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| RETURNING MAY 1 THU 2008 | ||
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(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. This new restoration of
the Chaplin masterpiece, chosen to close this year’s Cannes Film
Festival, entailed treating over 126,000 frames of film, correcting negative
scratches and picture deterioration, and restoring its rich black and
white cinematography. AN MK2 PRESENTATION RELEASED BY KINO INTERNATIONAL
Available at Amazon.com: |
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