Chaplin at the assembly line
Modern Times is a 1936 comedy film by Charlie Chaplin that has his iconic Little Tramp character struggling to survive in the modern, industrialized world. The film is a comment on the desperate employment and fiscal conditions many people faced during the Great Depression, conditions created, in Chaplin's view, by the efficiencies of modern industrialization. The movie stars Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Henry Bergman, Stanley Sandford and Chester Conklin, and was written and directed by Chaplin.
Modern Times was deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress in 1989, and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
Plot
Modern Times portrays Chaplin as a factory worker, employed on an assembly line. After being subjected to such indignities as being force-fed by a "modern" feeding machine and an accelerating assembly line where Chaplin screws nuts at an ever-increasing rate onto pieces of machinery, he suffers a mental breakdown. Chaplin is sent to a hospital. Following his recovery the now unemployed Chaplin is mistakenly arrested for leading a Communist demonstration when he was only attempting to return a flag (a red flag) that fell off a delivery truck. In jail, he accidentally eats smuggled cocaine, mistaking it for salt. In his subsequent delirious state he walks into a jailbreak and knocks out the convicts. He is hailed a hero and is released.
Outside the jail, he discovers life is harsh, and attempts to get arrested after failing to get a decent job. He soon runs into an orphan girl (the "gamin"), played by Paulette Goddard, who is fleeing the police after stealing a loaf of bread. To save the girl he tells police that he is the thief and ought to be arrested. However, a witness reveals his deception and he is freed. In order to get arrested again, he eats an enormous amount of food at a cafeteria without paying. He meets up with the gamin in the paddy wagon, which crashes, and they escape. Dreaming of a better life, he gets a job as a night watchman at a department store, sneaks the gamin into the store and even lets burglars have some food. Waking up the next morning in a pile of clothes, he is arrested once more.
Ten days later, the gamin takes him to a new home - a run-down shack which she admits "isn't Buckingham Palace" but will do. The next morning, Chaplin reads about a new factory and lands a job there. He gets his boss trapped in machinery, but manages to extricate him. The other workers decide to go on strike. Accidentally paddling a brick into a policeman, he is arrested again. Two weeks later, he is released and learns that the gamin is a café dancer, and she tries to get him a job as a singer. By night, he becomes an efficient waiter though he finds it difficult to tell the difference between the "in" and "out" doors to the kitchen, or to successfully deliver a roast duck to table. During his floor show, he loses a cuff that bears the lyrics of his song, but he rescues his act by improvising the words in gibberish while pantomiming. His act proves a hit. When police arrive to arrest the gamin for her earlier escape, they escape again. Finally, we see them walking down a road at dawn, towards an uncertain but hopeful future.
Cast
Production
Chaplin began preparing the film in 1934 as his first "talkie", and went as far as writing a dialogue script and experimenting with some sound scenes. However, he soon abandoned these attempts and reverted to a silent format with synchronized sound effects. The dialogue experiments confirmed his long-standing conviction that the universal appeal of the Tramp would be lost if the character ever spoke on screen. Most of the film was shot at "silent speed", 18 frames per second, which when projected at "sound speed", 24 frames per second, makes the slapstick action appear even more frenetic. Available prints of the film now correct this. The duration of filming was long, beginning on October 11, 1934 and ending on August 30, 1935.[1]
The reference to drugs seen in the prison sequence is somewhat daring for the time (since the production code, established in 1930, forbade the depiction of illegal drug use in films); Chaplin had made drug references before in one of his most famous short films Easy Street, released in 1917.
Music
According to the official documents, the music score was composed by Chaplin himself, and arranged with the assistance of Alfred Newman. The romance theme was later given lyrics, and became the pop standard "Smile", first recorded by Nat King Cole and later covered by such artists as Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, Michael Bublé, Michael Jackson, Liberace, Judy Garland, Madeleine Peyroux, and Robert Downey, Jr. (included on the soundtrack for the film Chaplin).
According to film composer David Raksin, the music was written by him as a young man wanting to make a name for himself. Chaplin would sit, often in the washroom, humming tunes and telling Raksin to "take this down". Raksin's job was to turn the humming into a score and create timings and synchronization that fit the situations. Chaplin was a violinist and had some musical knowledge, but he was not an orchestrator and was unfamiliar with synchronization. Raksin later created scores for such films as Laura and The Day After.
At the Michael Jackson Memorial in 2009, Brooke Shields commented that the song "Smile" was Michael Jackson's favorite song and reminded the world to smile. Jermaine Jackson also performed the song.
Reception
World premier of Modern Times (1936), New York
Modern Times is often hailed as one of Chaplin's greatest achievements, and it remains one of his most popular films. The iconic depiction of Chaplin working frantically to keep up with an assembly line inspired later comedy routines including Disney's Der Fuehrer's Face, an episode of I Love Lucy titled "Job Switching", and most recently, an episode of Drake & Josh.
This was Chaplin's first overtly political-themed film, and its unflattering portrayal of industrial society generated controversy in some quarters upon its initial release.
The film exhibits notable similarities to a 1931 French film directed by René Clair entitled À nous la liberté (Liberty for Us)--the assembly line sequence is a clear instance. The German film company Tobis Film sued Chaplin following the film's release to no avail. They sued again[citation needed] after World War II (considered revenge for Chaplin's later anti-Nazi statements in The Great Dictator). This time, they settled with Chaplin out of court. Liberté director Clair was an outspoken admirer of Chaplin, was flattered by the notion that the film icon might imitate him, and deeply embarrassed that Tobis Film would sue Chaplin.
The film did attract criticism for being almost completely silent, despite the movie industry having long since embraced the talking picture. Chaplin famously feared that the mystery and romanticism of the tramp character would be ruined if he spoke, and feared it would alienate his fans in non-English speaking territories. His future films, however, would be fully fledged "talkies".
American Film Institute recognition
See also
References
- ^ As said in "Chaplin Today: Modern Times", a 2003 French documentary.
External links
