The Great Dictator (1940)

USA, 125 minutes

Director / writer: Charles Chaplin

Photography: Karl Struss, Roland Totheroh

Music: Charles Chaplin, Meredith Wilson

Editors: Willard Nico, Harold Rice

Cast: Charles Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Jack Oakie, Reginald Gardiner, Henry Daniell, Billy Gilbert, Maurice Moscovitch

Getting back to this movie after decades, I was reminded of the old chestnut that “history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes” when a character named Epstein showed up. He’s Jewish and a powerful financier who must be turned to for assistance by the fascist and openly antisemitic regime of Tomainia, which is basically Germany in director and writer Charles Chaplin’s clonking sendup. Chaplin is Adenoid Hynkel, the Phooey (Fuhrer) of Tomainia, which happens to be in an uneasy alliance with Bacteria (Italy). The Tomainian swastika is two X’s, called the double cross. You can tell Chaplin was not holding back here (though an editor or collaborator might have come in handy). For a 1940 Hollywood picture it’s unusually blunt about its points, which is not to say always inspired. Chaplin also plays a Jewish barber and veteran of World War I who lives in the ghetto of an unspecified Tomainian city (he probably couldn’t think of a Warsaw gag ... where are Mad magazine writers when you need them?). The Jewish barber must endure the problems you would expect.

The picture is bloated at over two hours, ham-handed to an infinite degree (did I mention Rome here is called Aroma?), and so self-righteous it verges on chest-pounding narcissism, which are reasons I haven’t been back to it in a long time. In retrospect, this is the beginning of the end for Chaplin. I hated to see it and all that followed—some, admittedly, with bright moments, but it was also the period when he ruined The Gold Rush by trying to add sound. Still, nevertheless, I could not deny that The Great Dictator hits different in 2026. That’s what made the details of a relatively background character named Epstein so eerily remarkable.

Modern Times (1936)

USA, 87 minutes
Director/writer/music: Charles Chaplin
Photography: Ira H. Morgan, Roland Totheroh
Editors: Charles Chaplin, Willard Nico
Cast: Charles Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Henry Bergman, Tiny Sandford, Chester Conklin

I will lay it out straight here, because I may as well and no sense wasting time. Modern Times is such a longstanding favorite for me, with so many personal attachment points, that honestly I have little judgment or perspective on it. I just love it, every bit of it. For me, no Chaplin picture looks better. It is quintessentially "modern" in a way analogous to how we are all now "post-modern"; its heroic conceptions of architecture, design, and labor management (about which it is rightly dubious) feel like an entirely different time now. Yet Chaplin's iron backbone sunny-side views, unafraid to touch the treacle, balance the stark and formal geometries with warmth and humanity. Among other things it is a feel-good movie after all.

It is "modern" in many different ways. The music, by Chaplin again, is often shrill, staccato, and angular. The picture opens on an extreme close-up of a clock face with a sweeping second hand. It is an old-fashioned clock face, with Roman numerals, but the close-up is so tight it effectively transforms time itself into an abstraction. Modern Times is also acutely aware of the strikes, unemployment, class conflicts, and labor unrest ripping into the fabric of the culture and economy at the time of its release, deep into the Depression. Explicit cocaine use is not only acknowledged but played as a joke, and a good one. Chaplin's mincing about, and his use of characters such as a prison inmate working on a needlepoint project, imply layers of hidden farcical sexuality. And when the vagabond couple is left alone in a department store overnight the first thing they do is go to the toys section and start playing. Or is that "post-modern" to treat the human condition and/or enterprise as one conducted essentially by immature children?

City Lights (1931)

#1: City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931)

I realized later that I probably could have put Citizen Kane here and maybe even pulled it off. I got kind of cute with these last five picks—an embedded Top 5 for my #5, a four-hour movie for #4, a made-up trilogy for #3, and a matched pair of stellar performances for #2. I wanted my #1 to represent a singular, multifaceted talent at the top of his form, and that's Orson Welles and Citizen Kane without a doubt.

