A major piece by Charmion von Wiegand as she surveys Charlie Chaplin’s artistic journey and reviews his now classic ‘Modern Times’ on its 1936 release.

‘’Modern Times’: Little Charlie, What Now?’ by Charmion von Weigand from New Theatre and Film. Vol. 3 No. 3. March, 1936.

“This is the saddest picture I have seen in America,” said a Russian girl to me after the premiere of Modem Times. I also came away feeling that the pathos of the picture outweighed its humor, that in spite of many amusing situations, the underlying theme was tragedy more than comedy.

I saw Modern Times twice. The first time I was part of a sophisticated New York audience, which attends premieres. The laughter that greeted Charlie’s appearance on the belt as a worker rippled on with scarcely an interruption to the end of the film. It was uproarious at those moments when Charlie was most cruelly walloped by fate–for instance in the scene when the automatic feeder goes berserk and splashes soup and whipped cream -in Charlie’s face, feeds him steel nuts and buffets him with a wiper; again when he is pardoned from jail and put out of his cosy-corner cell into the cold world; or in the cabaret, when he loses his cuff with the words of his song scribbled on it and faces his audience blankly. It was plain that the audience in the theatre that night did not too closely identify itself with Charlie in his painful situations.

The second time I saw the film was on a holiday forenoon when the house was crowded with people anxious to take advantage of the cheaper morning prices. This time the laughter was louder in some scenes-for instance, when Charlie picks up the red flag from a truck and unwittingly finds himself leading a demonstration of unemployed (there were even cheers in the audience at this point); again when Charlie, penniless, consumes a gargantuan meal in a cafeteria and then summons the policeman from outside to come in and arrest him; or when, in the midst of a strike he steps on a board which hurls a brick in the face of a policeman. But in contrast to the first night, there were pauses of tension and uncertainty. The audience seemed puzzled by certain situations and did not know how to respond. I am most anxious to see the film when it is released in the second-run houses and observe the reactions of an audience even less economically secure. But the first two reactions are sufficient to indicate the complexity of Chaplin’s new masterpiece-as great a piece of work as he has ever turned out, but no longer in the style of pure comedy.

Modern Times is a melange of satire, comedy, fantasy and tragedy. It is not a unified work of art. Nevertheless, the creative level of this film is far beyond what Hollywood has hitherto produced. Supported by an excellent company, which includes his comely new leading lady, Paulette Goddard, and that lavishly mustached comedian, Chester Conklin, the whole film bears the distinctive stamp of Chaplin’s personality. Idea, scenario, production and chief role are all by Chaplin himself. Thus if ever a film had an opportunity to become a unified work of art, it is this one. Yet it fails to do so. It is interesting to pose the question: Is this failure due to Chaplin (in any one of his capacities as scenarist, producer or actor) or is it due to something far more fundamental?

The critics, in reviewing Modern Times, have expressed mixed feelings about it. For the most part the reviewers of the daily press have loudly denied that the film has any social significance and they have insisted that it is merely a piece of uproarious slapstick, with Charlie at his best in the time honored situations and gags. Again other critics, particularly of the weekly and liberal press, have credited Chaplin with a film of social criticism displaying a distinctly leftish approach. Much of the advance publicity emphasized this viewpoint. There is no doubt that the first caption of the film supports this latter theory, for it reads: “Modern Times is a story of industry, of individual enterprise-of humanity crusading in pursuit of happiness.” This is followed by a shot of a herd of sheep in a runway and then by a parallel shot of a mass of workers coming out of the subway and passing through the factory gates. But this opening theme is not consistently upheld throughout the action-it appears for a moment, then is lost in situations not at all relevant to it, and reappears in ever fainter echoes until the end. Thus the meaning of the film remains confused.

