Modern Times

In my quest to become a more well-versed movie watcher, I move into the 1930’s and onto a classic work by a film genius, Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. It’s one of his major films that I just hadn’t gotten around to watching until recently, and now that I have, I have some thoughts.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, as usual, it features his mustachioed Little Tramp character, this time as a drone on an assembly line. The film is largely a response to economic, political, and technological upheavals during and following the Great Depression. The Tramp can’t keep up at the increasingly automated factory and ends up losing his job. While out looking for work, he gets mistaken for a Communist party leader and ends up in jail. While there, he accidentally quashes a prison break and becomes a hero. To his dismay, he loses the three squares and a guaranteed bed every night when he is rewarded by being released back into a broke, jobless life on the streets. Along the way, he meets a beautiful, young street urchin played by Paulette Goddard, and together, they forge their way through a modern world that seems stacked against them. 

 My first impression of Modern Times is how it highlights the differences between Chaplin and last week’s star, Harold Lloyd. Lloyd was all about the set-up and the gag. He loved long, intricate sequences that built tension as he interacted with his ensemble. Chaplin, on the other hand, is a virtuoso whose singular, physical, almost balletic performances are always the most important thing. The initial sequence of the Tramp trying to keep up with his rushed, repetitive job as the line in the cartoonish factory moves faster and faster is a one-man symphony of twitches, pratfalls, and physical comedy – but only Chaplin gets the laughs. Everyone else on the screen is only there in service of him. It’s neither good nor bad that his work is like this; it’s just interesting to notice the differences in how silent stars approached their work.

My second thought is that Paulette Goddard is a revelation in this film. It is her first credited role, and she makes the most of it in a fiery, kinetic performance. Many times, it’s clear why a silent actor couldn’t make the transition to contemporary sound or color pictures, but Goddard seems as though she would be perfectly comfortable starring in a 21^st century movie today. Her performance in Modern Times is one of those moments when it becomes clear why an actor was a big deal.

My third thought about Modern Times is more of a question. What do we do with great creative work made by terrible people? Chaplin was a documented predator of young girls and openly had relationships with several of his teenage co-stars. Like many, many men in Hollywood, he used his immense power and influence to take advantage of the less powerful for his own gratification. I have no problem avoiding Woody Allen films because I find almost all of them listless, self-indulgent, and nowhere near as funny as he thinks they are. But Chaplin’s films are the real deal – inventive, ground-breaking, and often startlingly funny. But what do I do about the fact that if he were alive today, leading the life he lead back then, I would want him to be in jail, not on the screen?

The Gold Rush, The Kid, Modern Times – all are cinematic masterpieces created by someone who was simultaneously a genius and a predator. How to approach those films as a spectator is a thorny, complicated question. Is the art independent of the person who made it? Independent of their actions and crimes? Or by watching Modern Times or Chinatown or Annie Hall, am I at least indirectly complicit? There is no one-size fits all answer, but there is value in continuing to assess our relationship with art, artists, and our own conscience.

Safety Last

In my ongoing quest to be a more informed movie spectator, I’ve moved into the 1920s, the time when cinematic language started to coalesce and the American movie industry as we understand it really took shape. Of course, the films of this period are silent and black and white, and to modern viewers, they often look too ancient and foreign to possibly be funny or relevant today. But what I have found each time I have watched work by the silent stars of the day is that they are surprisingly funny and engaging, despite being nearly a century old.

I’ve seen my share of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton movies, but I had never seen a film by the other third of the great silent comedian holy trinity, Harold Lloyd. Chaplin, of course, is famous for his mustachioed little tramp character, and Keaton was known for his stone-faced stoicism in the face of his remarkable physical stunts, but Lloyd, with his round glasses and slicked back hair, often played the optimistic, ambitious, but naïve boy pratfalling his way to success in a tough world. 

Lloyd started in movies while still a teenager and had roles in several Keystone comedies. While under contract with Universal, he met Hal Roach, the aspiring filmmaker, who gave him some of his biggest breaks and who helped introduce him to Mildred Davis, the woman who would become his co-star and his wife. Around 1918, Lloyd developed the character with which he is most closely associated, the one he just referred to as “glasses.”

It’s this character who is the star of the comedy that really cemented Lloyd as an A-list actor, 1923’s Safety Last. It’s a love story, a workplace comedy, and it features some hilarious and iconic stunt sequences.

