The New Pictures

Modern Times (Charles Chaplin) is the first picture made by its star since City Lights (1931) and his third in seven years. In it, Chaplin sings one song but does not speak. The other actors are heard only when the action permits their voices to be mechanized through phonographs, television sets, radios. A musical score, written by Chaplin, accompanies the film.

City Lights was produced when talkies were both so novel and so bad that silence helped rather than hindered the picture. No such advantage aided Chaplin with Modern Times. Even in 1936, however, his older admirers will be able to accept the character which he has immortalized on the screen without sense of shock at such obsolete cinematic devices as subtitles and exaggerated pantomime. What may be the reaction of 10,000,000 cinemaddicts who have grown into the audience since the days when Chaplin pictures were everyday occurrences, is a problem to be answered by the box office. Judging by its reception in Manhattan last week, Modern Times is likely to find a satisfactory niche in the winter program of U. S. cinema entertainment. It is a gay, impudent and sentimental pantomimic comedy in which even the anachronisms are often as becoming as Charlie Chaplin's cane.

A worker in a steel factory, Chaplin has to screw nuts on plates in an assembly line. He is dexterous but uneasy. A fly lights on his nose. He brushes it off. The belt gets ahead of him. He follows it into the maw of a gigantic machine which has to be reversed to return him to the line. At lunch time, the president of the factory uses him to test a new eating machine which throws soup in his face, jams a corncob against his teeth, pounds his face with a blotter. After this hideous experience, Chaplin goes wild. First he races about the factory pulling all the switches in sight. Next he goes outdoors and scares a lady by waving wrenches at her because the buttons on her dress remind him of the nuts on his assembly belt. Chaplin goes to jail where he enjoys life until, by helping quell a prison mutiny, he wins a pardon. Faced once more with the task of confronting a world where even less eccentric and more ambitious individuals are having a hard time, he experiences a series of disasters.

In a shipyard, a foreman asks for a wedge. Chaplin knocks one out of a cradle, thus launching an unfinished boat. He goes back to work in the steel factory. The workers go on strike. He gets a job as night watchman in a department store where he enjoys roller skating through the corridors at night. When three old cronies break into the store, Chaplin is constrained to share a snack with them in the wine department. Next morning he wakes up on a counter under a mass of lingerie. He goes to jail.

By this time Chaplin has made the acquaintance of a Gamin (Paulette Goddard). She has patched up a shack where both can live in airy disdain of the Hays organization. When Chaplin gets out of jail, the Gamin is dancing in a cabaret whose proprietor agrees to employ Chaplin as a singing waiter. There occurs a scene of tray juggling, followed by the Chaplin song, in gibberish. Juvenile court officials descend on the cabaret to arrest the Gamin. Escaping, she and Chaplin are last seen walking together up that desolate and endless road upon which so many of his films have sadly ended.

It took Chaplin two years to make City Lights. He made Modern Times in 148 shooting days. Reason: for the first time in his career he used a script. Far less complete than those used by other producers, it merely sketched the story. As usual, Chaplin outlined his own sets, directed by acting out all parts, developed his own camera angles on the sets, cut each sequence after making it, scored the picture himself in the projection room by playing accompaniments on a small piano with a musical stenographer to write down what he played. Though he plays violin, banjo, harp, organ, concertina and several brass horns, Chaplin cannot read music. The script also contained dialog, of which less than 10% is spoken or used as captions, inserted to give actors timing for their scenes. Sample, from the scene in which The Tramp and The Gamin make friends, sitting on a sidewalk.

Gamin: What's your name?

Tramp: I have no name.

Gamin: No name?

Tramp: It's a silly one. You wouldn't like it. It begins with X.

Gamin: Not eczema?

Tramp: It's worse than that. It's Charlie.

Gamin: There's no X in that.

Tramp: I never thought of that.

Chaplin's small studio, spread out in the sun behind high walls on La Brea Avenue, is like a legendary castle charmed to resist change by some sorcery laid upon it before talkies were invented. In it he has made small effort to keep abreast of new developments in the industry whose one acknowledged genius he is. He sees few pictures, afraid that other actors might influence him. Shooting Modern Times, he worked harder and more systematically than ever before. He got to the lot at ii or 12 o'clock every morning, seldom left before 2 or 3 o'clock the next morning. Chaplin casts his own pictures but never interviews applicants for roles.

He peeps through a curtain while a subordinate conducts the interview, signals privately whether or not the applicant should be hired. This is because he cannot bear to refuse a part. Once in a music hall, an audience booed him. He has not forgotten the humiliation.

Because in the last five years Chaplin has been forced to think of himself as a genius, to recognize in his productions the underlying themes which others first perceived in them, his pictures have lost spontaneity. In Modern Times, the "message" has been underlined rather than, as in the old days, subconsciously implied. Socially, Chaplin's prestige has steadily increased since he went into semiretirement. Although cinemaddicts may be less interested in him. the critical recognition of the 1920's has brought many notables to his door. Some, like Poet Laureate Masefield, who tried repeatedly to get an interview, he unaccountably dodges. Others, like Albert Einstein and H. G. Wells, he welcomes. In entertaining visiting notables, Chaplin's method is to discourse on his guest's specialty. For Wells, he is a student of world affairs; for Einstein, a mathematician. He once spent an evening telling Charles Mitchell how to run National City Bank. It is a tribute to his social prestige that, because he chose her as his companion as well as his leading lady, Paulette Goddard, whose most noteworthy previous role in cinema had been as a Goldwyn Girl in The Kid from Spain, was internationally famed long before Modern Times was previewed.

