Writing this as I try to scrimp together the motivation to start catching up on 2020 films, some of which I might write about on here in spot installments. I’m also thinking of increasing my output for these canon-completion dispatches to two a week—with the second focusing on films not at the very tippy-top of the TSPDT list or absent from it altogether, as a sort of alternative canon—but I'm trying to build a hefty movie lead before I aspire to that. After all, I’m still a full-time corporate slave who just sneaks these into my day whenever I can. If any of that sounds interesting to you at all (or if you like the post below), do hit that subscribe button to get these as they come out!
Modern Times (1936, Charlie Chaplin)
TSPDT Rank (2020): #48 (#5 of the 1930s, #2 of 10 by Chaplin in the top 2,000)
"Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin’s last outing as the Little Tramp, puts the iconic character to work as a giddily inept factory employee who becomes smitten with a gorgeous gamine (Goddard). With its barrage of unforgettable gags and sly commentary on class struggle during the Great Depression, Modern Times—though made almost a decade into the talkie era and containing moments of sound (even song!)—is a timeless showcase of Chaplin’s untouchable genius as a director of silent comedy." - The Criterion Collection
It is perhaps as uncontroversial a statement as any to say that Charlie Chaplin is one of the most important figures in the history of cinema. Perhaps the only silent-era entertainer to remain instantly recognizable even to a modern audience, he was one of the first true global celebrities, whose brilliance as an artist was almost superseded by his status as an icon. As a filmmaker, he distinguished himself from the rapid-fire slapstick of Buster Keaton and daredevil derring-do of Harold Lloyd by employing a slower, more sentimental rhythm in his movies, while also being more than capable at rapid-fire slapstick or daredevil derring-do himself. Always a sporadic creator, he only directed eleven feature films over more than four decades, but all except his famously awful The Countess from Hong Kong (1967) are considered exemplary, with the four films he made from 1925 to 1940 being among the 200 or so most acclaimed movies of all time. Quoth Tarkovsky: “The films [Chaplin] left behind can never grow old.”
Much more controversial at the time than Chaplin’s unimpeachable artistry is his politics, which is apparent in many of his features and which got him banned from the United States for two decades at the height of McCarthyism. While he demurred from officially affiliating himself with any particular ideology—he described himself, first and foremost, as a “peacemonger”—it doesn’t take a close reading of his films to understand that Chaplin was perhaps cinema’s greatest left-wing filmmaker. His silent-era Little Tramp films all necessarily centered the underprivileged by virtue of the Tramp’s background and ethos, and his later work became more overtly political as his growing interest in social sciences coincided with Hitler (The Great Dictator) and post-war America (Monsieur Verdoux, A King in New York) offering ample axes for him to grind.
Modern Times is in many ways the pivot point between Chaplin’s early and late periods, as well as perhaps his most comprehensive artistic statement. It is the last film where he plays the Little Tramp, and the first one where he adopts a more overtly political tone. Curiously, it is at once his last silent and first talkie, as he incorporates dialogue as part of the non-diegetic soundtrack while maintaining the conventions of silent films in his use of interstitials and over-the-top facial expressions. The one time a character who is physically present on set uses their speaking voice, it is the Tramp in an iconic scene, singing a nonsense (yet somehow implicitly bawdy) song to a crowd who nonetheless eats it up, a not-too-subtle jab at sound film, which he perceived as a less sophisticated art form at the time.
While the visual gags here are on par with his top-flight work in both City Lights (1931) and The Great Dictator (1940), the film’s most fascinating element is its soundscape. With the aforementioned infusing of spoken-word sequences as more a part of the score—dialogue between characters who are face-to-face with each other is delivered through interstitials, while radio transmissions and PA announcements are spoken out—it is reminiscent of how Brian Wilson incorporated non-musical elements into his arrangements for Pet Sounds, in how it creates a more jagged and tactile atmosphere to the film’s score. A capable composer on top of his myriad other talents, Chaplin wrote the score for all eleven of his feature films, and the hybrid nature of Modern Times’s soundtrack makes it perhaps his most thrillingly experimental.
The film is both anarchic in its comedy and almost anarchist in philosophy, with each act affirming at once the buffoonery and dehumanizing bent of institutions while also upholding the centrality of freely chosen human relationships through the romance and fraternity between the gamine and the Tramp. Titans of industry are productivity demons with Orwellian inclinations, and law enforcement is alternatively unimaginative and incompetent. Chaplin’s conception of modern society here (which he would make explicit in this famous speech from his very next film) is one designed more for automatons than living, breathing human beings. More direly to Chaplin, the machinations of modern society—those ever-oppressive gears—often conspire not to bring people together, but to cause them to turn on each other and tear them apart.
Very specifically, Chaplin takes dead aim at capitalist systems, with his evocations of giant gears and automation run amok as stand-ins for the industrial revolution’s corrosive and oppressive effects on the human soul. The automated feeder scene, which arrives near the beginning of the film, is both an uproarious farce and a chillingly true caricature of capitalism’s slow encroachment into the entirety of our waking (and nowadays even sleeping) hours. The film is dominated by scenes of laid-off workers either going on strike or resorting to lives of crime to stay alive, and while Chaplin never sacrifices comedy for messaging, his messaging is fairly plain. Even in one of the film’s most beautiful sequences (the Tramp and the gamine skating and cavorting around in the third act) is set in a mall—that ubiquitous monument to American-style consumerism—and when they are caught, it is akin to being rejected by the entire capitalist system itself.
As acerbic as all that is—and compared to the romanticism of City Lights, Modern Times is a film with much more bite—Chaplin tempers affairs with his trademark sentimentality and unrelenting humanism. Much of this is unlocked by the gamine, played by the wonderfully expressive Paulette Goddard. In one scene, Chaplin imagines a suburban home life with her, and the film intentionally evokes American-Dream stereotypes to heighten the sense of fantasy when juxtaposed with the rest of the film’s much grimier reality. The threadbare set dressing of his fantasy sequence makes for a jarring comparison with his and the gamine’s actual first house, a fully-realized ramshackle lean-to next to a shallow marsh that nonetheless feels much much real both in its design and in the emotions it evokes from both the two protagonists and the audience.
Much like last week’s film, Modern Times also features one of the great endings in cinema history. Having been chased away from their job as entertainers at a restaurant and now fugitives from the law—for, of all things, “vagrancy”—the Tramp and the gamine are once again on the road. On the verge of the despair, the gamine laments their lot in life and declares it all pointless. The Tramp responds, as the Tramp always does, with chin-up optimism, offering no concrete plans because there can be none for people like them who live on the margins. They do not have the privilege of knowing things with certainty, the way those who exist easily in the slowly calcifying society that rejected them do. All they do have (and all he can offer) is companionship. In Modern Times (and, well, modern times) that cannot be enough, but it must be.
The two of them then resume their long walk towards a nebulous future, certain in nothing but each other and hopeful in nothing but the same: You and me against the world, baby. If any image sums up Chaplin’s ethos more succinctly, I’ve yet to see it. In many ways, Modern Times is his greatest work: Articulate and precise in its timely politics, yet still universal and ageless even 90 years on, in the way the Tramp was always meant to be. Like Chaplin himself, it is timeless.
Next week, we’ll be doing Claire Denis’s Beau Travail (1999), coincidentally also the fifth-highest ranked film of its decade. See y’all then, but in the meantime, feel free to drop a line if you’re so inclined.