Chaplin believed that the ‘theme of life is conflict and pain,’ and recalled years later that ‘all my clowning was based on this.’ His comedy, following the most conventional of plot formulations, involved ‘the process of getting people in and out of trouble.’ Humor best served these troubling themes, Chaplin believed, because ‘it heightens our sense of survival and preserves our sanity…because of humor we are less overwhelmed by the vicissitudes of life.’
The origins of Chaplin’s screen persona, as Chaplin himself noted, may be discerned in his Dickensian childhood. In his self-invention as the tramp who survives, even as he continues to suffer the abuses of capitalist society, Chaplin repeatedly re-enacted his own tumultuous early life. He dramatized how today’s working man too easily becomes tomorrow’s homeless tramp, the opening concept in Modern Times…
No twentieth-century artist was to reveal more sympathy for the poor and the outcast, for the working man. Chaplin offered not pity for the ‘little fellow,’ but admiration for this ordinary man with his endless capacity to survive, for his energy, fortitude, integrity, generosity and humanity. The Little Fellow remains a person without malice, no matter the abuse inflicted upon him by bullies, the rich and their hired hands, the police. Each of the Chaplin films with the Little Fellow at its center concludes in a spiritual victory.
Chaplin became the great cinema poet of the Depression with City Lights, Modern Times, and The Great Dictator, a trilogy dramatizing the effect on the ordinary man of the global economic collapse. Modern Times would offer the American film its first realistic images of America under economic siege, unemployed workers filling the streets, perpetual strikes, the starvation of those crowded out of the economy and heart-rending Hoovervilles.
The Great Dictator connects the Depression with the rise of the Nazis. Chaplin defied the British, who threatened to ban the film should he make it, and the Jewish producers who urged him to desist because such a film could only further inflame the Nazis and anger Hitler. Chaplin replied that Hitler couldn’t be any worse than he was.
Encouragement issued from Franklin Roosevelt, who told Chaplin he personally would ensure that The Great Dictator was distributed. American Communists refrained dutifully from criticizing Hitler during the period of the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact. But Chaplin took no orders from Moscow when it came to his art—or his politics—and went ahead anyway. Defiantly he ignored the Communist Party line urging ‘peace’ during the period of the Pact.
In The Great Dictator, as in Modern Times, workers complain about the inhumane conditions of their existence, with the difference that in the later film they are promptly arrested and shot. At the end of this, his first sound film, Chaplin reveals he has something to say. Rejecting an aesthetic that, even at such a moment of urgency, forbids the didactic, Charles Chaplin the man steps out of character to address his audience.
Decrying the ‘machines’ that ‘have left us in want,’ no more here than in Modern Times does he blame the “Machine Age” for the world’s troubles. Rather, it is those who own the machines, taking little notice of his needs, who have threatened the very survival of the Little Fellow. It is they who have permitted the rise of fascism.
SOURCE: Modern Times. Joan Mellen. London: Cromwell Press, 2006. [pgs. 6-14]
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