"Blog 2: MODERN TIMES" - Charlie Chaplin

Despite Modernism's seriousness, one person was able to get the modern world to laugh at its new technological self and subtly query whether this new modern reality was a good thing. Charlie Chaplin arrived in Hollywood at a crucial juncture in the development of cinema. Chaplin's down-to-earth and offbeat cinema performances provided sanity to modern culture and humanized the trials of modern existence.

The Little Tramp, who had won Charles Chaplin worldwide recognition and who is still the most globally recognized fictional image of a human being in the history of art, made his final film appearance in Modern Times. The world into which the Tramp said his goodbyes was substantially different from the one into which he had been born two decades before the First World War. Then he had shared and symbolized the tribulations of all the poor in a world that had only recently emerged from the nineteenth century. In the aftermath of America's Great Depression, when vast unemployment coupled with a significant surge in industrial automation, he found himself in radically different circumstances in Modern Times.

 After being institutionalized, he gets released only to be mistaken for a communist activist. He is apprehended, but after foiling a jailbreak, he is set free. He soon develops feelings for Paulette Goddard, a teenage girl he met while escaping the cops after stealing a loaf of bread. The factory worker and the daughter had numerous adventures together as they flee the cops and fight for a better life.

They make their way out into the open road in the end. It had been five years since Chaplin had appeared on a movie screen when his film Modern Times was released to tremendous acclaim in 1936. He was the only one who refused to work in "talkies," concerned about preserving the silent film. Chaplin agreed to produce a soundtrack with music and sound effects, but no dialogue would be shown on screen, as he did in City Lights.

Modern Times is regarded as one of Chaplin's more lighthearted films. There are a lot of social commentaries, but he is mostly concerned with making people laugh. The botched attempt by Chaplin to keep up with the industrial assembly line is regarded as a great comedy moment.

A biographer of Charlie Chaplin, Jeffrey Vance, has written about the film's reception and legacy. Modern Times may be more timely now than when it was first published. The film's twentieth-century theme—the struggle to prevent alienation and preserve humanity in a modern, computerized world—exactly reflects the issues that face the twenty-first century. The experiences of the Tramp in Modern Times, as well as the accompanying comic mayhem, should provide strength and consolation to anyone who feels helpless cogs in a world beyond their control. Because of its universal themes and comedic uniqueness, Modern Times is one of Chaplin's greatest and most enduring pictures. It's the Tramp's ending, perhaps, more importantly, that pays respect to Chaplin's most famous figure and the silent-film era.

The Great Dictator is a satirical comedy-drama film directed, produced, scored, and starring British comic Charlie Chaplin that was released in 1940 in the United States. After being the sole Hollywood filmmaker to create silent pictures well into the sound film era, Chaplin made this his first true sound feature. Chaplin's picture criticized Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, fascism, anti-Semitism, and the Nazis. During the early days of World War II, when it was first issued, the United States was technically at peace with Nazi Germany and neutral. Chaplin portrays both a ruthless fascist dictator and a persecuted Jewish barber. The Great Dictator was a critical and financial success for Chaplin.

Modern critics have hailed it as a historically significant film, as well as one of the best comedies ever made and a significant work of satire. The Great Dictator, an American comedy film produced in 1940, starring and was directed by Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin's most financially successful film, it satirized Adolf Hitler and Nazism while also criticizing anti-Semitism. Chaplin portrayed a harsh tyrant who is mistaken for a Jewish barber in this film. He goes through with the charade, giving a speech in which he calls for peace and compassion. In a dual character, Chaplin also played a fascist monarch modeled after Hitler.

The Great Dictator was Charlie Chaplin's debut feature film with sound. When the film was released in 1940, the US was not yet officially at war with Nazi Germany. Character names like "Adenoid Hynkel," who stands in for Hitler, and ministers "Garbitsch" and "Herring," who are modeled after Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring, respectively, are parodies of fascist figures of the time. "Benzino Napaloni," the monarch of "Bacteria," was a parody of Italy's Benito Mussolini. One of the film's most iconic sequences features Hynkel dancing with a world balloon to Richard Wagner's music. Chaplin later remarked that he would never have been able to make the film if the true magnitude of the Nazis' atrocities had been widely recognized.

"However, Chaplin was not persuaded. He anticipated The Great Dictator would be a hit at the box office, and it was the second most popular film in the United States in 1941. On the 80th anniversary of the film's release, Chaplin's insight is even more impressive. The Great Dictator is a masterpiece that is both a hilarious comedy and a depressing agitprop drama, as well as a terrifyingly accurate depiction of Hitler's psyche. "He was a visionary," Costa-Gavras, the Greek-French doyen of political cinema, said in a making-of documentary. "When the world's leaders couldn't see the future, he stayed on Hitler's side."