Reelin' In The Years -- Modern Times (1936), directed by Charlie Chaplin

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Powerhouse" by The Raymond Scott Quintette

       A couple of reviews and 13 years ago, we talked a little about Buster Keaton and his enormous impact on comedy in film. Well now it’s time to talk about the other giant of the silent comedy era: Charlie Chaplin. While most folks might only know him today as that one guy who did that one speech in that old movie that one time, that fact is that Chaplin was one of the burgeoning film industry’s biggest stars, the Johnny Depp of his day. With a career that lasted from 1914 to the late 1960’s, Chaplin appeared in at least 82 films, many of which he directed and starred in himself. He survived a couple world wars, a great depression, a McCarthyist witch-hunt, several wives, and the transition from silent to sound cinema. If anyone could challenge Keaton as the most influential comedian in film history it would have to be Chaplin, and a good argument could be made that it’s actually the other way around. Simply put, if the conceit of this little tour we’re on is to expand our horizons a little bit, see the big picture (or screen as the case may be), then The Tramp needed to make an appearance. 1936 had a lot of contenders for possible entries, Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Hitchcock’s Sabotage, the legendary Reefer Madness, but since I’ve already seen The Great Dictator then die had already been cast. If we’re getting Chaplin, we’re getting him now.

       Released in 1936, written, directed, produced, starring and composed by Charles Chaplin, this was the sixth out of eight films that he put out through United Artists, a company that he had actually helped found in 1919. Chaplin plays an unnamed factory worker whose days consist of unscrewing nuts on tiny pieces of metal. After a particularly rough day involving an automatic feeding machine and a trip through some gears, our factory worker suffers a mental breakdown and is sent to the hospital. When he gets out, he finds that things have changed; The factory has closed down since he’s been away, and it’s dragged everything around it into the gutter. Poverty brings about societal unrest and from there violence, and it seems that our perpetually unlucky worker can’t help but stumble into trouble wherever he goes. Yet when he meets up with a crafty street urchin (played by his future wife and even more future ex-wife Paulette Goddard), it seems like his luck might just be changing for the better.

       Now if you’re getting into this era of film you might wonder what it is that really separates Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, given that they were both silent performers. While I have essentially watched only a single film from each of them, I’m fairly confident in saying that it is in how their characters arrive in these situations. Keaton is a very reactive character I think, he stumbles into bad situations and stumbles his way out. Chaplin on the other hand is very active; While he certainly has his share of bad luck, a lot of his misfortune comes down to feeding his id or just outright messing with people. Keaton was a put-upon gentleman, Chaplin was a big kid. If you’ve ever seen Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean, that is very much a character in the Chaplin mold.

       Modern Times also shows us that Chaplin was very visually minded as an artist. Chaplin’s look has long since become iconic, the toothbrush mustache, floppy shoes and derby hat, and his movements are very expressive and physical, very much a ‘you can tell what he’s thinking from the back row’ style of pantomime. You’ve also got the intimidating, art deco machinery of the factory, and visual gags like a pocket watch getting caught in an industrial press and coming out flat like a pancake. It feels very cartoonish at times, which makes sense because Chaplin feels like a very cartoonish type of comedian in a way that Keaton could not match. At least not in Our Hospitality, his later films might be more farcical.

       Other than Chaplin himself, I also found myself quite taken with Paulette Goddard. Unlike other female characters of the time, coughcoughEllieAndrewscough, the street urchin (or ‘gamin’ as she’s titled in the film) has a sense of agency and intelligence that I found refreshing, and Paulette brings that out with a youthful exuberance. I know most folks will find it a bit skeevy that Chaplin’s character is hanging around a teenage girl, just as they were in real life when nearly the 50 year old Chaplin married the 26 year old Goddard, but what I appreciate is that their relationship is not really treated as a romantic one. Yes they literally shack up together (Chaplin sleeps in a chicken coop or something), and there’s a sequence where they imagine a life akin to the cliche suburban fantasy, but it feels more like children playing make-believe than anything serious. They never felt like lovers to me, basically, but two people who forged a close bond by enduring hardships together. Like Midnight Cowboy if it were written by an optimist, although maybe the guys in that movie were supposed to be fucking too, I don’t know. Just feels platonic to me.

