BEFORE: Well, I've made great progress in the last two days, but I've also screwed up my sleeping schedule something fierce. My body now wants to be awake when I should be sleeping, and vice versa. Plus I seem to have lost the ability to fall asleep in a bed, I now have to start a film, watch it for 30-45 minutes, fall asleep in the recliner for 2 hours, wake up and finish the film - after all that, it's about 5 am and I can't get back to sleep. When I was working 5 days a week, making it through a whole movie didn't seem to be much of a problem, but sleeping late on Tuesdays and Thursdays could also be affecting things. Nah, let's blame Chaplin.
AFTER: It's sort of ironic to watch a film titled "Modern Times" when it was made almost 80 years ago. How modern could it possibly still be? Turns out, quite a bit in the portrayal of the factory, which has a boss that can view all of his workers on a giant screen, and order them back to work the same way, even when they're smoking in the bathroom. (Chaplin depicted the first hidden toilet-cam, I guess...)
Chaplin's not a Tramp here at first, he's a factory worker whose fortune rises and falls with the American steel industry. But the rapidness of the assembly line gets to him, physically and mentally, so he's forced off the line. As a commentary on the greed of industry leaders, he's even seen being fed by an experimental "feeding machine" which is intended to reduce worker's lunch hours to just a few minutes. Of course, the machine ends up beating him silly with a corn cob, and force-feeding him metal nuts instead of pieces of food.
After he suffers a mental breakdown, he's mistaken for a Communist instigator and thrown in jail, where he comically mixes up cocaine (sorry, "nose powder") and salt, leading to an interesting lunch that Al Pacino's Scarface would have enjoyed. High as a kite, he stumbles out of jail, then stumbles back and prevents a jailbreak. Normally this would get a man shanked in the shower, but here it leads to his parole.
For once, a Chaplin film sets him up romantically with a counterpart at his level - not some beautiful, seemingly unattainable gorgeous dancing girl, but a similarly homeless girl, also wanted by the police for vagrancy. Ever the gentleman, he steps in to get arrested in her place whenever she steals, and even covers for her when she escapes from the paddy wagon. (It's like a 1930's comic version of "Les Miserables", am I right?)
After a failed stint as a night watchman for a department store, and yet another prison term, the two set up house, in a shack that makes the cabin from "The Gold Rush" look like a luxury hotel. But when the newspapers announce the factory's re-opening, it's back to work - just in time to go on strike. Wah, wah. He finally finds some measure of success as a singing waiter, though the song that he sings is mostly made of nonsense words that sound vaguely French or Italian, along with pantomimed movements.
That's right, Chaplin sings, so it's not really a silent film - sort of a "half-silent". Why did Chaplin persist in making silent-style films after sound films had come into vogue? I can only assume that after such a long career in silents, this is just the method he was accustomed to. The notes on IMDB state that Chaplin was convinced that "talkies" were just a passing fad, and since he was the writer, director, and chief financier of his films, he was able to keep making films the way he wanted, even though the industry was changing all around him. He was also concerned about the way that his films would play in foreign countries, and felt that adding too much English dialogue would affect their international box office. Hmm, where I have I heard that before?
Also starring Paulette Goddard, Henry Bergman, Tiny Sandford, Al Ernest Garcia
RATING: 6 out of 10 giant gears
No comments:
Post a Comment