Reviews


Modern Times - Criterion Collection

Classics 101: Modern Times

For nearly 30 years, I’ve been introducing new generations to classic features, short subjects, and vintage cartoon through a series of Friday night film parties held weekly at my home. I’ve also sponsored and hosted a variety of theatrical screenings of classic films. One of the great joys I have is introducing “great films” that are also simply fun to watch, highly entertaining, and enjoyable on levels people don’t expect. In the months ahead, I’ll be spotlighting some of those films. For my initial foray into Classics 101, I’ve selected the film that I consider the greatest feature-length comedy ever made, one of the finest films ever produced, and the movie that made me a fan of classic movies when I first saw it in a 1970s revival: Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 masterpiece Modern Times. In an age in which The Artist received (well-deserved) kudos for daring to be an instant anachronism for daring to go “Old School Silent” during the modern era, it’s interesting to note that Modern Times did the same thing 75 years earlier. To say that Charles Spencer Chaplin (1889-1977) came from “humble beginnings” barely does justice to his early life; his father and mother incapacitated by physical and mental illness, he was mainly raised in “workhouses” for children before landing a position in Fred Karno’s musical hall entertainers while a teenager. His talent and energy quickly made him the star of the show, and during a 1914 tour of America, he was signed at 50 a week by Mack Sennett’s Keystone film company. In a short period of time, Chaplin – who portrayed the same character, the Little Tramp, in each film – was the most popular star in the history of entertainment. As his status and popularity rose, he moved from Keystone to Essanay to Mutual to First National and then, in 1919, became one of the founders of United Artists pictures. His first self-produced feature film, The Kid, was released in 1921, but Chaplin would never be prolific in features, starring in only three more over the next ten years, all classics: The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928), and City Lights (1931). By 1930, all theatres in the United States had been wired for sound, and studios weren’t even making silent versions of their talking pictures any more for the “out in the sticks” venues. Chaplin, however, was uncertain that the Tramp would be successful as a talking character, and so City Lights became an anomaly, a silent film years after The Jazz Singer had promised folks that they hadn’t heard nothin’ yet. Chaplin embarked on an 18-month combination vacation-promotional tour around the world in support of City Lights, and witnessed first-hand the effects of the Great Depression on the poor and working class. Returning to California in 1934, he began work on a film intended to show the struggles of the Little Tramp in dealing with modern technology, modern politics, and Modern Times. Even with the two-reelers he’d made years earlier, Chaplin worked and reworked material throughout the production period. With Modern Times, he ended up with a cohesive story that serves as a frame for a series of hysterical comedic sequences. The story: The Little Tramp works on an assembly line, tightening big bolts for no apparent reason. Suffering a physical and mental breakdown due to the rigors of the job, he’s fired, and out on the streets struggles during hard times, eventually being imprisoned for accidentally taking part in a Workers’ Demonstration. He finds prison life preferable to life on the streets, and once released tries his best to get back behind bars; when he meets a lovely young street urchin, though (Paulette Goddard), he tries his best to find honest work, including night watchman at a department store and manual laborer at a shipbuilding yard, to make a home for them. They find success at a nightclub, her as a dancer and him as a singing waiter, but the good times aren’t to last, and our couple hits the road together in search of happiness.
Obviously, this would work just as well as (and rather sounds like) a Depression-era drama starring Paul Muni; Chaplin uses the dramatic clothesline to hang sheets of comic genius, including sequences with the Tramp actually sucked into the gears of the giant assembly-line machine; accidentally launching a half-built battleship and watch it slide down the ramp and right to the bottom of the harbor; and going so insane from tightening bolts that he and his wrenches chase anything and anyone with buttons. Although the film is a traditional silent with musical score and effects, those sound effects include scattered dialog emanating from factory speakers, broadcast television, and phonograph records. In perhaps the film’s most celebrated sequence, though, Chaplin speaks on film for the first time, as the Little Tramp sings a nonsense song (he can’t remember the lyrics) while dancing at the restaurant. It’s one of the funniest things he’d ever done, and led the way for the Tramp to speak in his next (and, as it turns out, final) film appearance. Following Modern Times (only a modest box-office success, disappointingly, and surprisingly nominated for no Academy Awards®), Chaplin turned to another topic of concern from his earlier world tour: the world-wide rise of Fascism. By 1938, he’d decided that his next film would be a satire on Hitler. Chaplin’s humor would be as effective lampooning history’s Great Dictator as it was finding humor in the man vs. machine world of Modern Times. Modern Times is currently available on Blu-ray and DVD from The Criterion Collection. Clifford Weimer is a writer and film historian in Sacramento, CA. He can usually be found lurking about the dark corners of a movie theatre at inthebalcony.com.