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| Charles
Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Henry Bergman, Tiny Sandford |
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Anamorphic
widescreen |
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Dolby Digital
5.1 |
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DTS |
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Trailer(s) |
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Featurette(s) |
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Documentary |
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Audio commentary
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Deleted scenes
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Concept art
/ storyboards |
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Multi-angle
feature |
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Pre-recorded mechanical salesman:
Observe our counter-shaft, double-knee-action corn feeder, with
its synchro-mesh transmission, which enables you to shift from
high to low gear by the mere tip of the tongue. Then there is the
hydro-compressed, sterilized mouth wiper: its factors of control
insure against spots on the shirt front. These are but a few of
the delightful features of the Billows Feeding Machine.
The Tramp struggles to live in modern
industrial society with the help of a young homeless woman.
 As
the most widely recognized human character in the world, Charlie
Chaplin still managed to come up with a new, specific context that
would provide his Tramp character with his single most resonant
image: the little man stuck between the enormous cogs in a gigantic
machine. A figure increasinly at odds with the changing world around
him, Chaplin took sharp aim at the inhumanity of industrialized
society, marking his first fully realized attempt at social commentary
and paving the road to his even more ambitious next feature, The
Great Dictator.
For Modern Times, which still contains some of the funniest
comedy sequences ever committed to film, Chaplin still stuck to
his guns as a pantomime comedian, but made more concessions to
the blossoming sound film than in his previous masterpiece City
Lights. He allows other, dehumanized characters to speak,
though only through recording devices, while his own character's
voice is only heard in the gibberish of the memorable Nonsense
Song. As funny and masterfully realized a film as Modern Times is,
it's also the first film in which Chaplin's ambition to be an important
thinker begin to compromise his judgment in filmmaking. He tends
to take aim at rather easy targets, and indulges in a form of sentimentalism
that was quickly growing outdated in the sophisticated cinema of
the mid-1930s. This makes Modern Times an uneven but heartfelt
film, a milestone in cinema history nonetheless and a true classic
in the Chaplin pantheon. |
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A Region 1 DVD was originally
released by Image, with mediocre image quality. More recently,
the international distribution rights for Chaplin's feature
films have moved to the Paris-based MK2, which is releasing
double-disc DVD editions of his major work in collaboration
with Warner.
Warner's international release schedule is bafflingly complicated:
The Gold Rush, Modern Times, The Great Dictator and Limelight were
first released in North-America both individually and as
a first 'Chaplin Collection' box set on 1 July, 2003. All
ten feature-length titles in the Chaplin Collection were
then released at once on 22 September, 2003, in Europe, also
both individually and in a large variety of box sets including
a complete 18-disc collection and a seven-disc Essentials
Box. Both these box sets contain the 132-minute documentary
Charlie by Richard Schickel. The next batch of releases
for North-America is scheduled for early 2004. The
versions being released for Region 1 and 2 have identical
contents,
but
the Region
1
versions
suffer
from video errors resulting from poor PAL-to-NTSC conversion.
The Region 2 double-disc set from Warner/MK2 served as the
basis for this release.
The fullscreen image is
framed at its original aspect ratio of approx. 1.33:1. The
image has been meticulously restored, offering a clean, high-contrast
transfer that's impressive throughout. There is hardly any
print damage, and blacks are deep and solid. (NOTE: The films
in Warner/MK2's new Chaplin Collection were transferred from
the restored high-definition masters to PAL video. For the
Region 1 release of these DVDs, the PAL transfers were converted
to NTSC, resulting in many instances of ghosting, aliasing
and other conversion flaws. The Region 2 release therefore
boasts superior image quality to the American version. Read this
article for more information on the PAL-NTSC
issue.)
Both the original mono soundtrack and a new Dolby
Digital 5.1 remix are included on this release. The 5.1
remix sounds far less constricted than the mono track, with
some well-judged directional effects and a good spread of
the musical score without overly unnatural additions to the
original mono track.
The five-minute introduction by
Chapin biographer David Robinson once again establishes the
essential bits of context for the film, followed by an epsiode
in the 'Chaplin Today' series, which runs about 26 minutes
and again offers some glimpses of rare footage before inviting
a contemporary filmmaker to offer their thoughts on Chaplin's
influence on their work, and their more general appreciation
of this specific film. In this case, the featured filmmakers
are the Belgian Dardenne brothers, who dutifully pay hommage
while also plugging their own film Rosetta.
A very funny outtake of the Tramp trying
to cross a busy street is presented without any audio, while
the full version of the Nonsense Song, the final verse of
which was cut in Chaplin's 1956 reissue of the film, is presented
as a deleted scene. The earlier Image DVD
restored the song to its original length within the feature
proper, which unfortunately hasn't been repeated here. But
at least the full song can be appreciated once more on this
second disc. For fun's sake, there's also a karaoke version
of the shortened version of the Nonsense Song for those willing
to sing along to Chaplin's brilliant mock-French/Italian
gibberish.
The lengthiest supplement on the disc strangely turns out
to be the least relevant to the film itself: Behind
the Scenes in the Machine Age is a creaky film
produced in 1931, documenting the sad state of factory workers,
and women in particular. At 42 minutes, it runs far too long
for casual enjoyment, and would have been prefeable in excerpted
form, leaving more disc space for extras that had more to
with the film itself. Especially with the absence of any
form of soundtrack, this extended bit of industrial history
is for avid history fans only. The 1940 ten-minute short Symphony
in F is an odd color promotional film produced by
the Ford company celebrating the joys of assembly line work.
The colors are faded and the soundtrack horribly distorted,
but this is a fascinatingly bizarre extra nonetheless.
Another surprising supplement comes with Liberace's 1956
performance of Smile, the standard based
on the musical motif featured so prominently in Mordern
Times. Even without the more extravagant trappings of
his later career, the singer/pianist makes it a truly kitsch
affair. The 1967 ten-minute documentary The
First Time deals with the famous "cine
movil " project
that brought films to rural populations. These outdoor cinemas
showed Cuban films, newsreels,
and Chaplin's Modern Times.
A compilation of three trailers from
around the world features voice-overs
inEnglish, French, and German.
The Photo Gallery contains over 250 production
and behind-the-scenes stills, original story notes, the shooting
log, and production reports divided into eight animated
compilations. A collection of 24 international
film posters from various decades is also
included, as is the standard collection of scenes from all
ten titles in the Chaplin Collection.  A
succession of two stills from the film leads into the main static
menu screen, as with the other titles in the Chaplin Collection.
Dan
Hassler-Forest
Reviewed:
October 5, 2003
Click
here for IMDB info on Modern
Times.
Click here
to return to the front page.
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