       Jumping on to that point, I think what makes me really like Modern Times beyond the jokes is that feeling of optimism and camaraderie. The movie starts with this grandiloquent statement about individual enterprise and the pursuit of happiness, but we are quickly shown the truth: Working long grueling hours while the boss kicks back and reads Tarzan comics, and when they decide to close up shop your ‘pursuit of happiness’ becomes ‘hoping for a shorter wait at the bread line’. It’s easy to feel discouraged in such a world, that it's a cruel unforgiving place and there’s no hope to be found, but it’s important to remember that a lot of people are feeling that way as well. So if you really try and you put your hand out there, maybe someone will put their hand out too, and the weight of the world on your shoulders might start to feel a bit lighter. It might still be bad, but you won’t have to face those problems alone.

       The one thing I might categorize as a misstep is how Chaplin approaches the sound issue. We’re already several years into the sound era at this point, but it seems like Chaplin isn’t interested in letting go of his bread & butter quite. So you have sound sometimes, you have spoken dialogue sometimes, but the majority of the film is in standard silent format with cards and all that. Which I guess makes it feel a bit unique, and it leads to a fun bit near the end, but also a tad superfluous. As if Chaplin wanted a completely silent movie and he was pushed into adding sound, which might have been the case. Personally I wouldn’t have minded an all-silent movie, throw another one on the pile, but I also would have been fine if it had been a sound movie and Chaplin just didn’t talk. It works for silent protagonists in every JRPG, don’t see why it couldn’t work here.

        I’m a bit surprised by how much I enjoyed Modern Times. The comedy still held up, it had a message that’s all the more relevant these days, and it managed to perfectly capture that bittersweet feeling by the end that really wrenches on your heartstrings. Highly recommended, maybe do a double feature with The Great Dictator if you’ve got the time. So with all these good vibes in the air, how about for our next stop on the tour we take a look at one of the most popular comic groups in film history? 

Reelin' In The Years -- It Happened One Night (1934), directed by Frank Capra

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Let It Happen", by Tame Impala

       The word ‘Oscar’ doesn’t get bandied about all that often round these parts. My personal interest, and the focus of this blog, has always been that of the genre film, and the Academy Awards rarely deigns to look in that direction, unless it’s to offload a couple of special effects trophies. Yet this is our Reelin’ In the Years tour, a showcase of a century of film, and it just wouldn’t feel right if I just continuously scrounge around for the more obscure movies just to maintain some kind of street cred. So if I’m going to take a trip into the heart of Oscar territory, I might as well swing for the fences with one of the only films in the history of the Academy Awards to win Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay in one sitting (the other two being One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Silence of the Lambs). Get them all out of the way now, you know?

       That film is It Happened One Night, based on the story by Samuel Hopkins Adams, written by Robert Riskin, and directed by Frank Capra. Claudette Colbert stars as Ellie Andrews, a spoiled heiress who has been locking horns with her father over her decision to marry handsome and totally on the level King Wesley against her father’s wishes. When Pops declares that he is going to force Ellie into an annulment, she literally jumps ship and swims to Miami, with the intent to take a bus up to New York and meet up with Wesley. Which sounds like a good idea, until you remember that she’s an heiress and thus totally incompetent. Enter down-on-his-luck journalist Peter Warne (Clark Gable) who, sensing the story that’ll get him back in the good graces of his editor, decides to help her out along. But who could have guessed that during this long trip to the Big Apple that certain feelings would begin to develop?

       Certainly not the movie industry, as they were so impressed with the ‘person of privilege is left on their own and must rely on a worldly lower-class person, which of course leads to romance’ angle that we’ve seen recycled numerous times over the years. Not only that, but Clark Gable’s character would go on to be a huge influence on the characterization of Bugs Bunny, in particular his eating of carrots. Hell, that old gag where someone tries to hitch-hike and it fails until you show off a little leg? That’s from this film as well. This is really the movie equivalent of a primary source in history class, so much of films would be all have a common origin from this film here, and much like in the case of Frankenstein this film gets a recommendation purely from a historical perspective.

       Man alive, but this movie felt like a slog to watch though. The thing about romantic comedies to me, especially ones that are based on unequal levels of power as this film is, is that they have to reach an equilibrium. The loner appreciates the value of friends, the asshole learns to be more compassionate, and so on. None of which happens here. Ellie starts off as a dim bulb heiress and stays that way throughout the entirety of the film, and it’s the same with Peter as this abrasive, verbally aggressive guy. While there are certainly segments that build up the relationship, and in those segments I’d say Colbert and Gable do have a certain chemistry, it never felt to me like these characters had really changed over the course of the story. Beyond the fact that they wanted to fuck each other rather than someone else.