On the technical side, Modern Times seems slightly archaic. It is true that the photography is beautiful, crystal clear, and as realistic as a Soviet film. But Chaplin persists in using a silent screen; the mode is that prior to the talkies. None of the characters speak. There is, however, incidental music and some sound devices. For the first time in a Chaplin film, there are spoken words, but they come from mechanical contrivances such as the loud-speaker attached to the television screen in the factory or the phonograph which explains the automatic feeding machine. And once Chaplin sings-for the first time we hear his voice and it is a pleasant, resonant voice which I, for one, would gladly hear again. Hence we know now that it is not due to any vocal difficulty that Chaplin refrains from accepting the advance of the talkie, but because he believes his art is dependent on a particular aesthetic, which permits only pantomime.

At times, it is true, the incidental music which underscores and sustains that pantomime is sufficient. But there are scenes which demand dialogue and to refuse it weakens the emotional effect. For instance, in the realistic scene when the gamin’s father is killed in a food riot and she discovers the body in the street, we actually see Paulette Goddard’s lips frame the words: “My father is dead.” At the second performance, I caught several people around me spontaneously repeating the words out loud. Abstention from dialogue at this point, and other similar ones, definitely deprived the audience of pleasure. In such a moment, one film style collided head-on with another film style: an old convention of a particular theatre was used to strait-jacket a new and more realistic convention of the film. Thus, in addition to a confusion in its theme, we have in Modern Times a distinct confusion of two styles in film technique.

What is the meaning of this confusion both in the content and in the form of the film? Does it signify that Chaplin is reactionary in his film technique and radical in his thematic material? Does it signify that he is a had director unable to control that material? He has been accused of both faults. But I venture to say that it means neither.

Chaplin is the greatest comic artist of our era. As a creative genius, he is so sensitive to his environment that he has acutely felt the impact of the changes which are occurring in the body of our society. He has registered with the accuracy of a seismograph the confusion in the world today and particularly the confusion in the minds of the middle classes. Moreover, he has had the courage to break the old art mould in which his comic genius has always functioned. He has struck out as a pioneer on a new road in search of a new form in film. The confusion in his theme is thus the direct product of our times. The confusion in his style is due to the fact that his old style, in which he conceived the character Charlie, has become antiquated and inadequate; it cannot he further developed to include the present pressing problems which confront contemporary society.

This confusion nevertheless marks Chaplin as ahead of the game and not behind it. Modern Times is the first expressionist film of contemporary American life. It is not, however, a perfect example of it. Expressionism is a style in art, which always occurs historically in a period of social break-up. (It had its most recent flowering in post-war Germany.) The structure of Modern Times is expressionist; there is no organic plot, no actual development of action involving a set of characters. It consists of a series of scenes loosely bound together by two characters, Charlie, the hero, and his female companion, the gamin. Their mutual adventures are played against a shifting background of modern life, which includes the factory, the street, the jail, the waterfront, the hospital, the Hooverville shack, the department store and the cabaret. Charlie is the little forgotten man wandering in quest of happiness across the chaos of our civilization. Each adventure robs him of one more cherished illusion. At the end, empty-handed and foot-sore, alone with his girl, he faces the open road, still debonair but secretly uncertain about the unknown future.

It is the scenario which keeps Modern Times from being a unified, expressionistic work. Its most serious weakness is the lack of any character development at all. Charlie remains fundamentally what he was at the beginning of his pilgrimage. He has learned nothing from his unfortunate adventures, experiences from which the most obdurate and thickheaded individual would conceivably have gained some knowledge or common sense. The reason why Chaplin has not allowed his creation, Charlie, to develop and change with experience is consistent. But to understand it, we must know what the essence of Charlie is, what he has symbolized in the old films prior to 1929. The early Chaplin films, particularly the slapstick reelers, were conceived within a small given framework. Within it, the world was historically taken for granted. The director, the character, the audience all accepted certain basic concepts. About the world they lived in. It did not occur to them to challenge the pre-suppositions. Hence all three were included within a given framework and the work of art produced by them collectively although of smaller scope than Modern Times-could he a unified production.

