Charlie Chaplin’s Lost Final Film Sounds Completely Unhinged

Charlie Chaplin is the comedy legend/sexual predator who gave us classic movies like City Lights, Modern Times, The Gold Rush and The Great Dictator. But, oddly enough, the silent film comedian nearly ended his career with a surreal movie “about a young girl with wings who is discovered by scientists in Argentina.”

Chaplin’s The Freak was first conceived in the late ‘60s, when the star was 80 years old. And while it was never completed, the movie is now being released in the form of a book. Per The Guardian, The Freak: The Story of An Unfinished Film will include Chaplin’s screenplay along with storyboards and sketches he created for the ambitious project shortly before his death in 1977.

Reportedly, the film’s story focuses on Sarapha, who Chaplin described as “a beautiful creature with wings … a bird with a human body.” Oh, and she has the “power to cure illness and bring peace to the world.” Chaplin wanted the central role to be played by his “teenage daughter Victoria.” Chaplin even spent months crafting Sarapha’s wings for the movie.

According to Variety, the script explains that Serapha is “born to a couple of British missionaries” and ends up in South America “where she becomes an angel-like figure at a pilgrimage site for invalids seeking to be cured.” Weirder still, she’s then kidnapped and taken to London and is “displayed for cash to crowds of miracle seekers before managing to escape and being put on trial to prove she is in any way human.”

Spoiler alert for a six decade-old movie idea that will never get made: The script also “features rape, murder and the girl’s death in the Atlantic Ocean.” 

Chaplin would have been in the movie himself, playing “a startled drunk who watches (Sarapha) fly above him in the London sky over the Houses of Parliament.” The new book also contains the “confidential” casting notes, suggesting actors such as Richard Chamberlain and Robert Vaughn for the role of the “English professor who befriends Sarapha after finding her on his roof, injured and unconscious.” And seemingly there would have been some kind of a romantic storyline involving the two characters; at one point in the script, Chaplin wrote that Sarapha “loved” the professor “in spite of the fact that he was without wings.”

While some film historians are clearly intrigued by this unrealized project, maybe it’s for the best that Chaplin, who had a long history of targeting and abusing underage girls, never got to make a movie in which his teenage daughter gets involved with a middle-aged man before meeting a watery death.