DVD Watch

Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times

It was a long time coming, but Criterion has finally released Chaplin's finest feature film, and while it looks as good on this DVD as it did the day it was made – Criterion's print is predictably pristine – watching Modern Times today, you're struck by just how timeless it feels. A heartbreaking yet ultimately hopeful love story between Chaplin's penniless Little Tramp and the beloved "gamine," played by a downright luminous Paulette Goddard, the narrative is also bursting with the director's left-leaning politics, which pop in and out of being like transgressive little exclamation points throughout. Filmed during the height of the Great Depression, there's a grimly anarchic spirit layered throughout that's continuously leavened by a wealth of classic Chaplin gags, including but hardly limited to the factory sequences (the surreal bit with Chaplin literally sucked into the belly of the beast could have come straight from Buñuel's nightmares) and a bit of skating on the edge of an abyss that could serve as the perfect metaphor for the Tramp's (and Chaplin's) entire oeuvre. Criterion's double-disc set includes thorough and informative audio commentary from Chaplin biographer David Robinson, a pair of "lost" sequences (that, frankly, add little to the already seamlessly edited film), and assorted Chaplin shorts. These have been released elsewhere before, but Criterion gives them a new life here, particularly the splendid two-reeler "The Rink." Two never-before-seen films are the stars of this extras-jam-packed collection. The first is the remarkable "All at Sea," a home movie documenting a voyage to Catalina Island by Chaplin, Goddard, and a very young Alistair Cooke aboard Chaplin's yacht, The Panacea (!). Shot on 8mm and all of 18 minutes long, it shows Chaplin, lithe and tanned, and crew clowning around to extreme comic effect. The other gem on the second disc is "For the First Time," a 1967 documentary by Cuban filmmaker Octavio Cortázar who, along with a group of projectionists, traveled into the remote areas of the island to show Modern Times to indigenous communities "for the first time." Cortázar caught the absolute magic that occurred when modern technology – and Charlie Chaplin, to boot – was first introduced to a tiny, rural community. You can guess the effect it had on the children, their awe-struck faces sublimely captured by Cortázar as the Little Tramp enters and changes their lives forever. It may sound flip to say it outright, but Modern Times remains as fresh and bold and funny a film as it was upon its first release.