       Speaking of romance, it might just be my modern sensibilities talking, but the romance in It Happened One Night comes across as really...creepy? Like there’s several moments throughout the movie where it feels like they're infantilizing Ellie, and when it’s coupled with romantic tension it doesn’t sit right. Plus there’s the fact that most of Peter’s dialogue towards her is dedicated to insults and demoralizing statements, in a joking manner or otherwise. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing if, and that’s a definitive if, Ellie gave it as good as she got, thus establishing the relationship to be on even footing. Which it doesn’t, and so comes across as less of a romantic comedy and more of some kind of BDSM jailbait roleplay scenario. Or a classic example of ‘negging’, as the kids call it.

       It doesn’t do the actors all that well either. Clark Gable comes out pretty well, it’s pretty easy to see why he was one of the big names of Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’, but Claudette Colbert...this film really doesn’t do her any favors in my opinion. Much as I described earlier she’s not especially shrewish at the beginning of the movie but she’s not especially down-to-earth by the end of the film either. She doesn’t sacrifice anything, she doesn’t suffer so she doesn’t grow as a character, maintaining this aura of vapidity through the entire course of the film. Which I admit is more an issue with the character of Ellie than Colbert as an actor, and Claudette Colbert had a storied career, but every time she was on screen I could feel myself getting more and more annoyed.

       As I said, as it regards film history It Happened One Night has a recommendation, but personally I just can’t give it the thumbs up. It’s one of those movies where I zoned out hard about a third of the way though and it never pulled me back in. Maybe if you’re in a relationship you’ll get something out of it, but I feel like if you can relate to a relationship where one partner is verbally abusive and the other is co-dependent then you might have bigger problems then what movie you're going to watch. Hopefully the next stop on our tour will be a bit more up-to-date.

Reelin' In The Years -- Frankenstein (1931), directed by James Whale

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Right On, Frankenstein!", by Death From Above 1979

       Years ago, when in a fit of youthful arrogance I decided to give this whole ‘movie review’ thing a try, the film I decided to choose to kickstart the whole affair was James Whale’s film Bride of Frankenstein, released by Universal Pictures in the year 1935. Proper logic, or at least good etiquette, might have suggested that I start with the original film in the series first. If Star Wars has taught us anything, it was that starting the middle of a story and then going backwards doesn’t work out too well after all. I had seen Young Frankenstein though, I had read Mary Shelley’s novel and I had good ol’ cultural osmosis, so I figured that was good enough and went through with it. And the rest is history, really bad history.

       Years later, when I decided to revisit old movies and old monsters, my mind naturally turned to Frankenstein. Rather than covering the original though I went with another sequel, the under-appreciated Son of Frankenstein. I believe my thinking at the time was that because I had already seen Frankenstein outside of the review process, which I believe I had at some point, then it was no longer a first impression and thus less legitimate of a review. Whether that’s the right mindset is also something I’ve considered, but when I compiling the missing years for the Reelin’ in the Years tour and discovered 1931 was one of those years, it seemed like fate was telling me it was finally time to close the book on this case. Taking a look back 1931 wasn’t a bad time for the cinema; Not only did you have Dracula, but Fritz Lang’s landmark crime thriller M, Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, Robert Mamoulian’s City Streets, and on and on. Yet of all the films it could have been, it could only truly be Frankenstein.

        Released on November 21, 1931, Frankenstein was directed by Thunderblog alum James Whale, who would later work with Universal on Bride of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and The Old Dark House. The screenplay was done by Francis Edward Farough and Garrett Fort, while the story was by John L. Balderston and Richard Schayer, obviously based on the novel by Mary Shelley as well as the stage play by Peggy Webling. I think by this point the plot goes without saying, but in case you’re going in blind, here it is: Dr. Frankenstein, a frustrated young genius in the field of medical science, decides the only way to prove his radical theories is to steal a bunch of body parts and organs, stitch ‘em all together and zap the whole thing till it comes to life. Which he does, and it works, only the brain he used was part the expiration date and the Monster ends up going nuts. Thus Frankenstein is moved to destroy his creation, questions are raised about mankind’s hubris, and it is finally determined that fire bad. Also if you live by a lake you should make sure your kids know how to swim.

