Charles Chaplin – Movie Musings

Chaplin’s silent swansong, is a funny but quietly impassioned attack on corporate greed

Director: Charles Chaplin

Cast: Charles Chaplin (The factory worker aka The Tramp), Paulette Goddard (The Gamin), Henry Bergman (Café owner), Stanley “Tiny” Sandford (Big Bill), Chester Conklin (Mechanic), Al Ernest Garcia (President of Electro Steel), Stanley Blystone (Gamin’s father), Richard Alexander (Cell mate)

As cinema entered Modern Times of its own, Chaplin had a profound sense that he needed to move with those times. The legendary comedian, whose Tramp persona had made him (possibly) the most famous man in the world, was a silent comedian starting to be left behind by sound. There is a rich relish in the fact that Modern Times, a joke-packed criticism of the coldness of modern industry, is both Chaplin’s last silent and first sound movie, a dipping of the toe in modern times and a valedictory swansong for the past. It’s a film that bridges the ‘modern’ and classic of cinema.

Chaplin is an assembly line-worker eventually driven to a nervous breakdown by the relentless, fast-paced monotony of his work (not to mention a death-defying encounter with the internal workings of the factory machines). Sent to recover in a hospital, he emerges into to find there is little in the world that a dreamer and romantic like him can understand. Again and again, things go wrong. He’s arrested for picking up a red flag in a union march, fired as a night watchman in a department store for helping starving thieves, hopeless as a factory repair man and struggles with tongue-tied silence as a singing waiter. But he and a young ‘Gamin’ (Paulette Goddard), both hope for a better life.

Modern Times has a deceptive structure. It’s easy, at first glance, to see is as four two-reelers thrown together: mini-films in the factory, prison, department store and café. But what Chaplin has created here is a picaresque fable, with the Tramp in the middle. (Only one sequence, with the Tramp as a repairman in a factory, feels superfluous repeating some jokes from the opening act). A morality tale of the modern era, where the big bosses and machines are indifferent to those on the bottom rungs, continually punctuated by the police riding up to bear away the innocent on the slightest pretext. It’s a masterclass of subtle repetition, with moments of contentment forever snatched away.

Chaplin’s most subtly political work became his most controversial. In a way few other films of the 1930s did, Modern Times engages with the conditions and politics of the Great Depression. Housing for the poor is ramshackle, with walls literally held up by mops. The factory alternates exploiting its workers at ever dizzying production speeds with ruthlessly laying them off the moment a slight economic downtown takes place. Union movements are ruthlessly stamped out: when the Tramp accidentally joins a march, he is arrested while the Gamin’s father is shot by police crushing another march. Poverty is ever-present – the Gamin ‘steals’ unwanted food to feed others, laid off factory-workers rob stores for food and when the factories are re-opened there is an almighty struggle from the desperate to get through the gates and claim a few hours of work.

Unsurprisingly Modern Times was condemned as possibly communist and suspiciously anti-American: Chaplin, turning a mirror on conditions in America started to be seen more-and-more by many as a suspicious alien (after all, he’d never taken on American citizenship). Nobody wanted to hear the funnyman turn prophet and many were suspicious of the comedian who used jokes to sweeten the bitter pill (even if, as per many of Chaplin’s messages, it was a rather naïve and simplistic one). It didn’t matter that Modern Times boils down to a plea for a universal love and understanding, it was somehow a creeping sign of the political dangers in ‘modern times’.

Today, distanced from the Red Scare, Modern Times looks far more like what it actually is: a pathos-filled, liberal eye on the working classes that champions the dreamers and the little guys over the corporations and the system. And who better as a hero for that than The Tramp? After all, this was a figure who had struggled against the odds for decades. Modern Times would see that struggle on multiple fronts: against the system, against the machines (literally so, as they swallow him up) and against a way of life that seems to be betting against him.

Even cinema was betting against the Tramp. Chaplin knew he couldn’t put off converting to sound forever. But he also knew the Tramp was a universal figure – and a large part of that was his silence. He never speaks in Modern Times – and when he sings, it’s in garbled, funny-voiced nonsense that effectively keeps him as a universal mute. It’s The Tramp’s final victory lap.

Chaplin’s comic timing remains masterful, and Modern Times is awash with marvellous, balletic set-pieces. Most famous is the opening factory sequence (which owes more than a debt to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and feels remarkably prescient of Orwell’s 1984 with its Big Brotherish boss), a crazed ballet of repetitive, fast-paced movement on the production line – culminating in the legendary sequence of him being sucked into the very gears of the machine. The factory cares so little about the men there, that a machine designed to feed them as they work is dismissed as impractical rather than inhumane – though it gives us a great set piece of Chaplin assaulted by this machine with soup, custard pies and morsels rammed into his face by a mechanical arm.

The comic invention continues through the prison sequence. It’s a sign of the sting under the surface of Modern Times that the highlights of this sequence come about due to the Tramp (accidentally) being high on a mountain of cocaine. Foiling a jail break through coked-up bravado – another wonderfully done sequence, timed to perfection and filmed in one-shot – the Tramp’s reward is not being allowed to stay (and get the roof and food he needs) but early release. (Modern Times finds time, before he goes, for a final pop at ineffectual, superior middle-class do-gooders, lampooning a crusading priest’s wife as coldly distant and the subject of a cheeky gaseous gag).

Modern Times develops into a sweet fairy-tale romance with the introduction of the Gamin. Paulette Goddard gives a radiant performance, full of confidence and comic vibrancy – she becomes the first female lead given near-equal treatment by Chaplin. The department store sequence is grounded with their relationship, from the Gamin taking the opportunity to sleep in a beautifully prepared bed. Their time in the shop at night is full of wonder at the comfort and luxury – that they never see in their own homes – and culminates in a beautifully shot roller-skating sequence, with Chaplin circling balletically on the floors of the shop. (Tellingly though, he does so on the edge of precipice marked danger – Modern Times never forgets that danger lies just round the corner).

It’s the Gamin who lands them a job at a bustling café – awash with spoiled, rich customers – via her dancing ability (there is a fabulously simple transition that sees her pirouetting on the streets to ending the dance in glamourous clothes in the café). Even this moment of happiness is foiled by the law – illogically chasing the Gamin for past vagary offences rather than leaving her to work. But it’s made clear that they are a partnership: fitting the humane message of Modern Times that our best chance of being saved is sticking together.

Modern Times is shot by Chaplin with a striking, sprightly inventiveness. There are signs throughout of Chaplin’s overlooked visual and editorial skill, transitions that are hugely cinematic, storylines that are communicated with maximum efficiency and clarity. As well as the influences of Lang, Chaplin shows a debt to Eisenstein with a striking early visual cut that sees a crowd of sheep (with one black sheep in the middle) cut to a crowd of workers emerging from a subway into the factory. Modern Times pushes its humane message with a gentle persistency, but never lets it dominate the comic and emotional force of the film. Chaplin is an entertainer with a social conscience – but he is an entertainer first of all – and Modern Times is never anything less than charming and funny, even when it is spikey.

The Little Tramp takes down Hitler in this iconic satire on the dangers of over-mighty strong-men

Director: Charles Chaplin

Cast: Charles Chaplin (Jewish barber/Adenoid Hynkel), Paulette Goddard (Hannah), Jack Oakie (Benzino Napolini), Reginald Gardiner (Schultz), Henry Daniell (Garbitsch), Billy Gilbert (Herring), Maurice Moscovich (Mr Jaeckel), Emma Dunn (Mrs Jaeckel), Grace Hyle (Madame Napolini), Carter de Harven (Bacterian ambassador), Bernard Gracey (Mr Mann)

They were born four days apart and had the two most famous moustaches of the 20th century. There the similarities end. One became the world’s most beloved comic, the other its most reviled bogeyman. Chaplin and Hitler were bound together in people’s minds for a decade before Chaplin turned his revulsion at Hitler into satire: The Great Dictator sees him play both a version of his Little Tramp (here reimagined as a Jewish barber) and a version of the Fuhrer (as a temper-tantrum-throwing, hatred-spewing, lunatic). But it also sees Chaplin effectively playing himself, capping the film with a famous humanitarian appeal to the audience for a little peace and understanding.

The Great Dictator is, just about, a comedy. A Jewish barber (Chaplin) serving in the front lines for Tomania during World War One, saves the life of officer Schultz (Reginald Gardiner) but loses his memory. In a veterans’ hospital for 20 years, he emerges into a radically different Tomania, now an anti-Semitic, fascist dictatorship ruled by the barber’s doppelganger Adenoid Hynkel (Chaplin again). Hynkel rants and raves about racial purity and Tomanian expansion and his stormtroopers march through the Jewish ghetto. The barber is saved from death, first by Hannah (Paulette Goddard) and then by Schultz, now a senior leader in the new Tomania. But, as Hynkel eyes up an invasion of neighbouring Osterlich, what role can the barber play in stopping his plans?

Chaplin said later, if he had known the horrors Hitler’s regime would perpetrate, he would never have made the film. That would have robbed us of one of the sharpest, most astute satires of power-hungry radicalism ever made. But Chaplin made his stinging assault on Hitler – painting him as both ludicrous and insanely dangerous – at a time when Hollywood was still nervously appeasing Germany to keep access to its film market, before the true horrors were known.

