At a time when synchronized sound was the standard in
moviemaking, there was increasingly less room for the silent stars, especially
comedians who relied so heavily on pantomime to make their comedy work. Charlie
Chaplin’s Tramp character was universal in being voiceless and without language
he had no firm ties to a particular geographic location. He could be Russian or
Japanese or Brazilian. The sentimentality of his stories could be understood
anywhere in the world. Chaplin’s last completely silent feature film, City Lights, was released in 1931, four
full years after Al Jolson’s profession, “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet,” in The Jazz Singer ushered in a new era for
motion pictures. Chaplin made Modern
Times between 1932 and 1936 and though it is for all intents and purposes a
silent film, it does utilize sound effects, a synchronized musical score and
some spoken dialogue. It was Chaplin’s way of sticking to the type of film
making he knew best while giving a small tip of the hat to the new mode.
Modern Times
was Chaplin’s most ambitious film to date, combining his unique brand of
pantomime choreography, classic comedy, emotional pathos, and timely comments
on the industrialization and mechanization of humanity and the dire economic
situation of the early 30s. Our Tramp starts out as a factory worker, a mere cog
in a Henry Ford-style production line in which he stands in one spot tightening
bolts that whizz by. One hiccup can throw off the entire process, costing the
company and the Big Brother-like President money. The President looks down upon
his factory and workers through a two-way TV screen (it should be noted that
the film precedes both widespread use of television by several years and George
Orwell’s landmark novel 1984 by more
than a decade). All the repetitive action leads to a nervous breakdown through
which he repeatedly tries to tighten everything he sees. This lands him in an
asylum after which he is released, but a series of misadventures continue to
land him in jail, including accidentally leading a protest of Communist
dissenters, preventing a jailbreak, working briefly in a shipyard and of course
meeting a beautiful young woman (played by Chaplin’s third wife Paulette
Goddard). In typical Tramp fashion, most of his experiences are the result of
his naiveté – an innocent inability to see what’s really happening in the world
around him.
Chaplin uses sound effects and dialogue sparingly. The
only effects heard on the soundtrack are produced by machines. The only
dialogue we hear comes through mechanized means: a phonograph record; a
directive from the boss via television. Chaplin’s voice is heard for the first
time in any of his films, but in song during a musical number. It is not
dialogue, but another form of musical accompaniment for his comedy. Modern Times is a film that is aware of
the sea change that the sound era represented to the artists who flourished in
the silent era. As such, the machines are what cause the Tramp’s first downfall
in the film.
More than being a treatise on changes in lifestyle, the
film is also funny, sometimes hilariously so. Again, Chaplin created indelible
classic images such as the automaton that feeds a hapless Tramp, shoveling food
and soup into his unwilling mouth. Then there is the famous sequence in which
the Tramp, in a reversal of the automated feeding machine, becomes the food for
the machine, being spat through oversized gears. The human Tramp literally
becomes part of the machine, a perfect image of the futility of resistance to
technological changes.
The beauty and poignancy of this, Chaplin’s last film
featuring the Tramp character and his last before succumbing to the onset of
the ‘talkies,’ is how the Tramp’s predicaments so often parallel Chaplin’s own
reluctance to allow new technology to affect his movies. So in a way, Chaplin’s
commentary is not only directed at the mechanization of work life, but also the
changes that would forever alter an artistic medium he adored.
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