Spine 543: Modern Times

Modern Times is our first proper Charlie Chaplin film in the Criterion Collection - though The Immigrant (1917) was a bonus feature on Spine 330, Louis Malle's Au revoir les enfants (1987).

Modern Times is just such a classic film, and a perfect fit for us as it's Chaplin's first excursion into what could be considered political film. We'll get more of that from Charlie in a few months with The Great Dictator, and really cannot wait for that! For now his heart is in the right place even if he's doing a lot that Rene Clair already did in A Nous la Liberte with a better political message but no Chaplin set pieces so it's really hard to rank them against each other. Clair's production company actually sued over Modern Times, but settled out of court and Clair himself was horrified that they sued his friend Chaplin. In the end, we get two great films about the hellish nature of technology in the hands of capital.