Sid James, appearing in A KING IN NEW YORK as “Johnson – TV advertiser”, is hardly a Madison Avenue smoothie. Edinburgh-born Hugh McDermott, who appears elsewhere in the film and who was likewise a bit of a specialist in pseudo-yank roles, would have been better casting, but I think Chaplin sees the business as inherently vulgar and so who better than Sid? Dawn Addams can stand in for the industry’s classier side.
I have in the past been guilty of confusing Eric James, who transcribed Chaplin’s humming and orchestrated it into this film’s score, with Eric Rogers, who composed a bunch of the Carry On films. James also served the same function for Lionel Bart’s Oliver! since Bart, like Chaplin, couldn’t read musical notation. James would also help Chaplin score most of his later silent films.
It’s a shame that Sid is given relatively little comedy to do, but then it’s a shame that the film itself has so little comedy.
Dawn turns up again bearing a cheque in payment for King Shadhov’s involuntary TV appearance. He tears it up, but then there’s a nice reversal when he learns his bank balance is low — he tips out the waste paper basket and calls for “sticking plaster” — I don’t think that’s the right term, Charlie, but we know what you mean.
Then King Shadhov must tour an orphanage, which comes slightly out of the blue but holds promise — surely some echo of Chaplin’s own days in the workhouse is intended? It’s a period Chaplin often spoke and wrote about, but it’s unrepresented in his films, save for the threat of institutional charity in THE KID. I’m reminded also that David Robinson records that, when Chaplin revisited England and was expected to tour his former Kennington orphan asylum, he opted instead to dine with royalty. One can see how that might be more enjoyable, but the kids were expecting him.
Among the orphaned kids here, ironically, is Chaplin’s son Michael. He has just published his first novel. Apparently his earlier memoir, I Couldn’t Smoke the Grass on my Father’s Lawn, was substantially ghosted. He says he enjoyed making this film and it gave him a chance at a closer relationship with his distant and domineering dad than he’d been able to achieve earlier.
He’s quite good. His character, Rupert Macabee, has been inculcated with leftist political blarney by his parents, who are now incarcerated on treason charges. So he spews this communist verbiage, helplessly, his eyes panicked as if he has no say in what comes yammering out of his little mouth. It’s a clever — and deniable — way for Chaplin to get his subversive views across onscreen. Shadhov wouldn’t say this stuff, any more than the Jewish barber would make his big speech at the end of THE GREAT DICTATOR. Michael is maybe the best thing in this film. He even has his own leitmotif, which plays almost every time he appears.
The rest of the orphanage scene is unremarkable. Shadhov being targeted by pea-shooters is too mild to be amusing, and even the sitting in a cake pay-off lacks the element of outrageousness needed to get a strong laugh. The highlight is actually Shadhov’s earlier revenge on his persecutor, tipping a bowl of soup over the brat’s head and then massaging it in, all while keeping up his argument with young Macabee/Michael.
When Shadhov returns to his hotel, his trousers have made a remarkable Tom & Jerry type recovery — a missed opportunity, since obviously having Shadhov still waddling about with a sodden and creamy rump would have been good for a laugh. Keep him uncomfortable and confectionary-smeared when Dawn shows up again, Sid James in tow: force him to explain his arse.
The visuals can be disposed of quickly. Chaplin, the Jewish barber, stands cap in hand before the microphones. But once the speech starts, Chaplin the director cuts to a tight head-and shoulders, and mainly stays on it.
A cutaway to Hannah allows him to break the shot and we return to a wider one, but a dramatic push-in as he ramps up his fervour once more takes us close. Crowd shot, dissolve to Hannah, then a series of closeups of the two, separated by distance but united by some psychic connection, perhaps — yes, love.
As Costa-Gavras points out, the simplicity is deceptive. They key thing Chaplin does with his framing, apart from creating intimacy with his audience (that of a talking actor, not a silent comic) is to exclude all the apparatus of Tomainian Nazism. The double cross armband is framed out. To Cost-Gavras, far from being uncinematic (a big talking scene) this is the essence of cinema. As Scorsese puts it, cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s not.
Chaplin was at continual war with his assistants about the speech. These conflicts were often productive — Chaplin only gave in when he was genuinely convinced, and have you ever noticed how impossible it is to convince anyone of anything? And yet, he did occasionally make chances. The crew was his first audience, after all.
Chaplin’s argument was that the speech was what the Jewish barber WOULD say, if he were given such a chance. Which is odd, because Chaplin doesn’t even bother to use the barber’s voice, that rather high-pitched, quick style of delivery. And there’s been no indication that the barber is a political thinker: he did, after all, describe Hynkel as “Most amusing,” when the raids on the ghetto were paused.
This is Chaplin speaking, as impressively as he can. Having played two roles throughout the film, then effectively merging them as the barber is mistaken for the dictator, he now drops both masks and makes the speech HE would make if given the chance. You can see him making speeches to raise money for war bonds in WWI and he’s similarly impassioned. And presumably didn’t believe a word he was saying.
Chaplin/the barber begins by suicidally dropping his Hynkel guise, or almost. He doesn’t want to be an emperor. He’d like to help everyone if possible. “We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that.” Says the man standing before the lightly fictionalized Nazi army. The thing is, he’s not wrong, which is why his words are touching. But whatever you can say about humanity, the opposite also seems to be true. It’s why the Chaplin-Hitler dichotomy is so effective here.
“Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want.” Chaplin returns to the themes of MODERN TIMES — he sees that the form of modern society that turns people into cogs in a machine is slavery, inhuman. He may not have recognized the similarity between communism and capitalism — whether you’re being oppressed by the state or by business may not make much difference — but he’s instinctively an anarchist anyway.
“We think too much and feel too little.” I never liked this line, in this context. One thing you can’t say about Nazism, it seems to me, is that it’s overly intellectual and lacks emotion. Rather, the appeal is to the gut. What Chaplin means by “feel, ” I think, is “show empathy,” at which point the line starts to work. And the kind of empathy that’s needed is true, universal empathy. No doubt the Nazis considered themselves empathetic, loved their children. But they closed off fellow-feeling, limited who could be considered their fellow.
“Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world -” a useful reminder which cues the first shot of Hannah.
“To those who can hear me, I say – do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress.” All this harping on greed. Hynkel is greedy, I suppose — he lusts for the world. But a lot of this speech is anti-capitalist more than anti-Nazi. And J. Edgar Hoover is in the audience, furiously taking notes. Chaplin will be allowed to make two more films on American soil.
“Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes – men who despise you – enslave you – who regiment your lives – tell you what to do – what to think and what to feel!” Ah yes. Necessary to address the actual, physical audience. Chaplin actually filmed shots of Tomainian soldiers putting down their rifles and dancing together. Maybe his assistants’ objections were sufficiently strong on that occasion, or maybe Chaplin didn’t want to cut away from himself. I think it’s important we don’t see too much how the speech is received. Chaplin has done what he has so often done — he did it in THE KID and CITY LIGHTS particularly — he has taken the story to an impasse, where it can end on a note of high, positive emotion, but it is impossible to convincingly or dramatically imagine what comes next. The film is forced to stop.
“Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men – machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men!” Again with the machines. If we think back to the WWI stuff, Chaplin dwarfed himself with big guns and put himself in a plane — war was the work of machinery, just as industry was in MODERN TIMES. It makes the spot gags with Hynkel’s inventors more relevant than we might have thought: the dictator is a modern man, keen to enlist all the latest scientific developments in his brutal advance. “We’ve just discovered the most wonderful poison gas,” gushed Herring. “It will kill EVERYONE!”
“Only the unloved hate – the unloved and the unnatural!” I don’t know if CC read Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism, but it’s perfectly possible. “In brief, the goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation.” The book was published in Germany in 1933, and immediately burned. Not sure about English translation, though.
“In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man” – not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you!” OK, he mentioned the deity. And pushes in dramatically, a very rare thing for Chaplin, as he does so. “Pour religion on everything, like catsup,” is Lee Tracy’s advice in THE BEST MAN. It always truck me as weird, as my school attempted to indoctrinate me (no separation of church and state here) that the one true universal religion was followed only by a small minority of human beings. Saying that God is inside all humans is, sort of, nice and inclusive. Or maybe colonialist? Perhaps the Hindus, Buddhists, Shintoists, don’t WANT that foreign God inside them? But Chaplin’s use of the idea is as benign as it can be made to be — if there’s any truth in this stuff, it should unite rather than divide us.
“You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.” Yes, and what do we choose to do with this power instead?
“Then – in the name of democracy – let us use that power – let us all unite. “Let us fight for a new world – a decent world that will give men a chance to work – that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will!” This is part of the trouble. Chaplin is saying all the right things, but he recognizes that others have made these promises, without any intention of even trying to achieve them.
“Let us fight to free the world – to do away with national barriers – to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance.” “How the world dearly loves a cage,” as Maude says in HAROLD AND MAUDE. Freedom of movement has always seemed crucial to me. Now it’s the big thing UK political leaders can win support by promising to abolish. When I was a kid I proposed to my socialist big brother that the nations of the earth should be free to run any forms of government they wanted, so long as their people were free to travel to pick the one they wanted to live under. He was appalled by my naivety. “That wouldn’t solve anything!” I still slightly suspect he was the one being naive, in believing that things get solved.
“Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!” Chaplin’s treatment of the speech’s reception is very clever. We need to see SOMETHING, I guess, so when he finishes his speech on a grand climax followed by an uncertain look, he fades up the sound of mass cheering — Chaplin looks VERY uncertain as to how he feels about this popular adulation, as well he should — and cuts to a stock shot panning across a vast, undifferentiated throng. Doesn’t look like a crowd in uniform. It’s just a sea of humanity. So that the Tomainian troops have been stripped of their military costumes and turned back into human beings. We can certainly agree that avoiding using recognizable TRIUMPH OF THE WILL footage was a good call. But using stock footage per se was also smart — it enhances the feeling of cardboard flimsiness, it separates the fictional world from our own, because this is a kind of dream ending.
