Audient Audit: Modern Times

This is the latest in my monthly series Audient Audit, where I question my own records about movies I say I’ve seen.

Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times may bear the most embarrassing reason for why I thought I saw it. There are two, actually.

      1)      “I’ve seen that scene of Charlie Chaplin running through the gears of that machine, therefore I must have seen the movie.” (It was likely in some kind of Oscar clip montage.)

      2)      “I must have seen Modern Times just because it’s a classic and I must have seen it.”

Not great reasons, you will agree.

The second one is particularly faulty reasoning, as I have never been the kind of cinephile to devour silent films. I know there are many of us who eat up every example of the origins of cinema, but I am not one of them. So the idea that I “must have seen it” is silly, because I’ve seen only 30-40 silent films in my entire life, and nearly half of those were in the past few years, when I devoted one of these annual viewing series to the topic in 2016.

I think I figured I saw it around the same time I saw City Lights, a film I think of in the same breath as Modern Times, if you will allow that phrasing. I remember that viewing, which took place in my old apartment in New York City sometime between 1998 and 2001 (as those were the years I lived there), because I decided to smoke a cigar as accompaniment to it. And I remember that because I don’t like cigars, and that was one of fewer than ten of those I’ve ever smoked.

Modern Times is indeed a silent movie, but by rights it shouldn’t be. It came out in 1936, which is nearly a decade after sound was introduced to the movies. Chaplin was resistant to cutting over, of course, because he had thrived as a silent actor and was worried he could not make the transition to talkies. (Though 1940’s The Great Dictator, a talkie, might be my favorite of his films.) In fact the film functions as something of a metaphor for this sea change, which put a lot of actors (though not Chaplin) out of work. Chaplin’s character and his love interest/female friend, referred to as “The Gamin” (Paulette Godard), spend most of the movie looking for work. Although automation is the thing in the film that’s preventing them from landing a steady job, in the world it was this change in the way films were made that Chaplin perceived as his primary obstacle.

I should clarify that it’s not a silent film the way The Gold Rush (1925) is a silent film. It actually does have spoken dialogue, but that dialogue comes only from the boss in Chaplin’s factory, which is consistent with Chaplin’s complaint about The Man making his style of filmmaking outmoded. It also has Chaplin singing in his final number. There are sound effects and other diagetic sounds interspersed throughout. But there’s also silent film’s typical reliance on pantomiming and physical comedy, as well as title cards, though Chaplin doesn’t rely heavily on them, consistent with his show-don’t-tell approach. The fact that he used the title cards, but also included bits of dialogue that proved he didn’t have to, gives further heft to Chaplin’s perspective.

Modern Times has some great, laugh-out-loud set pieces. I think my favorite, mostly because I laughed out loud the most, was when he’s being fed by the automated feeding machine, which pushes food (and sometimes machine parts) into his mouth, and which goes haywire rotating a corn cob dangerously close to his mouth. Chaplin’s reactions are priceless, particularly his eyes, as his mouth is largely obscured by the corn cob. I also really enjoyed the blind roller skating right next to the department store dropoff. I'm not sure how he did it so convincingly without, you know, dying. 

The film doesn’t amount to more than the sum of its set pieces, though. Other Chaplin films I’ve fallen in love with in recent years have a fair amount of heart – I’m thinking primarily of The Kid, but even The Great Dictator has a huge amount of passion and heart in its final political speech. Modern Times doesn’t have this same feel to it and often feels like a loosely connected succession of bits. The bits really work, but the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

That of course still equates to a four-star (out of five) rating, as this is a substantial achievement and a fun watch. It’s just near the bottom of the Chaplin features I’ve seen, in part because the others are so superlative.

And to be clear, I definitely had not seen it prior to this week.

On to July. I don’t have my movie picked out yet.