Just wanted to say that this is a terrific series, so happy to be watching along! I'm pretty slow (just watched Yi Yi - you guys were right, what a picture!), but the movies are great and the writing is just as good. Thanks guys for giving me the excuse to fill in a bunch of blind spots!
I saw a few of the most notable Chaplin films back in college, but only got to some of them, including Modern Times, fairly recently (in which I mean, I finally finished watching the box set I bought back in college). I wish I had gotten to it earlier, because Paulette Goddard is a treasure.
I also watched The Circus around the same time, and I'll throw that out there as underrated, even among Chaplin's filmography.
I can't help but think of how monstrous Charlie Chaplin was (see: https://www.vice.com/en/article/wnwwwy/charlie-chaplin-was-a-sadistic-tyrant-who-fucked-teenage-girls) each time I see one of his films, even though I truly loved Modern Times (and, well, mostly thought well of The Dictator). I know, I know, death of the author and all that, but at the same time, every time I see Chaplin's face on screen, I think "this is the face of someone who abused his kids and consciously seduced 16-year-olds to the point where he fled the country to marry one because he knew the American courts would send him to jail."
Still, Modern Times is a masterpiece. I think about that opening sequence pretty much every time I sit down to do my job.
Something that always struck me about Goddard in this movie is, for lack of a better term, what a "modern" vibe she has—there's a vibrance and naturalness she exudes that makes the performance feel, to me, very contemporary and less "stagey" compared to many of the era. I've thought this about various actors/performances from the '30s and '40s—one that immediately pops to mind is WIlliam Powell in the Thin Man movies—where their acting style would feel perfectly at home in a modern film.
Anyway, there's my $.02. (Which I would toss to Chaplain and Goddard if I were walking by.)
I agree, she's quite a modern type of character. In fact, I think of Goddard in this movie as kind of the original Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Not in a bad way, since it wasn't a tired trope back then and she plays it so well. But she does sort of play that role.
Goddard is also distractingly beautiful in this. There isn't much beyond a smudge on her face to identify her as a "street urchin" type; even her ragged clothes wind up looking chic the way she moves in them.
Haha, that feels very "modern" as well. It's such a big thing in movies for beautiful actresses to always look beautiful, with perfect hair and skin and everything, even if they've just gone through a car chase through a jungle being chased by dinosaurs or whatever.
I recently saw the Abyss 4K Remaster Special Edition in the theater, and I had forgotten how ridiculous it was when the lead actress (only actress, I suppose) basically drowns and "dies" then gets resuscitated after an absurdly long sequence of her getting chest-pounded and electric-paddled and slapped in the face, and then in the next scene she looks totally perfect again, none the worse for wear, and not traumatized at all. If this could even happen in real life, she would be a total mess physically and mentally, and probably brain-damaged. Still, despite that, fun movie!
I always loved that sequence where the Tramp can't stop himself from doing the bolt-tightening maneuver if he sees anything vaguely bolt-shaped even while on break, but in addition to being funny I suspect he was basing that on workers' actual experiences of what it does to your brain to do such repetitive behavior. I experienced this often when I was a cashier at Wal-Mart as a teenager. Even when I wasn't working, I could hear in my head that incessant beeping of the barcode scanner. If I closed my eyes, it was like I could see myself moving items across the scanner. I would literally have dreams that were just scanning items over and over. It was awful. It's basically the "Tetris effect" where if you play too much Tetris you see the blocks falling in your mind's eye constantly, but it's way worse to be having to do "work" even while not working. I felt like Wal-Mart should have paid me for 24/7 labor.
I'm so glad you included the title of the "nonsense song" because that was a part of the movie that has seemed a bit weird and mysterious since I was a kid. I kind of got the joke that he was singing nonsense and pantomiming, but I always wondered why the audience would be so into it. So I looked it up, and it turns out that was an actual popular song at the time that people would have been familiar with, but since it's in a foreign language, you could imagine Americans getting fooled by fake lyrics. So anyway, mystery solved, and it adds an additional element of satire about how fancy Americans at a place like this would be into European music but couldn't be bothered learning any European languages.
After watching all the main Buster Keaton movies last year, following along with Blank Check and Dana Stevens' book, I came to the conclusion that for me Charlie Chaplin is definitely the superior model of silent comedy star. I love a lot of Buster Keaton's moments, gags, and especially stunts, (he was like the Tom Cruise of his day) but his stories were usually pretty slight and full of cliche, the non-stunt comedy work not nearly as sophisticated, and most of all is just their different attitude about whether to "punch up" or "punch down." Chaplin always punched up, making fun of the rich, the powerful, the upper classes, etc, standing up for the little guy. He either played a down-and-out Tramp type character, or when he played a rich or powerful character, he was doing it to show them as buffoons.
