms the core of the documentary, pays tribute to this side of Chaplin's art, but it is less an imitation than balletic extension, in which everyone from prancing cops to the urchin from "The Kid" (played in the film by Suo's wife, ballerina Tamiyo Kusakari) embody the Chaplin style and spirit. The heart of the production, however, is the Tramp, whom Italian dancer Luigi Bonino portrayed more than 170 times before reprising the role for Suo's cameras.