So, I finally got around to watching Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 “silent” classic:
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. Indeed, this film marks the Tramp’s last screen appearance, and is arguably the final film of the silent era.
I was not at all surprised by Chaplin’s fantastic physical comedy, but I was surprised by a few other things.
First, the iconic factory scenes do not form a large fraction of the movie. It’s not a movie about life in a factory. More than anything, it’s a movie about the Great Depression, and some people didn’t like that at all:
This was one of the films which, because of its political sentiments, convinced the House Un-American Activities Committee that Charles Chaplin was a Communist, a charge he adamantly denied. He left to live in Switzerland, vowing never to return to America.
The second surprise comes when the Tramp is in prison and a fellow prisoner has smuggled some “nose powder” in. I was not expecting a coked-up Tramp in a 1936 comedy.
While a feature-length silent comedy can seem a bit monotonous to a modern audience — a bit like a feature-length music video, I suppose — I can definitely see why the AFI ranked it as one of the 100 greatest movies of all time.