Chaplin created a fixed character, Charlie, for this old supposedly stable world. His audience was the great middle class of America (which included a large portion of the working class too). The United States has always been the country of middle class ideals. In the days before the economic crisis, the worker also felt himself part of this class. He accepted the democratic illusions taught in public school, he shared some of the prosperity of the upper classes, and he emulated the manners of those above him. He believed the doctrine that honesty is the best policy and that hard work will he rewarded. In short he did not feel hound to his class as the worker did in Europe. In that past era so many self-made men attained wealth and position, that the legend seemed true. Lincoln, the rail-splitter who became president, was the ideal hero of our democratic republic. Charlie, the beloved universal character of the film, was conceived out of this legend and he played for this audience. (It is interesting to note that Charlie in Modern Times, when he makes his jail cell cosy, tacks up a picture of Lincoln.)

Charlie, when he first made his debut on the shadow screen won immediate favor. He was the common man, always incurably romantic, in that he saw through the hypocrisies and cruelties of the upper classes, yet aped their costume and fine manners, and accepted their mask of chivalry as bonafide. Because of this, in all his early adventures of failure he continued to cherish the illusion that some day he would find the pot-of-gold at the end of the rainbow. He would escape out of poverty and humiliation into the glittering social heaven above him. His was an eternal quest for that miraculous moment when he would change his battered suit, emblem of shabby respectability, for a new one; when he would cease to pretend and become what he imagined the most wonderful thing in the world-a gentleman.

This same Charlie was an incorrigible optimist, as befits a citizen of a country of vast unexploited resources and the highest technique in the world. He thumbed his nose at fate, which always knocked him down on the threshold of paradise-when he thought he had stepped out of his class into the one above it. What made him so funny, so wistful, so mocking was that he reflected the aspirations and the failures of millions of people like him. They saw him fail hut they believed that they might succeed. They too had a hankering to thumb their noses at their superiors, to plant the custard pie full in the face of their enemies, and to climb over the hacks of their fellow men to individual success. Charlie might fail, hut they could laugh from their vantage place of seeming security; for there was always the hope that they might be different. Charlie fulfilled their wishes on the plane of fantasy.

This early art of Chaplin was thus built entirely on illusion and fantasy. The character Charlie was fixed, the conditions were stable. The milieu was the eternal now of fantasy. For no matter how seemingly real-and the early film did not have sufficient development to treat anything realistically-the background of the city against which Charlie performed was actually nothing more than the painted scenic,: drop bodily transferred from vaudeville to the screen. All those absurd slapstick adventures never took place in the real world hut in an imitation of it. In this world of escape which Charlie proffered his audience, everyone might enjoy the most painful failures, the most vulgar gags, the cruelest jokes, and achieve a release of their hidden desires. But if these same things had been acted on the plane of reality, they would have been too painful even for that hopeful and seemingly secure audience of early days.

The rules of the game in this world of fantasy were the- same rules which were used in the classic theatres of the 17^th and 18th century-particularly the commedia dell’ arte. Chaplin, brought up in the English music hall and the American vaudeville, was in the direct line of that tradition, which has given us the ballet, the pantomine, and much of vaudeville. This old classic theatre, which may be traced, if you will, as far back as classic times, was a theatre of improvisation and of pantomine. It specialized in a set of stock types of characters. The actors improvised the action on a given theme without any text. The character remained fixed, unchanging; the situation always changed, thereby furnishing the element of novelty. The action took place on the plane of fantasy.

Chaplin is the only actor of modern times to create such a successful universal character. Adhering to the strict classic rules, he made Charlie. He preserved the eternal mask of a fixed set of characteristics and a fixed costume-the little man with the derby, the cane, and the broken-down shoes, striving in the midst of poverty to retain the gentility and courtesy which he believes are superior attributes; searching with a romantic heart for beauty in the most sordid and unlikely spots on earth. Charlie belongs with Scaramouche and Harlequin, characters of an earlier age, which outgrew their creators and assumed reality as symbols of their time.

The movie in the period when Chaplin first began to act was silent. It was unrealistic. It employed theatrical sets as a background. It provided the ideal conditions for this classic art. The human voice achieves stylization best in song; it would have shattered the illusion if the fantastic person Charlie had spoken. Chaplin wearing the mask of Charlie became the greatest pantomine artist of our epoch. The plastic quality of his face permitted him the most delicate nuances of feeling visually. His infinite grace of movement and the precision of his gesture placed him beside the outstanding dancers of our time.

