Modern Times

When we were children there was a TV show on Saturday nights which showed clips from silent movies. Usually the extracts just showed one comic sequence from a longer film. Last night we went to see the whole of Modern Times, a Charlie Chaplin film, which was an hour and a half long, the longest silent film (apart from The Artist) I have ever seen. The sound track was played live by the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

The film was an anachronism - made in 1936 when other directors had long abandoned silence and mime - but Chaplin believed his Tramp character just wouldn't work with dialogue. It also tells a tale of American life during the Depression era - unemployment and strikes, hunger and theiving, abandoned children.

It was Chaplin's story. His early life, his London childhood, was terrible, as bad as it could possibly be, with a father who abandoned his mother, his parents having at first made an uncertain living on the stage, the mother becoming unemployable and the children having to go into  the workhouse, and the mother eventually sinking into madness. The father became an alcoholic.

 Charlie was nearly always on his own; he was a street child like the character Goddard plays in Modern Times. He joined a troupe of boy dancers who went around the music halls doing clog dancing. So he survived, and then worked up a comedy act of his own.

He was clearly a talented dancer! The way he moves during the sequence where he goes mad with spanners in his hands is beautiful - it tells of a sensitive nature being wounded by brainless, repetitive work, which is exactly what he wants to say.

Then there is an amazing sequence of blindfolded roller-skating, too, graceful and thrilling.

The joy of dancing is an individual joy, and this individuality is what the Tramp cannot surrender. Here he goes into the men's room to have a smoke, but the factory boss spies on him through a huge screen (shades of Big Brother). So a political question is posed through this film - how far must men surrender their individuality to benefit the economic system? Chaplin is clearly not on the side of capitalism. He sees that if it is allowed to rage untramelled, many people will lose their souls or their sanity, and that, judging by the depression, strikes and unemployment, it doesn't do its job of keeping the population fed, and hopeful of leading decent, fulfilling lives.

There is a scene where the Tramp character inadvertently ingests a large amount of cocaine, in which his expressions of surprise are hilarious - this leads to his decisively defeating a group of jailbreakers single-handedly. Apparently Chaplin worked out the comedy sequences on set with the cameras rolling, and they took days and days.

In early films the Tramp's character was brutal and mean, but by this time Chaplin had developed the character into a sweet-natured and hapless clown. However, he does cause other people to have accidents - I'm thinking of the waiters and the In/Out doors, and the mechanic trapped in the machine.

Here you can see Chaplin going through the machine.

He also wrote a soundtrack to the film. The music we had last night must have incorporated the themes he wrote - "Smile" being one of them. I kept expecting him to sing - but when he does sing it's a gibberish comedy number. Chaplin wrote "Smile" - a classic song of about covering up your sadness and hardship - and that's what he says to Goddard just before the last shot.

Fascinating that he was one of the richest and most successful men in the world, but was making films that harked back to the terrible times of his boyhood.

I would like to see ALL of the Chaplin features. He was a wounded man and an artist.