Buster Keaton usually did the opposite, his stock character was a wealthy, idle fop trying to prove himself, and way too much of his comedy is blatantly sexist, racist, classist. The "Seven Chances" film has it all--it makes fun of Black characters (some played by actual Black actors, some played by white actors in blackface doing the classic minstrel-show routine), it makes fun of any woman who is not young and beautiful, and it even has an overt moment of Anti-Semitism when he sits at a bench a woman is sitting at and is momentarily interested in her, only to find (the horror!) that she is reading a Hebrew newspaper. There are moments like this in most of his films, and I just feel like he's "punching down" and making fun of people who are mostly oppressed.
This series has been terrific, but I especially enjoyed this essay. Modern Times' final image is my favorite moment in Chaplin's work because it's equally heartening and melancholy. The Tramp and the Gamine have been kicked around by life, and Chaplin offers nothing to indicate that will end; but as the essay points out, they have each other to lean on. For all the gifts Chaplin lavished on his other—also wonderful!—films, nothing quite walked that tightrope as well.
Me coming to this one late — me was in New Orleans for few days, trying to develop king cake cookie — but it worth noting that it not just boss who have voice and employees who are silent. Until Chaplin sings in final scene, we only ever hear voices through machines. Loudspeakers, radios, no character ever speaks directly. It commentary on how technology isolating people 75 years before people start saying that about smartphone, but it also very clever way of doing "talkie" without actually having anyone talk.
This is supremely entertaining film, but it also razor sharp meta commentary on itself. Chaplin knew this was going to be not only his last silent film, but likely last silent film of significance anyone make. It essentially only time in entire history of film that someone had chance to comment on how medium was changing by embracing that change, and he absolutely seizes moment. (only thing that comes close is black-and-white-to-color transition in Wizard of Oz, but of course people kept making black and white movies for decades afterwards)
Just wanted to say that this is a terrific series, so happy to be watching along! I'm pretty slow (just watched Yi Yi - you guys were right, what a picture!), but the movies are great and the writing is just as good. Thanks guys for giving me the excuse to fill in a bunch of blind spots!
I saw a few of the most notable Chaplin films back in college, but only got to some of them, including Modern Times, fairly recently (in which I mean, I finally finished watching the box set I bought back in college). I wish I had gotten to it earlier, because Paulette Goddard is a treasure.
I also watched The Circus around the same time, and I'll throw that out there as underrated, even among Chaplin's filmography.
I can't help but think of how monstrous Charlie Chaplin was (see: https://www.vice.com/en/article/wnwwwy/charlie-chaplin-was-a-sadistic-tyrant-who-fucked-teenage-girls) each time I see one of his films, even though I truly loved Modern Times (and, well, mostly thought well of The Dictator). I know, I know, death of the author and all that, but at the same time, every time I see Chaplin's face on screen, I think "this is the face of someone who abused his kids and consciously seduced 16-year-olds to the point where he fled the country to marry one because he knew the American courts would send him to jail."
Still, Modern Times is a masterpiece. I think about that opening sequence pretty much every time I sit down to do my job.
Something that always struck me about Goddard in this movie is, for lack of a better term, what a "modern" vibe she has—there's a vibrance and naturalness she exudes that makes the performance feel, to me, very contemporary and less "stagey" compared to many of the era. I've thought this about various actors/performances from the '30s and '40s—one that immediately pops to mind is WIlliam Powell in the Thin Man movies—where their acting style would feel perfectly at home in a modern film.
Anyway, there's my $.02. (Which I would toss to Chaplain and Goddard if I were walking by.)
I agree, she's quite a modern type of character. In fact, I think of Goddard in this movie as kind of the original Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Not in a bad way, since it wasn't a tired trope back then and she plays it so well. But she does sort of play that role.
Goddard is also distractingly beautiful in this. There isn't much beyond a smudge on her face to identify her as a "street urchin" type; even her ragged clothes wind up looking chic the way she moves in them.
Haha, that feels very "modern" as well. It's such a big thing in movies for beautiful actresses to always look beautiful, with perfect hair and skin and everything, even if they've just gone through a car chase through a jungle being chased by dinosaurs or whatever.
