"Modern Times." At the Tivoli
The Cinema
I AM WO much an admirer of Mr. Chaplin to believe that the most important thing about his new film is that for a few minutes we are allowed to hear his agreeable and rather husky voice in a song. The little man has at last definitely entered the contemporary scene ; there had always before been a hint of " period " about his courage and misfortunes ; he carried about with him more than the mere custard pie of Karno's day, its mtmners; its curious clothes, its sense of pathos- and its dated. poverty. There were occasions, in his encounters with Mind flower girls or his adventures in mean streets or in the odd little pitehpine mission halls where he carried round the bag or preached in pantomime on a subject so near to his own experience as the tale of David and Goliath. when, he seemed to go back almost as far as Dickens. Thy change is evident in his choice of heroine : fair and featureless with the smudged effect of an amateur water-colour which has run, they never appeared again in leading parts, for they were quite characterless. But Miss Paulette Goddard, dark. grimy, with her amusing urban and plebeian face, is a promis that the little man will no longer 'linger at the edge 01 mawkish situation, the unfair pathos of the blind girl and the orphan child. One feels about her as Hyacinth felt about Millicent in The Princess Casamassima : " she laughed with the laugh of the people, and if you hit her hard enough would cry with their tears." For the first time the little man does not go off alone, flaunting- his cane and battered bowler along the endless road out of the screen, Ile goes in company looking for what May turn up.
What had turned up was first a job in a huge factory twisting screws tighter as little pieces of nameless . machinery passed him on a moving belt, under the televised eye of the.manager. an eye that followed him even into the lavatory where by snatched an illicit smoke. The experiment of an automatie feeding 'machine, which will enable a man to be fed while he works, drives hint crazy- (the running amok of this machine, with its hygienic .mouth-wiper, at the moment when it has reached the Indian corn course, is horrifyingly funny ; it is the best scene, II think, that Mr. Chaplin has .ever invented). When he leaves hospital he is arrested as a communist leader (he has picked up a red street flag which has fallen off a lorry) and released again after foiling a prison hold-up. Unemploy- ment and prison punctuate his life, starvation and lucky' breaks, and somewhere in its course he attaches to himself the 'other piece of human refuse.
The Marxists, I suppose, will claim this as their film, but it is a good deal less and a good deal .more than socialist in intention. No real political passion has gone to it : the police batter the little man at- one-moment and feed him with buns -the next : and there is no warm maternal optimism, in thy -Mitchison manner, about the character of the workers : when the police are brutes, the men are cowards ; the little man is always left in the lurch. Nor do we find him wondering " what a socialist man should do," but dreaming of a steady job and the most bourgeois home. Mr. Chaplin, whatever his political convictions may be, is an artist and not a propa- gandist. He doesn't try to explain, but presents with vivid fantasy what seems to him a crazy comic tragic world without a plan, but his sketch of the inhuman factory does not lead us to suppose that his little man -would be more at home at Dneipostroi. He presents, he dOesn't offer, political solutions.
The little man politely giving up his seat to the girl- in the -crowded Black Maria : the little man when the dinner-bell sound tenderly sticking a spray of celery into the mouth- of the old .mechanic whose head has been caught between the cog-wheels : the little man littering the path of the pursuing detectives with overturned chairs to save his girl : - Mr. Chaplin has. _like Conrad, "a .few simple ideas " ; they could be expressed in much the same phrases courage, loyalty, labour,: against the same nihilistic background - of purposeless suffering. " Mistah Kurtz—he dead." These ideas are not enough for a. reformer, but they have proved amply sufficient for au
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