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Modern Times

Modern Times marked
the last screen appearance of the Little Tramp – the character which had brought
Charles Chaplin world fame, and who still remains the most universally
recognised fictional image of a human being in the history of art.

The world from which the Tramp took his farewell was very different from that
into which he had been born, two decades earlier, before the First World War.
Then he had shared and symbolised the hardships of all the underprivileged of a
world only just emerging from the 19th century. Modern Times found him
facing very different predicaments in the aftermath of America¹s Great
Depression, when mass unemployment coincided with the massive rise of industrial
automation.

Chaplin was acutely preoccupied with the social and economic problems of this
new age. In 1931 and 1932 he had left Hollywood behind, to embark on an 18-month
world tour. In Europe, he had been disturbed to see the rise of nationalism and
the social effects of the Depression, of unemployment and of automation. He read
books on economic theory; and devised his own Economic Solution, an intelligent
exercise in utopian idealism, based on a more equitable distribution not just of
wealth but of work. In 1931 he told a newspaper interviewer :

“Unemployment is the vital question . . . Machinery should benefit mankind.
It should not spell tragedy and throw it out of work.”

In Modern Times he
set out to transform his observations and anxieties into comedy. The little
Tramp – described in the film credits as “a Factory Worker”- is now one of the
millions coping with the problems of the 1930s, which are not so very different
from anxieties of the 21st century – poverty, unemployment, strikes and strike
breakers, political intolerance, economic inequalities, the tyranny of the
machine, narcotics. The film’s portentous opening title – “The story of
industry, of individual enterprise – humanity crusading in the pursuit of
happiness” – is followed by a symbolic juxtaposition of shots of sheep being
herded and of workers streaming out of a factory. Chaplin’s character is first
seen as a worker being driven crazy by his monotonous, inhuman work on a
conveyor belt and being used as a guinea pig to test a machine to feed workers
as they work.

Paulette Godard

Exceptionally, the Tramp has a companion in his battle with this new world.
On his return to America after a world tour in 1931, Chaplin had met the actress
Paulette Goddard, who was to remain, for several years, an ideal partner in his
private life. Her personality inspired the character of the “Gamine” in Modern Times – a young
girl whose father has been killed in a labour demonstration, and who joins
forces with Chaplin. The couple are neither rebels nor victims, but, wrote
Chaplin, ”The only two live spirits in a world of automatons. We are children
with no sense of responsibility, whereas the rest of humanity is weighed down
with duty. We are spiritually free”. In a sense, then, they are anarchists.

Chaplin at first planned a sadly sentimental ending for the film. While the
Tramp was in hospital, recovering from nervous break-down, the Gamine was to
become a Nun and so be parted from him for ever. This ending was filmed, but was
finally abandoned in favour of a more cheerful finale. “We¹ll get along”, says a
title; and the couple, arm in arm, set bravely off down a country lane, towards
the horizon

By the time Modern
Times was released, talking pictures had been established for almost a
decade. Till now, Chaplin had resisted dialogue, knowing that his comedy and its
universal understanding depended on silent pantomime. This time though he
weakened to the extent of preparing dialogue, and even doing some trial
recordings. Finally he thought better of it, and as in City Lights uses only
music and sound effects. Human voices are only heard filtered through
technological devices – the boss who addresses his workers from a television
screen; the salesman who is only a voice on the phonograph.

Just at one moment, though, Chaplin’s own voice is heard directly. Hired as a
waiter, the Little Worker is required to stand in for the romantic café tenor.
He writes the words on his shirt cuffs, but these fly off with a too-dramatic
flourish; and he is obliged to improvise the song in a wonderful, mock-Italian
gibberish. Chaplin’s voice had already been heard on radio and in at least one
newsreel, but this was the first and only time that the world heard speech from
the Little Tramp.

Apart from this indecision over sound and the changed ending, the shooting
seems to have been fairly untroubled and, by Chaplin¹s standards, comparatively
fast. It may have helped that the essential structure is neatly devised in four
“acts” each one more or less equivalent to one of his old two-reel comedies. As
the contemporary American critic Otis Ferguson wrote, they might have been
individually titled The Shop, The Jailbird, The Watchman and The Singing
Waiter.

As he had done for City
Lights Chaplin composed his own musical score, giving his arrangers and
conductors a harder time than usual, with the result that the distinguished
Hollywood musician Alfred Newman walked off the film.