Paulette Goddard's influence upon Chaplin has been noteworthy. When they go out together they use not his car, a Cadillac assessed on the Los Angeles tax rolls at less than $100, but her Rolls-Royce. She has persuaded Chaplin to discard occasionally his customary costume of sneakers, white ducks, open collar, and sport coat for more decorative garments. She has modernized his house to the extent of eliminating a decade's accumulation of old scripts, broken dictographs, phonograph records. Chaplin hates parting with such memorabilia as much as he hates parting with actual cash--a trait so noticeable that, when he is lunching with his staff, a subordinate usually pays the check, later reimbursing himself from company funds.

Chaplin swims, plays tennis, never smokes, drinks only an occasional public glass of champagne. He gives infrequent parties. His intimate friends--the Sam Goldwyns, Douglas Fairbanks. King Vidor --are few. At the dinner table, Chaplin, whose screen appearances have been limited for 20 years to impersonations of a small tramp in baggy pants, will prove himself the most brilliant pantomimist alive with interpretations, sometimes lasting as long as an hour, of Fagin or Captain Bligh, Marlene Dietrich or Franklin D. Roosevelt. He still wants to play Napoleon.

The Story of Louis Pasteur (Warner Brothers) is a serious attempt to create a serious cinema biography of a great man. Paul Muni studied biographies of Pasteur, conferred with laboratory experts, spent days perfecting his makeup. Warner's research staff scurried to France to fetch authentic props. Authors of the screen play worked hard to condense the chemist's life into a dramatic script that would be historically valid.

As serious cinema, The Story of Louis Pasteur is at its best in the faithful reproduction of the following incidents: Pasteur's spectacular triumph, when 25 bleating sheep, previously inoculated, prove to a throng of skeptical doctors that death from anthrax can be prevented; his decision to risk his life & work by treating nine-year-old Joseph Meister with injections which he had tested only on his menagerie of dogs; his 70th birthday celebration before a distinguished Sorbonne audience. So well has Paul Muni caught the spirit which immunized the great French scientist against despair that even cinemaudiences who know they are fanciful will not cavil at the introduction of a villain, Dr. Charbonnet (Fritz Leiber); at the 18-year postponement of Pasteur's paralytic attack; at other slight tinkerings with truth. Josephine Hutchinson as Pasteur's unselfish and understanding wife is likewise without flaw, helps to make Muni's interpretation all the more complete.

Warner Brothers boasts of having originated most major recent cinema trends.

Unable to patent their latest idea, but unwilling to see it maltreated, they are rushing screen biographies of Major General Goethals and Dr. Gorgas, Ludwig van Beethoven, Florence Nightingale (Kay Francis). Other producers plan to recreate Houdini (George Raft), Buffalo Bill, Elias Jackson ("Lucky") Baldwin. To be released this week by Twentieth Century-Fox is The Prisoner of Shark Island, the story of Dr. Samuel Alexander Mudd, (TIME, Feb. 4, 1935).

The Petrified Forest (Warner). One school of cinema criticism holds that, since the camera can reproduce motion, and since changes in cinema sets are more easily managed than in the theatre, any film which fails to include wide geographical range combined with something in the nature of a Mack Sennett chase falls short of its function. The Petrified Forest, an expert adaptation of Robert E. Sherwood's successful play, is a convenient case in point for critics who believe that this theory is nonsense. All the significant action of the piece occurs in the lunch room of a prairie Bar-B-Q parlor. There an itinerant romanticist (Leslie Howard) in search of a reason for living or Hying, a neurotic gangster (Humphrey Bogart) running away from a sheriff's posse, the proprietor's daughter (Bette Davis), who reads Villon in the intervals between serving customers, her grandfather (Charley Grapewin), whose proudest memory is that Billy the Kid once fired at him and missed, spend most of their time sitting around and talking. Behind the lines of their talk, the picture lays the fuses of a superb melodramatic situation which explodes suddenly with the arrival of the posse.

When the smoke clears away, all four principal characters have more or less found what they are looking for. Cinemaddicts who go to The Petrified Forest looking for something as exciting as prairie pictures with Indians on horseback will do likewise. Like the play, of which Screenwriters Charles Kenyon and Delmer Daves and Director Archie Mayo were daring enough to make the film an almost literal transcription, the picture is an enormously skillful romantic melodrama, so smoothly acted and so shrewdly written that even the pseudo-philosophy uttered by Leslie Howard seems worth listening to. Good shot: Gangster Duke Mantee listening to a football game on the radio.

The Lady Consents (RKO). Ann Harding has a clause in her contract which permits her to select her own stories. The only kind of stories she likes are those in which she appears as a lady who, disappointed in love, eventually gets what she wants by mouthing whimsicalities beneath a stiff upper lip. The Lady Consents, true to type, is less painful than most of Miss Harding's pictures: 1) The dialog is consistently literate; 2) Margaret Lindsay as Miss Harding's rival gives a clever impersonation of a hardboiled vixen; 3) The picture includes a character new to the cinema, that of a lovable father-in-law (Edward Ellis) who, by dying heroically after a propitious shooting accident, helps reunite Ann Harding and her husband (Herbert Marshall).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.