"A pairing of Chaplin’s perfect blend of comedy and melodrama."
– Dave Kehr, The New York Times

(1931) Chaplin on talkies, 1929: “I loathe them.” As stuffy orators intone at the unveiling of a monstrous group of civic statuary, the speech-less soundtrack imitates kazoos and chickens, even as the Little Tramp is revealed asleep in the arms of the matronly allegorical statue. And so, for the world of fans who had waited four years for Chaplin’s response to the talkie revolution, the answer was — except for a recorded music track, with sound effects like gunshots, clanging bells, and that whistle — a silent movie... and a masterpiece. But this time channeled through the double tracks of parallel plots: the suicidal zillionaire who, saved from drowning by Charlie, becomes his bosom buddy... until that darned sobriety returns; and Virginia Cherrill’s beautiful blind flower girl, who in offering the shabby Tramp a boutonnière, mistakes him for a swell stepping out from his limo. (Cherrill, a socialite and film neophyte, disliked Chaplin, and vice versa — he tried to fire her once and cast her only because she could avoid grotesquerie when faking blindness. Soon after, she became the first Mrs. Cary Grant.) En route, Charlie mistakes cheese for soap and confetti for spaghetti, gets stuck streetcleaning behind an elephant, interrupts a society soloist with whistle-augmented hiccups,continually unknowingly teeters on the brink as a street elevator up-and-downs behind his to-and-froing before a naked statue in shop window; and turns a safely-fixed-but-now-it-dangerously-isn’t prize fight into a hilariously synchronized pas de trois; all, ultimately for love of Cherrill, culminating in the legendary scene of recognitions: the final close-up (emulated by Giulietta Masina in Nights of Cabiria and Woody Allen in Manhattan) was later proclaimed by James Agee as “the greatest piece of acting and the highest moment in movies.” “If only one of Chaplin’s films could be preserved, City Lights would come the closest to representing all the different notes of his genius. It contains the slapstick, the pathos, the pantomime, the effortless physical coordination, the melodrama, the bawdiness, the grace, and, of course, the Little Tramp — the character said at one time to be the most famous image on earth.” – Roger Ebert. Approx 87 mins.
Showtimes: 1:00, 4:30, 8:00

A KINO INTERNATIONAL RELEASE.

(1936) Chaplin’s Little Tramp gets trapped in the coils of automation — at one point literally — so frenziedly tightening screws on the assembly line that, getting off it, he compulsively tightens the buttons on a woman’s behind — and later becoming the guinea pig for an efficiency-promoting feeding machine gone amok. Obviously inspired by René Clair’s À Nous la Liberté, not to mention Metropolis, and itself perhaps an influence on Orwell’s 1984 (note the televised Big Boss-cum-Big Brother catching Charlie smoking in the men’s room), Modern Times is a corrosive satire on the dehumanizing effects of technology — the screeches, groans, and grinds of the machines have more lines than the actors (the only spoken dialogue, all superfluous, issues from the Boss’s all-seeing bigscreen tv). But, despite its pre-occupation with the Depression, poverty and starvation, Modern Times also manages to be (amazingly) the most lighthearted comedy of the director/star’s later years, other highlights including the Tramp helpfully waving a red flag dropped by a departing truck, just as a Communist demonstration marches up behind him; getting thrown in the slammer, where after accidentally sniffing a fellow con’s “happy dust” he breaks up a prisoners’ riot; and that final shuffling walk into the horizon, the last the Tramp would take — but this time in the company of Paulette Goddard’s vivacious “Gamin.” Conceived as his farewell to the Tramp, Charlie remains mum — apart from a song improvised in gibberish when he loses a cuff with the words scribbled on it — in what is without question the last great silent movie. Approx 89 mins.
Showtimes: 2:45, 6:15, 9:45

AN MK2 PRESENTATION RELEASED BY KINO INTERNATIONAL

• View the trailer for this restoration [Requires the lastest version of QuickTime]
• Read Pauline Kael’s New Yorker Review
• Read J. Hoberman’s review in the Village Voice
• Kino International’s MODERN TIMES page

Available at Amazon.com:

Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema
by Jeffrey Vance (Author)

Available at Amazon:

CHARLIE CHAPLIN: INTERVIEWS
edited by Kevin J. Hayes