The film became the victim of a strange charge of plagiarism. The
Franco-German firm of Tobis claimed that Chaplin had stolen ideas and scenes
from another classic film about the 20th century industrial world, A Nous la
Liberté, directed by René Clair. The case was weak, and Clair, a great admirer
of Chaplin, was deeply embarrassed by it. Yet Tobis persisted, and even renewed
its claims in May 1947, after the Second World War. This time the Chaplin Studio
finally agreed to a modest payment, just to get rid of the nuisance. Chaplin and
his lawyers remained convinced that the determination of the German-dominated
company was revenge for the anti-Nazi sentiment of The Great Dictator

Happily for posterity, Tobis failed in their original demand to have
Chaplin¹s film permanently suppressed. Instead, Modern Times survives as
a commentary on human survival in the industrial, economic and social
circumstances of the 20th century society. It remains as relevant, in human
terms, for the 21st century.

The Challenge of Sound

The arrival of sound films was a bigger challenge for Chaplin than for any
other actor or director. He had won world fame with the universal language of
pantomime. If the Little Tramp now began to speak in English he would become
incomprehensible to a large part of his international audience. In 1931 he
predicted that talking pictures would not last six months, and told an
interviewer that ’Dialogue may or may not have a place in comedy . . . dialogue
does not have a place in the sort of comedies I make . .. For myself I know that
I cannot use dialogue.’ When the interviewer asked him if he had tried using
speech in his films, he retorted “I never tried jumping off the monument in
Trafalgar Square, but I have a definite idea that it would be unhealthful. . .
For years I have specialized in one type of comedy – strictly pantomime. I have
measured it, gauged it, studied. I have been able to establish exact principles
to govern its reactions on audiences. It has a certain pace and tempo. Dialogue,
to my way of thinking, always slows action, because action must wait upon
words.”

By the time he came to prepare Modern Times however, it
seemed that he had steeled himself to use speech. In the Chaplin archives there
is a dialogue script for all scenes in Modern Times up to and
including the department store sequence. The dialogue which Chaplin planned for
his own character is staccato, quippy, touched with nonsense. He began to
rehearse the dialogue for the scenes in the jail and warden’s office; but after
only a day or so seems to have been deeply dissatisfied with the results. No
more dialogue scenes were to be shot for Modern Times

Chaplin did proceed with sound effects, however, and took a personal interest
in the technique of their creation. For a scene involving rumbling stomachs, he
created the noises himself by blowing bubbles into a pail of water. The fact
that Chaplin was sufficiently keen to create the effects himself in this way
suggests the extent to which he was intrigued by sound problems at this time. A
memorandum about possible musical effects notes: ’Natural sounds part of
composition, i.e. Auto horns, sirens, and cowbells worked into the music.’ The
sound effects, as the Dardennes brothers point out in the accompanying
commentary, became an element of the musical score.

The Premieres

Modern Times was
launched more quietly than previous Chaplin films. The film opened in New York
on 5 February 1936, and in London on 11 February. Chaplin and his co-star
Paulette Goddard attended a third and the most glamorous “premiére” in Hollywood
on 12 February. The venue was Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, which had opened in
1927 as “a shrine to art … the crowning achievement of a brilliant career … the
realization of the vision of a simple soul, a master showman … Sid Grauman”. The
guests were handed programmes designed in lush and glamorous Art Deco style,
printed in black and red on gold paper.

In the past Grauman had devised elaborate live stage shows for Chaplin
premieres, but this time the entertainment was entirely on screen, with a
newsreel, a travelogue, a Technicolor interest film, and the latest issue of the
current documentary series The March of Time – though, emphasising its
topicality, this was announced as “Subject to weather conditions for Air
Express”.

The most notable item in the supporting programme was a new Silly Symphony
from the Walt Disney Studios, Mickey’s Orphan Concert. The inclusion of this
cartoon exemplified an intense mutual admiration between Chaplin and Disney, who
both recognised similarities in the other’s work. Disney bought advertising
space in the programme, “In appreciation of the pantomimist supreme whose
inimitable artistry and craftsmanship are timeless”. It was signed, “Mickey
Mouse and Walt Disney”.

Text by David Robinson© 2004 MK2 SA

Translated in [fr]

(click on image to see
Picture
Gallery)

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All photographs Copyright (c) Roy Export Company
Establishment. All rights reserved.
CHARLES CHAPLIN, CHAPLIN, the LITTLE
TRAMP, the images on this web site, and the names of
Mr. Chaplin's films are
all trademarks and/or service marks of Roy Export and/or Bubbles Inc. S.A.

Used with permission.

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