Chaplin did consider dissolving from here to the barber waking up in his concentration camp, which would have been very strong. NOBODY wanted to see that. It would have been, in a way, more true and tasteful, but in 1940 Britain, having urged Chaplin not to make the year before, was now clamouring for a propaganda feature, and Chaplin gave it to them — in his own manner.
“Look up, Hannah!” The bit of the speech which is mysteriously chopped off so often.
“Listen,” says Hannah, looking up and listening after the speech has ended, and only Chaplin’s music is playing.
Nobody talks about that. Everybody says the film ends with a big long speech. “It needed to be said,” said Sidney Lumet, dismissing the carping that it was too on the nose. “Everything doesn’t have to be perfect.” Which is true, but the film doesn’t exactly end on a big speech. It ends on a woman listening, to silence, or to non-diegetic music somehow only she can hear, or to something else that we can’t hear. Not yet, anyway.
The last scene of MODERN TIMES… the Tramp’s last scene as a silent character… is composed of just four shots, with intertitles.
A lovely view of the empty road — pan onto a hard shoulder and a full-figure two shot of Charlie and the Gamin sat at the roadside. He is making his feet more comfortable for the long walk ahead, and after presumably a long walk behind. She is tightening her bindle.
Match cut on this movement to a medium shot of the G. She becomes tearful. Rather than a cut, a moment after she buries her face in the crook of her arm to sob (Paulette Goddard, despite her showgirl origins and never having been in a silent film before, is more like a silent movie actor in this, as the term is usually understood, than anyone else), the camera pans to Charlie, whistling, and then noticing (it being a genuinely silent scene, her sobs do not travel). Pan back with him as he shifts closer to comfort her. So this one shot does the business of three.
Charlies gives a pep talk and they hit the road — a match cut on their getting up leads us into a heroic wide shot, trucking back as our stars advance down the road at us. The classic Chaplin head-to-toe composition but with a relatively rare camera move (though MODERN TIMES is more mobile than most).
Charlie reminds Paulette to “Smile” via pantomime. Which is the name of the song playing, but it hasn’t received a title or lyrics yet.
Chaplin jumps his camera 180 to show the couple retreat, backlit by the rising sun, up the shining asphalt lined with telegraph poles and scrubby palms towards hazy distant hills.
“There is every sign that he consciously recognised this was the last appearance of The Tramp, twenty-two years after his first appearance at Keystone in 1914. The optimistic end–for the first time Chaplin trots off towards the sunset [sic] not alone but in company with the girl, won at last–taken with the clown’s ultimate discovery of a voice, gave the film an air of finality.” ~ David Robinson, in the 1972 Sight and Sound review I got my hands on purely fortuitously last week.
I guess fortune plays a role here two — while Chaplin was thinking that time was running out for his brand of silent film, despite the box office success of this one. Nobody else was holding out against sound, we could argue that the story of MODERN TIMES simply demanded this ending, regardless of any desire to give the Little Fellow a suitable FINIS. Also, if CITY LIGHTS or THE CIRCUS had been Chaplin’s last appearance in character (we can say that the Jewish barber in THE GREAT DICTATOR, a talking character, is the same guy in costume but not wholly in character) they would gain in significance and also seem like magnificent, timeless curtain calls for the famous figure.
But MODERN TIMES, if you could somehow shuffle the filmography around, would lose out, at least in the pang of its ending. Other Chaplins where he apparently gets the girl, or a stable companion, are different: THE KID and CITY LIGHTS end with a slight question mark — how is this going to continue? Unanswerable in both cases — will the Tramp fit into Edna Purviance’s elegant household, is he going to marry the formerly blind flower girl? The movies stop at a point of beautiful affirmation but, as Walter Kerr noted, they HAVE to stop there, because what happens afterwards is a puzzle. The square one endings seen in THE TRAMP, THE CIRCUS, and many others, totally work in themselves, affirming the Tramp’s essential rootlessness. Only THE GOLD RUSH concocts a finale that seems to set out a forseeable life of ease. What all this demonstrates I guess is that Chaplin was so good at endings, any of these might have seemed a suitable note to end his tramping career on, GOLD RUSH alone lacking a really suggestive evocation of uncertainty.
MODERN TIMES’ last image suggests two contradictory ideas: our heroes walk off into the future, and the past. In 1936 and for some years after, it would surely have seemed possible to imagine them still out there, scrounging a living, Now, of course, that is a hard illusion to sustain. Both actors lived to a decent age, but are both gone, buried in Switzerland. The Tramp is immortal, but he belongs to the past. He’s out there in those hills, maybe, but they’re black-and-white hills, composed of light or celluloid not earth, alive with the sound of nothing.
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