The last years have seen a revolution in our film technique. The silent movie has been displaced by the talkie. Photography has become so supple a medium that it rivals the texture and the plastic form of painting. The result has been a great advance in cinema art and this new art has been built on realism. The Soviet film was the first to include a much larger segment of reality within the conventions of the film. It founded a new school of producers, added a much wider field in thematic material, and posed a demand for a realistic school of acting far beyond any achieved so far in the Western European or American theatres. Thus the restrictions of the medium which Chaplin employed in his early films have been abolished. Chaplin’s last film City Lights already presaged change and posited the necessity for his leaving the old form and striking out for a new one. City Lights, however, was conceived and made before the economic crisis.

The year 1931 marked a historic turning point in the fortunes of the vast majority of people in the United States. The depression, which so largely affected the middle classes, has changed the audience, which loved and followed Charlie. A deep rift has occurred. Those who still have a stake in the system and believe they can salvage their security, will amalgamate with the classes above them. The others-the vast majority-have had their economic basis wiped out; their standard of living has dropped. They have had to give up their dream of rising in the social scale; instead they are being pushed down. There are millions of unemployed. There are millions on government relief. A new generation is growing up which has not been able to find a place for itself and for whom the old illusions are meaningless.

Therefore in making Modern Times Chaplin faced a serious dilemma. He had to deal with a changed technique in the cinema and a changed audience. As a result he had to choose a new theme. But he had on his hands a fixed character- Charlie-who belonged and existed within the limits of a given art. In short, Chaplin has had the same difficulty in turning a corner in his art, as little Charlie has in turning a street corner in the film.

Modern Times thus represents Chaplin’s crisis in art. It is a film, done on a large canvas which grapples with the fundamental problems of our times. Its hero, however, is still the optimistic, lovable Charlie-a clown.

But against the background of modern times a hero cannot be the pure clown. Poverty, unemployment, hunger are serious themes-they are the stuff of tragedy. Only from the vantage ground of security can they appear comical. Chaplin is acutely aware of the tragic implications of his theme. He knows that you can no more have pure comedy than pure poetry today. We live in an age of transition and the world is passing through a crisis which will involve a struggle between two totally different concepts of society.

This is the reason for the confusion in theme and in style in Modern Times. Aesthetically the film moves in two planes-that of reality and fantasy. Sometimes they run parallel but more often there is a head-long collision between them. Chaplin has endeavored to preserve Charlie intact. He has tried to preserve the classic form. But he has also had to admit a new world of reality, and the two are inimical. One must destroy the other.

The first sequence of Modern Times, in the fantastic factory, is delightful satire with a social sting. Words are unnecessary here. The humor is light and gay and for this reason many things like the speed-up, the regimentation, the prying boss, the feeding machine, which in reality would be painful are simply amusing. A worker going mad from the speed-up is a sad subject, but kept strictly within the old formula, it becomes delightful pantomine.

But in the next sequence, we are dropped onto the plane of reality. We see the inside of a jail. We are taken out of doors on the waterfront. This is a picture of a real background. We meet the hungry little gamin stealing bananas. She is a real child and a pathetic one–not a stock character, whom we know. In a way, the fact that Charlie meets this gamin symbolizes Chaplin’s desire to come in contact with reality in his art. Throughout the following scenes of mutual adventure, we feel the difference between them as characters. The gamin is a real girl who has waked in a dream and met a dream character- Charlie. She might have met Santa Claus just the same way. She is practical-she finds a home even if it is a hut in Hooverville; she has a few romantic illusions; she doesn’t think it wrong to steal bananas and bread. She is a proletarian of the city streets. She is delighted with Charlie–his fantastic chivalry, his fairy tales of a dream cottage. But as a real character she demands to speak, to tell her story. Her pantomime is never convincing since it is a convention of fantasy applied to a realistic character.