Safety Last is the story of the Glasses character leaving his small country town and the girl he loves to move to the big city where he intends to earn his fame and fortune. He can’t marry his sweetheart until his financial future is secure. Instead of making a fortune, however, he ends up sharing a room with a buddy, avoiding his landlord and the overdue rent, and trying not to earn the wrath of his boss at the department store where he works at the fabric counter. Instead of paying rent or buying food, Harold buys expensive jewelry and sends it home to his girlfriend, telling her all about his great success in the city.

Problems ensue when his sweetheart decides it’s not safe for a young, unattached man with that much money and success to be alone in the city. She comes for an unannounced visit and the sequence featuring Harold showing her around the department store while trying to convince her that he’s the boss without alerting his actual bosses is very funny. The film is at its best during sequences like this. Complication after complication builds the tension as Harold nimbly finds inventive, usually visually funny ways of getting out of trouble.

 Harold’s efforts of earn a fortune lead to the film’s most iconic moment. He overhears the department store owner offer a thousand dollars to anyone who can draw a lot of customers to the store. Harold offers half to his roommate if he will scale the outside of the building as a publicity stunt. The friend agrees but runs afoul of the law and so Harold has to climb the building himself while the friend checks in every other floor or so, assuring him that he’ll go the rest of the way just as soon as he ditches the cop chasing him. Harold clinging to the hands of the clock on the side of the building has been recreated many, many times. It’s a virtuosic sequence and worth seeing, but so is the rest of the movie. Safety Last and Harold Lloyd as a performer absolutely live up to the hype.

Within Our Gates

A funny thing about being an English teacher is that some people assume you’ve read everything. They’ll ask you about Moby Dick, The Grapes of Wrath, The Shining, and 50 Shades of Gray all in the same breath, figuring you have detailed thoughts on all of them even though you may not have read any them. (For the record, I have read two of those books – not saying which.) It’s the same with film. I’m a movie guy, so people assume I’ve seen all ten hours of The Decalogue as well as all eleven Friday the 13^th films. (Spoiler: I haven’t seen all of either.)

But I want to see more and be a more informed movie viewer, so this summer, I plan to watch a different film each week that I should have seen by now but haven’t. I’ll go through the decades, starting with the teens, and watch either a significant classic I’ve neglected to this point or an important but more obscure film that I’ve always wanted to see. Maybe the movies will turn out to be new favorites and I will kick myself for missing out all this time and maybe some weeks I’ll just nod and say, “Well, I guess I can scratch that off the list and never watch it again.”

This week, I begin with the earliest of the early: Oscar Micheaux’s important but nearly forgotten 1919 race film Within Our Gates. It’s a shame Micheaux isn’t more well-known because he was a film pioneer of the first order. Born the son of a slave in 1884, he ended up founding the Micheaux Film and Book Company in Chicago, one of the first and certainly the most successful production company owned and operated by an African American until Tyler Perry came along almost a century later. Micheaux wrote, produced, and directed more than forty films over the course of his career, several of them based on his own novels.

Produced in 1919 but released in 1920, Within Our Gates is set during the Jim Crow era and addresses the black experience in America at the time. It’s the story of Sylvia Landry, a young African American woman and her efforts to both find love and raise money for the Piney Woods School, an underfunded rural school for black children. The story in some ways is very typical of silent era drama – there’s melodrama and stageyness, lost love, murder, mistaken identities, chance meetings, the saving of a child about to be run down by a car, and a wedding at the end. Despite its period hokeyness, it takes seriously the world black Americans faced. It deals with the disparities in educational opportunities and legal inequity, social and class difference, and even the contrast between country and city life.  In revealing Sylvia’s backstory, the Ku Klux Klan attacks and lynches her parents and attempt to murder her brother. Sylvia herself is also nearly raped by what turns out to be her white biological father.

There are a couple of versions of Within Our Gates available on Youtube. The clearest version is from the Library of Congress, but unfortunately, it really is silent and doesn’t feature any music, which can make the film’s 80 minute run time seem a little long. While of course it’s going to seem old fashioned to a 21^st century viewer, I’m glad I saw it. Thanks to Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther and Ava Duvernay’s A Wrinkle in Time, this past year has been a historic one for black filmmakers, but it’s important to know that back before there was even a centralized fimmaking world or a Hollywood as we understand it now, Oscar Micheaux was running his own company, making his own films, and representing the black American experience on the silver screen.