Charlie Chaplin, 1936
So this did make me laugh quite a bit, just not as much as a lot of the rest of the audience. And I hate admitting to that because it makes me sound like such a snob, like I think I'm more sophisticated than most folks, when in fact it's just a simple characteristic that I often wish I could change. So I'm not going to get all snooty and tell you about how the only thing that really makes me laugh is some obscure Lithuanian TV show or something. (Although I have been meaning to tell you about something kind of obscure that did really make me laugh, although even then not as much as others in the audience. And I was such a mess I never got round to doing any posts on British comedy, perhaps I should pick that up.)
Jeez! That's enough rambling and wallowing in my own emotions and neuroses for one post. Modern Times: famous for that scene where the Tramp goes through the giant cogs, which thematically and visually expresses the film's anticapitalist stance. No soapboxes here, and the message proves more powerful for it. It's interesting to think about how (beyond "well, obviously') the film would have been received during the Great Depression, but it has resonance during our own cultural moment, doesn't it?
So if Chaplin had only achieved that stuck in the cogs moment, this film would still be a classic. But there's more to it than that. The Tramp's job on the assembly line is tightening bolts; when he emerges from the cogs totally loopy, he prances about balletically, tweaking everything in sight. Comedy, as I've said, isn't just about pratfalls, it's also about elegance. The delicacy of his movements there creates a tension with the silliness of his actions. Tension: another key of comedy. The Tramp runs outside and we cut to a shot of a zaftig matron bustling along; buttons cover her nipples. He goes beserk and chases her. It's about as crude as Chaplin ever gets, and wonderfully effective because we see it coming once we see those buttons.
Tension, I think, plays an important role in making this one of Chaplin's most enjoyable films. There is of course tension coming from the fact that the issues -- the absurdity of capital and labor, on again off again, the difficulty of finding work -- have a serious side. But it's not that straightforward. In the Bright Lights piece I quoted in the City Lights post, Alan Vanneman conceives of the Tramp as a kind of flaneur who simply can't be bothered to work because it would interfere in the enjoyment of life's pleasures. We see that aspect here too; he gussies up his prison cell and tries to go back to jail so he doesn't have to work. So there's this "Let me work!"/"I don't wanna work!" dichotomy that's extremely relatable and it's nice to see it existed before the extended adolescence brought on by the 60s.
The great thing about this movie is that it displays the pleasures as well as the pitfalls of modernity. In fact it shows us the (as far as I'm concerned) greatest experience modernity has to offer (aside from the more likely-to-happen experiences of good molecular gastronomy and using a vibrator): having free rein to run through a department store. (This same basic idea was used, albeit with a grocery store, in 28 Days Later, positing the hypothesis that when the zombies come, the upside will be that you can have all the whiskey and Terry's Chocolate Oranges you want. Lest you think this is a strictly middlebrow, filmic phenomenon: the Frankfurt School had a lot to say about department stores. Personally, walking through them -- particularly the now-defunct Marshall Field's on State Street in Chicago -- always gives me a special thrill.) One scene in the store niftily combines pleasure and pitfall: the Tramp shows off for the Gamin (Paulette Goddard -- more on her later) by rollerskating (a truly beautiful sight -- Chaplin's special brand of elegance) blindfolded, blissfully unaware that the floor is in construction and missing a railing at the edge. Chaplin skillfully plays with danger (not to mention our nerves) as he did in the sequence in City Lights where the Tramp admires a nude sculpture in a shop window, stepping toward and away from a hole in the pavement.
The traditional Tramp formula benefits enormously from the addition of a (quite literal) partner in crime in Goddard's Gamin. When we first see her, she's on the docks, stealing a bunch of bananas, wielding her knife and chopping them off and chucking them up to little street urchins. She has a prettiness that's plain enough to really let emotions manifest themselves on her face. And she's beaming and she's got this energy about her -- gleeful, manic but not scary -- and we just fall for her. (Unfortunately, Goddard really falters in the serious, emotional moments: she quails and wobbles her chin in a terribly hammy fashion. It's also very hard to swallow her as a juvenile; Goddard was 26 at the time.) And once she and the Tramp get together, seeing the delight they take in each other's antics, watching them rescue each other from scrapes, proves a real treat. Their relationship remains chaste -- they sleep in separate quarters in the shack they set up house in -- one senses an amiability between them that I long to see in romantic screen pairings.
I should have noted earlier that I sort of indirectly fell in love with Chaplin before I'd ever seen his work by watching Robert Downey Jr. play him in Chaplin; he quite justly received an Oscar nod for the performance. In it he gives quite a wonderful speech about why the Tramp can't speak. Echoing my thoughts about comedy as elegance, Robert as Charlie likens that actuality to Ninjinsky bursting into speech in the middle of a performance. All that feels quite true, but Modern Times incorporates sound technology quite well. The president of the steel works can see the whole place via video; we hear his image yell at people to get back to work or speed up the assembly line. In a fantastic comic piece, the Tramp, who has forgotten the words to the song he's supposed to sing in his job as a waiter, ad libs a song made up of words from various foreign language. It's marvelously funny as well as catchy, and a real testament to the versatility of Chaplin's comic skills. The film also famously features the lovely song "Smile," which Chaplin wrote. It was used to wonderful effect on an episode of Glee, and while there's nothing ironic or meta about it, it hasn't aged abit.
Comments