Modern Times

Charlie Chaplin, USA, 1936
3 out of 4 stars

Honestly, I am tempted to give the first two sequences 4 stars and the rest of the film 2 stars; as it is, I split the difference and ended up with the good-but-not-great 3 star rating.

This is actually my first Chaplin film, and as I am not a film student (but rather a "projectionist," in which capacity I saw this film), it will most likely be my last. I didn't find the conventions of the "silent" (with occasional speech near the beginning and sound effects throughout) film too difficult to get a hold of, and for the most part the humor was not incomprehensible.

If anything, the bar was perhaps set too high by the first sequence, in which Chaplin's "Little Tramp" desperately tries to make his way through a day at the factory, becoming increasingly unhinged with results that myself and most of the undergraduates found absolutely hillarious. No surpise that an English professor would assign this, as Chaplin demonstrates the "alienation of labor" concept far better than Karl Marx or any of his followers could hope to!

There are flickers of brilliance throghout (the first jail sequence is pretty solid), but the film increasingly becomes repetetive (near the end the Tramp ends up in yet another factory, even mirroring many of the earlier gags albeit in a different context. It seems that Chaplin was regrettably unable to maintain the high level of both social commentary and humor that he shows at the beginning.

Source: Warner DVD
15 April, 7:10 PM