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Slapstick factory, Luddite poet. "Il faut être absolument moderne." (Rimbaud) Charles Chaplin at once takes stock of Metropolis and À Nous la Liberté, his Victorian dreamscapes can no longer hold the twentieth century at bay, the Tramp tightens the bolts of the machine that engulfs him. (Through the gears he slides like a strip of celluloid, cinema after all being the industry of images.) Hobgoblin of technology, the feeding apparatus that turns lunch break into torture session and still gets rejected by the boss, "not practical." Pan at the assembly line, the satyr's horns are the wrenches held up by the laborer short-circuiting from exhaustion. In the outside world he's an accidental communist, better to remain in jail where there's a bed plus the occasional plate of beans dusted with cocaine. Domestic reveries alongside The Gamin (Paulette Goddard), "we'll get a home, even if I have to work for it." Mechanisms and comrades in Chaplin's satirical dystopia, where the archaic and the radical are breathtakingly blurred in accord with Huxley's "more efficient means for going backwards." First seen as a bouncy buccaneer helping famished kids, the heroine makes the acquaintance of the Tramp in a moving police wagon, to the end they remain a fugitive couple. (Their imaginary abode offers grapevines and milk straight from the cow, their actual shack is located next to Mallarmé's "peu profond ruisseau.") The department store is a grand consumerist temple with a precipice within, cf. Lang's You and Me, after-hours intruders interrupt the Tramp's rollerskating with the message, "we ain't burglars—we're hungry." Orwell takes notice of the executive's looming two-way screens, just as Fellini is born in the waiter's melodic gibberish routine. ("Sing! Never mind the words" is a perfect cry for Chaplin's defiance of talkie expectations, the hum of engines and the gurgle of stomachs prove more significant than dialogue.) The supreme analysis is Tati's in Playtime. With Henry Bergman, Stanley "Tiny" Sandford, Chester Conklin, Al Ernest Garcia, Stanley Blystone, Richard Alexander, Murdock MacQuarrie, and Hank Mann. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |