Chaplin's popularity by 1916 was truly global, cresting at the moment that the American film industry was gaining a dominant position in the global market. The extent of this popularity brought him to the attention of conservative groups in the US. Chaplin's move to pathos in the tramp can be seen as a counter to the accusations of vulgarity from these groups. In 1916 Minnie Madern Fiske, a respected legitimate stage actress, wrote an article praising Chaplin's art which marked the beginning of the public recognition of Chaplin as comic genius. Looking at Mutual films such as The Vagabond (1916) and The Immigrant (1917), which depict through a combination of comedy and tragedy the stresses and strife of the immigrant experience and of living rough on the road, it is hard to disagree. The over-all effect of this incorporation of pathos was that he brought his audience with him.

However, controversy was also a fellow traveller to Chaplin's growing fame, with accusations by the Northcliffe press in Britain of avoiding military service and later suspicion of socialist sympathies and surveillance by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Hoover had noticed the nature of Chaplin's comedy, which sided with the powerless and in the context of threats of labour unrest, and communism found him a threat. He opened a file on him in 1922 and for thirty years actively sought to discredit him through political and personal humiliation.

While up until 1918 Chaplin had primarily worked in the short film format, the 1920s saw his maturity as a feature filmmaker. In 1919 he formed United Artists, with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and DW Griffith, a film distribution company that would be independent of the major Hollywood studios and would allow unfettered creative control of their projects. Apart from The Kid (1920), which was directly drawn from his impoverished London childhood, the rest of the films on which his reputation rests were with United Artists.

His eight films for United Artists demonstrate both the ingenuity and inventiveness of his film work and also mark out his troubles with an increasingly aggressive American conservatism. The Red Scares of the early 20s give a sense of how counter to conservative values Chaplin's themes of destitution and an unsympathetic world were. His private life gave cause for scrutiny with two sordid divorces in 1920 and 1928, which were cast against the wider condemnation of Hollywood decadence brought about by the Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle scandal in 1921. Chaplin's adulation by intellectuals and artists such as Bernard Shaw, Louis Aragon, Germaine Dulac, as well as Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein continued to fuel a smouldering suspicion among reactionary groups.

Yet Chaplin's comedy was always too subtle and complex for simple interpretations. The famous French critic and semiotician Roland Barthes remarked of this elusiveness in Modern Times (1936): "Chaplin has always seen the proletarian under the guise of the poor man: hence the broadly human force of his representations but also their political ambiguity." Judged from the 21^st century it seems astonishing that a film that ridiculed Adolph Hitler would have also been subject to the scrutiny of censuring bodies, yet it was. Chaplin made The Great Dictator (1940) at a time when the US was isolationist and Hollywood had by and large shied away from making films critical of Nazis. During the Second World War Chaplin was a vocal supporter of a second front to support the Russian war effort and the attention he drew from the FBI intensified.

By the time of the release of the dark 'comedy of murders' Monsieur Verdoux in 1946, Chaplin's press reception was preoccupied with his political views rather than his filmmaking. As the McCarthy era gathered momentum so did the frustration of Hoover with being unable to discredit Chaplin. His opportunity came when Chaplin left the US in September 1952 to attend the premiere of his film Limelight in London. Hoover put pressure on Immigration Services and Chaplin, who had never taken up US citizenship, had his visa revoked.

After his exile, he lived in Vevey, Switzerland and made two films in Britain; A King in New York (1957) and The Countess from Hong Kong (1967); neither a success compared to his earlier films. In this period he also devoted his time to developing projects and to rescoring his earlier features.

Chaplin's reputation suffered in the 50s not only from political animosity but also from the disregard that accompanied the end of the silent period generally. This was even more acute with other silent comic greats like Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Harry Langdon. Sparked by renewed interest in the silent period which gathered pace in the 1960s and 70s Chaplin's comedy began to be reassessed so that even his later film Monsieur Verdoux came to be recognised for its dark subtlety – 'murder is the logical extension of business'. Chaplin's films began to be re-screened in special retrospectives in New York and Los Angeles. This revival accompanied a weakening of reactionary forces in the US generally and praise for Chaplin's work began to appear in the press and family magazines such as Life. In 1972 he returned to the US to accept a special award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the US seemed to have miraculously recovered its memory for his contribution to cinematic arts. Later in his book My Life in Pictures he remarked 'I was touched by the gesture – but there was a certain irony about it somehow.' Chaplin died on 25 December 1977.

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