Chaplin’s film is chilling enough with what it does know. Its depiction of bullying stormtroopers is deeply unsettling, for all they are also comic buffoons. These jackbooted bullies march into the ghetto, swiftly escalating from daubing “Jew” on shop windows to beating and shooting innocents. Hynkel casually orders the execution of thousands and day-dreams of a world where Jews are no more. We see Jews brutalised. Chaplin doesn’t pull punches in demonstrating fascism is a dangerous cancer in the world, or that the likes of Hynkel are appalling in their ruthless heartlessness.

That makes it a mark of genius that Hynkel is also the centre of a ridiculous farce painting him as inept, childish and laughable. Chaplin achieves this by masterfully channelling Hitler’s mannerisms – no less than you would expect from the most gifted physical comedian in history. We are introduced to Hynkel at a Nuremberg-style rally, delivering a speech in a hilarious mix of gobbledegook and random German words (“Werner Schnitzel!”) delivered with a perfect parody of Hitler’s physicality. (Marking the film’s careful balance between jokes and seriousness, this includes a spit-flecked rant against “Der Juden”). His grandiosity is further punctured with coughing fits and clumsiness.

That’s nothing to what we see of Hynkel off-stage. Prone to carpet-chewing rants, prat-fall prone with the manner of a bitter, insecure teenager, Hynkel is a bully elevated into a position of power, clinging to the trappings of office to give him a feeling of personal worth. Residing in a presidential palace that’s a perfect parody of Speer’s grandiose architecture, Hynkel is both laughable and deeply dangerous. Chaplin gets this mixture of the sublimely ridiculous and terrifying in every scene: most notably in Hynkel’s famous dance with an inflated globe. He bounces and cavorts with this like a romantic lover (appropriately themed to Wagner) – but it all grows out of his near sexual excitement at the idea of conquering and purifying the world of Jews (and brunettes).

The Great Dictator bursts that globe, but it also bursts the bubble of puffed-up strong men in a way that’s still highly relevant today. Hynkel and fellow dictator Napolini (a perfect capturing of Mussolini’s mannerisms, mixed with a “mamma-mia” accent from Jack Oakie) are both buffoons, who can’t even co-ordinate shaking hands in between their ludicrous salutes. These buffoons have the power and coldness to kill millions, but are both idiots. Napolini’s state visit is a hilarious game of one-up-manship, from Hynkel’s feeble attempts to intimidate Napolini in his office, to the two of them pathetically pumping their barber chairs higher and higher (to insane levels) to try and look the tallest. They even engage in a childish food fight while bickering over who will have the right to invade Osterich. Vanity, childishness and homicidal nation-destroying all hand-in-hand.

To counter his brilliant deconstruction of Hitler, Chaplin deployed his Little Tramp character in a new guise, here re-imagined as a Jewish barber, but with the same mix of good intentions and bumbling clumsiness. There is classic Chaplin business – his shaving of a client perfectly in time to Brahm’s Hungarian Dance No 5 is pretty much perfection – but also darker material. The Barber is saved from lynching, nearly gets roped into a suicide attack on Hynkel and winds up in a concentration camp. This is the Tramp’s war: his decency used to point-up the hideousness of Hynkel even more.

And, in case we miss the point, Chaplin plays a third character in the final five minutes. With Hynkel in prison (mistaken for the Barber), the Barber-as-Hynkel takes his place to speak to Tomania. He’s got the Barber’s soul, Hynkel’s appearance… but his words are Chaplin’s. Talking direct to camera – just as the Barber glances at the fourth wall throughout – Chaplin makes an impassioned plea for peace, like the curtain speech of a classical actor. He was begged not to do it (it later lead to him being denounced as a Commie) – but Chaplin was making the film to make this point. It was all very well to make Hynkel look stupid, but equally important to put forward an alternative vision, one of hope and faith in mankind’s decency. The speech may be on the nose (probably a little too much), but Chaplin delivers it with the intensity of someone who passionately believes every word he is saying – and at least it serves as a culmination of themes and ideals the entire film espouses among the jokes, rather than a blast from the blue.

The Great Dictator is over-long (at over two hours), and some of its comic moments are more successful than others. But the sequences that deconstruct Hitler are almost perfect (and feature superb support from Daniell and Gilbert as lupine Goebbels and cry-baby Goering parodies) and the film balances hilarious farce, biting political wit, and an earnest despair at the horrors of dictatorship with just the right touch of hope.

Chaplin’s genius combined with his passion created a landmark, brave film. Few others could have balanced its tonal shifts with such deft skill and perhaps no other performer could have been both so funny and so appallingly destructive. Hitler banned the film, but succumbed to curiosity and arranged a private screening. No one knew what he thought of it – but he watched it twice.