But it's also Charlie Chaplin and City Lights. The guy wrote it, directed it, edited it, stars in it, and he wrote all the music too. And it's great music. The talkies had already arrived and his moment was slipping away, but Chaplin still had a few good ones in him—his best, in fact—along with some strikingly innovative ideas about the place and purpose of sound. This is not a silent picture; it is, as billed, "a comedy romance in pantomime," and sound is a significant part of it even if dialogue isn't, for which he still uses (sparingly) the intertitle cards. It is original in ways that few pictures not done by Chaplin are.

Modern Times (1936)

#29: Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936)

I first saw this in 1972 on a rerelease that was most likely predicated on Chaplin winning one of those put-up-job Oscars, in this case for his score for Limelight, a 1952 picture for which he was somehow eligible that year. I was an angry teen on a bored Sunday moping around the house. My dad piled me into the car and dropped me at the theater. I thought it might have been the most ridiculous thing he had ever done for me—done to me, actually, I probably thought.

It turned out to be one of the best. Phil has been talking recently about the paucity of comedies on his list. I may (or may not) have a few more than him, but I know this. Most comedy classics of the period between the world wars are mostly lost on me: Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Laurel & Hardy, W.C. Fields, even the Marx Brothers. In company with others, especially on the rare occasions when I can find a packed theater, I laugh right along with everybody else—I love to be with people who are laughing; it's infectious. Alone, however, I barely crack a smile, and I'm more often just bored and restless. I understand this is entirely my own loss.

The Gold Rush (1925)

USA, 81 minutes (72 minutes, 1942 re-release)
Director/writer/editor: Charles Chaplin
Photography: Roland Totheroh
Music: Charles Chaplin (1942)
Cast: Charles Chaplin, Mack Swain, Tom Murray, Georgia Hale, Henry Bergman, Malcolm Waite

The Gold Rush offers another example of a classic movie that exists in multiple, somewhat controversial versions, although in this case, sadly enough, it's the auteur himself who is arguably the villain in the drama. Chaplin, in 1942—likely emboldened by his ability to survive in the "talkie" era, as evidenced by his three previous, laudable efforts, City Lights, Modern Times, and The Great Dictator, all of which managed to maintain the aesthetics he had established in the silent era even as they took shrewd advantage of the developing technologies—set himself to recutting The Gold Rush, which many consider his greatest picture. He trimmed away some 10 minutes, scored it, and then made the colossal error of removing the intertitles in favor of adding his own voiceover narration.

I was first exposed to the original version in a film class some 30 years ago—where, again, I wish I would have paid a little more attention (or at least kept my notes from the class), because I have to think the instructor, Rob Silberman, must have discussed these versions, and deliberately chose to show us the original. But I was blissfully unaware a year or two ago when I finally got around to seeing it again, and found, lo and behold, the simpering, unctuous voice of Chaplin carrying on as if he is reading bedtime stories to children. It seemed to me unbearable.

City Lights (1931)

USA, 87 minutes
Director/music: Charles Chaplin
Writers: Charles Chaplin, Harry Clive, Harry Crocker
Photography: Gordon Pollock, Roland Totheroh
Editors: Charles Chaplin, Willard Nico
Cast: Charles Chaplin, Virginia Cherrill, Florence Lee, Harry Myers, Al Ernest Garcia, Hank Mann

I was involved over much of the past six months with a couple of other friends in a Facebook project, just concluded, in which we counted down our 50 favorite movies in a group dedicated to the purpose. A few dozen people were along for the ride and chipped in with their own remarks, criticisms, praise, alternative selections, and talk about the weather and such as we went along. I have plans to port my list and write-ups over to this blog in a kind of meta anatomy of how I approach these kinds of countdowns, which I have been doing more in recent times than I ever thought I would have. More on that down the road.

Meanwhile, I'm just going to go ahead and give away the store here, partly because it's what's next on my ongoing project of writing about the pictures ranked in the essential They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? survey of critical consensus, partly because it surprised me how elusive my #1 proved to be not only to the two I was doing the countdown with, but also to friends of mine who were following along—I had really thought it was more or less common knowledge by this point, or at least somewhat readable from the picks I was making—and partly because the point of my exercise next year is not really going to be driving toward the big reveal of a top 10 and #1, but more looking closely at how I get there.