I recently saw the Abyss 4K Remaster Special Edition in the theater, and I had forgotten how ridiculous it was when the lead actress (only actress, I suppose) basically drowns and "dies" then gets resuscitated after an absurdly long sequence of her getting chest-pounded and electric-paddled and slapped in the face, and then in the next scene she looks totally perfect again, none the worse for wear, and not traumatized at all. If this could even happen in real life, she would be a total mess physically and mentally, and probably brain-damaged. Still, despite that, fun movie!
I always loved that sequence where the Tramp can't stop himself from doing the bolt-tightening maneuver if he sees anything vaguely bolt-shaped even while on break, but in addition to being funny I suspect he was basing that on workers' actual experiences of what it does to your brain to do such repetitive behavior. I experienced this often when I was a cashier at Wal-Mart as a teenager. Even when I wasn't working, I could hear in my head that incessant beeping of the barcode scanner. If I closed my eyes, it was like I could see myself moving items across the scanner. I would literally have dreams that were just scanning items over and over. It was awful. It's basically the "Tetris effect" where if you play too much Tetris you see the blocks falling in your mind's eye constantly, but it's way worse to be having to do "work" even while not working. I felt like Wal-Mart should have paid me for 24/7 labor.
I'm so glad you included the title of the "nonsense song" because that was a part of the movie that has seemed a bit weird and mysterious since I was a kid. I kind of got the joke that he was singing nonsense and pantomiming, but I always wondered why the audience would be so into it. So I looked it up, and it turns out that was an actual popular song at the time that people would have been familiar with, but since it's in a foreign language, you could imagine Americans getting fooled by fake lyrics. So anyway, mystery solved, and it adds an additional element of satire about how fancy Americans at a place like this would be into European music but couldn't be bothered learning any European languages.
After watching all the main Buster Keaton movies last year, following along with Blank Check and Dana Stevens' book, I came to the conclusion that for me Charlie Chaplin is definitely the superior model of silent comedy star. I love a lot of Buster Keaton's moments, gags, and especially stunts, (he was like the Tom Cruise of his day) but his stories were usually pretty slight and full of cliche, the non-stunt comedy work not nearly as sophisticated, and most of all is just their different attitude about whether to "punch up" or "punch down." Chaplin always punched up, making fun of the rich, the powerful, the upper classes, etc, standing up for the little guy. He either played a down-and-out Tramp type character, or when he played a rich or powerful character, he was doing it to show them as buffoons.
Buster Keaton usually did the opposite, his stock character was a wealthy, idle fop trying to prove himself, and way too much of his comedy is blatantly sexist, racist, classist. The "Seven Chances" film has it all--it makes fun of Black characters (some played by actual Black actors, some played by white actors in blackface doing the classic minstrel-show routine), it makes fun of any woman who is not young and beautiful, and it even has an overt moment of Anti-Semitism when he sits at a bench a woman is sitting at and is momentarily interested in her, only to find (the horror!) that she is reading a Hebrew newspaper. There are moments like this in most of his films, and I just feel like he's "punching down" and making fun of people who are mostly oppressed.
This series has been terrific, but I especially enjoyed this essay. Modern Times' final image is my favorite moment in Chaplin's work because it's equally heartening and melancholy. The Tramp and the Gamine have been kicked around by life, and Chaplin offers nothing to indicate that will end; but as the essay points out, they have each other to lean on. For all the gifts Chaplin lavished on his other—also wonderful!—films, nothing quite walked that tightrope as well.
The image is just so gorgeous, too. Hard for any ending in any movie to top CITY LIGHTS for me, but I love the sentiment of this one.
Me coming to this one late — me was in New Orleans for few days, trying to develop king cake cookie — but it worth noting that it not just boss who have voice and employees who are silent. Until Chaplin sings in final scene, we only ever hear voices through machines. Loudspeakers, radios, no character ever speaks directly. It commentary on how technology isolating people 75 years before people start saying that about smartphone, but it also very clever way of doing "talkie" without actually having anyone talk.
This is supremely entertaining film, but it also razor sharp meta commentary on itself. Chaplin knew this was going to be not only his last silent film, but likely last silent film of significance anyone make. It essentially only time in entire history of film that someone had chance to comment on how medium was changing by embracing that change, and he absolutely seizes moment. (only thing that comes close is black-and-white-to-color transition in Wizard of Oz, but of course people kept making black and white movies for decades afterwards)