There's a scene in Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times" that has a freaky resonance to the 24-hour-surveillance privacy concerns of the 21st century. Chaplin is a factory drone who has snuck off to the bathroom for a smoke; he has just lit up when the Boss appears on a wall screen behind him and orders the flustered worker back to the floor. Great comedy is timeless, and great social comedy is even more pointed in the Dilbert era.
When it came out, ironically, "Modern Times" seemed to have one foot stuck in the past. The film, which begins a one-week run today at the Brattle in a restored 35mm print, represented a silent genius's holding action against the talkie tide. Chaplin wrote and started to film a dialogue script but junked it when it seemed clear that the magic wasn't happening; he retreated, happily, to a world of street noises, intertitles, and no talking -- except for the scene in which he sings a yappy nonsense song while waiting on tables.
He also played, for the last time ever, the Tramp character that had endeared him to the planet -- a stand-in for humanity who, in the opening sequences of "Times," is crucified on the rack of modern labor. That sounds awfully serious, but anyone who has seen the hilarious assembly-line sequence that starts the movie off knows it's awfully funny, too. Chaplin's sentimental politics and peerless comic invention dovetailed more perfectly in this film than in any other he made, and when the Tramp helplessly takes his wrenches to the noses of his fellow workers or literally becomes a cog in the machine, you laugh and bleed at the same time.
Chaplin's costar was Paulette Goddard as "the Gamin" -- another one of the comedian's young, adoring mirrors. Yet Goddard (who married Chaplin around this time) gave as good as she got, and she seems vivaciously engaged with the world in a way the star never did -- when the two walk off together at the end of "Modern Times," it's as equals. Before that happens, there's the riotous night in an empty department store, with Charlie doing a ballet on roller skates that carries him time and again to the lip of a precipice; filmed in long shot, it's the result of painstaking rehearsal, yet Chaplin makes it look carefree, as though catastrophe was just one other dancing partner.
The real fall wouldn't come until after the war, when the rosy leftism of this movie would be introduced as evidence of the star's "communist" leanings. "Modern Times" is a final moment of silent grace, and anyone who knows Chaplin only as a vague icon of slapstick buffoonery -- i.e., your children -- should be forthwith frog-marched to the Brattle for remedial instruction.
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