When Charlie leaves the jail, where he has been sent for inadvertently picking up a red flag and leading an unemployment demonstration, he puts on his old garments of gentility. He is again the gentlemanly bum. After we have seen him as a factory worker, this shabby fellow seems ridiculous, particularly in the scene with the policeman. Hence the scenes of demonstrations and strike are not excessively funny. (These shots included newsreel pictures and a part of Charlie’s audience took them seriously. They enjoyed it most when he got the better of the cops, but they wished him to do this on purpose, while as a matter of fact Charlie participated in the demonstration and the strike only by accident. In a critical and real situation, an audience demands of its hero purposeful action.)

But as the action progresses on the plane of reality, Charlie’s situation becomes too serious for his gentlemanly pretense, for his costume. We do not believe in this costume for the illusion which created it is not shared by all the audience anymore. Just as the film juggles two planes of action and thus creates an emotional confusion in the reactions of the audience, so Charlie juggles his costume. Half way through the picture, there occurs a break. The plane of reality recedes. Charlie reverts to his old self. The action slows but the funny business is increased. The old slapstick becomes dominant. There are many more laughs, but there is no doubt that the most comic sequences in the film are for the most part repetitions of his early works-The Skating Rink, The Nightwatchman, The Floorwalker, The Singing Waiter, etc. These sequences bear the same relation to the film as the autobiography of literary men to their work. It is a necessary resume at a critical turning point.

Throughout the film, Charlie remains the same wistful romantic lonely individual and this in spite of his experience in a factory as a worker. Here Chaplin misses one of the most progressive elements of the machine–the discipline it imposes and the collective spirit it awakens in the workers. We do get suggestions of this collective spirit in the demonstration and the strike but we do not participate emotionally, because the character Charlie never does.

Moreover, if Charlie had experienced these new emotions, he would be changed by his experience. But he is a fixed character. Hence the dilemma of the director. In the film, if Charlie had stayed long with the gamin, he would have changed in spite of himself. But the director, believing he must keep faith with his audience, insists that he hold to the familiar character with its fixed characteristics, ignoring the fact that the audience is not the same old audience.

To the end, Charlie remains the same lonely little individual. We leave him at the cross roads, in his old suit, with a bromidic optimistic caption. But we too have been through his adventures and we don’t believe that things will be better for him, that he will ever become a gentleman or improve his fortunes. If he learns nothing from experience, he will only run into more troubles and we will lose patience with him. At best, it is a sad ending.

What is Charlie going to do next time? Get rid of his antiquated costume and the things it stands for, join with his fellow men in distress, with whom he so deeply sympathizes? (But if he should do the latter, he would no longer be the Charlie we have known in the past-the little knight-errant of the shabby derby.) His wistful but optimistic romanticism is as out of date in the world today as was Don Quixote’s tilting at windmills. His audience for the most part has had to give up their optimistic illusions. He faces an aesthetic crisis. To follow his audience, now so sharply divided, he will have to choose which half of it he wishes to reach the secure upper minority, or the vast majority of common folk from whom he has always drawn his strength. If the latter, he will be forced to leave his respectable shabby suit behind or deed it as a farewell gift to the secure minority. I for one believe that as a character, he has enough vitality to live on without it. I would like to see him change and grow in the realistic new film world, and to hear his voice speak for him. Little Charlie, what now?

(Several days after the above article had been set up in print, the author’s point of view received unlooked-for substantiation from the words of Mr. Chaplin himself, who declared in a press interview held on February 19: “I shall probably veer away from my tramp role some day. I just can’t make him talk. He is a vestige of the silent days.”-The Editors.)

The New Theater continued Workers Theater. Workers Theater began in New York City in 1931 as the publication of The Workers Laboratory Theater collective, an agitprop group associated with Workers International Relief, becoming the League of Workers Theaters, section of the International Union of Revolutionary Theater of the Comintern. The rough production values of the first years were replaced by a color magazine as it became primarily associated with the New Theater. It contains a wealth of left cultural history and ideas. Published roughly monthly were Workers Theater from April 1931-July/Aug 1933, New Theater from Sept/Oct 1933-November 1937, New Theater and Film from April and March of 1937, (only two issues).

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/workers-theatre/v3n03-Mar-1936-New-Theatre.pdf