       I don’t know if any adaptation of a work has proven so influential over a premise as Universal’s Frankenstein has been to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The whole idea of the Monster being created by stitching body parts together and zapping it to life with lightning comes from this film (although it’s technically not lightning that does it), as well as Karloff’s now iconic flat-top,bolt-necked appearance. There’s a few things that never really carried over; Frankenstein’s name being Henry rather than Victor (although there’s a character named Victor here just to make things confusing) for example, and ‘Henry’s’ hunch-backed assistant named Fritz would be largely be replaced by his hunch-backed assistant named Igor, but for the most part this film has informed 99% of everything Frankenstein going forward. Even films that try to look more period-appropriate or stick more closely take some measure of influence from this film, especially in regards to the creation of the Monster. So strictly from a historical perspective Universal’s Frankenstein has more than earned a recommendation, although that doesn’t necessarily say much about it as a movie beyond being the first past the post (aside from the one movie Edison did back in 1910). 

       As a movie then, Frankenstein feels a bit off. Rather than starting with ‘Henry’ Frankenstein’s origins and the building up to the act, we start in media res, with the Monster being brought to life almost immediately. Then immediately after that we jump into the Monster going crazy and all that, with characters and relationships just kind of happen. I assume that this is largely a result of the film being an adaptation of the stage play rather than the novel, but apparently this was in the days when adapting the theatre to the theater was still in its infancy. Lots of tell and not enough show, if you catch my drift.

       Of course Frankenstein is the role that introduced the world to Boris Karloff, in spite of the fact that his career started back in 1918, and seeing him here it’s easy why and how this version of the Monster became THE version of the Monster. Karloff would portray the Monster several times after this, but he’s never looked as good as he does here. The sunken cheeks, the lifeless eyes set in dark sockets, the way he stumbles and stomps about like his legs barely work, I don’t think even Night of the Living Dead captured the premise of a living corpse. He captures your eyes as soon as he gets on screen, and it’s surprising that such an iconic character doesn’t actually get all that much to do. Of course you’ve got the infamous scene with the girl at the lake, and a little bit of stuff when he’s introduced, but it’s not until Bride of Frankenstein that the Monster as a sympathetic character was fully established. For now he’s just a grunting weirdo in big shoes.

       We move on to Colin Clive then, whose inclusion in this film is also rather bittersweet in hindsight. Colin Clive’s portrayal of the titular Frankenstein is almost as iconic as that of Karloff’s, exuding an air of supreme arrogance and barely restrained mania, and his frantic shout of ‘It’s alive!” is easily one of the most famous lines in cinema. However, that Frankenstein only exists in the first third of the movie, the rest of the time he’s just Henry, the dude who’s just there. Even near the end of the film, the point which you’d think would be ‘Frankenstein is finally driven to destroy his creation’, and the film claims it as such, Frankenstein feels like an ancillary character through the whole thing. His entire climatic final showdown with the Monster amounts to him getting beat up and thrown off a balcony, and I’m not counting that as a spoiler because I covered the sequel almost a decade ago. At the very least you could say that they build the romance subplot between Henry and Elizabeth (played by Mae Clarke) better than we would see in The Invisible Man a few years later, even hinting at a love triangle with Victor. The very least is about the only way you could describe it too; Mae Clarke isn’t very good, she and Clive have zero chemistry, Victor is a plank of wood with a mustache drawn on it, and any hint of that triangle is dropped like a bag of rocks almost immediately. Frankenhooker was a more intriguing love story than Frankenstein.

       Let’s see, what else is Frankenstein remembered for...the German Expressionist inspired art design? Great, love the shot of Fritz walking down the dark and winding staircase, but again that only appears near the beginning and a bit towards the end. The laboratory? Same thing, and honestly done better by Mel Brooks in Young Frankenstein. The aforementioned infamous scene with the girl at the lake. Not in the beginning of the movie, but a scathing critique of mob violence if you felt like getting analytical. It’s kind of bizarre to think that so much of what makes this a defining film of the horror genre takes place before the first half hour. Like this is just as much about a wedding as it is about subverting the laws of nature.

       So I guess if you were really pressed for time, you could watch a clip or two and get the gist of it. In spite of my criticisms though, for its time Frankenstein is a fine film, and because of my history with the story and the history the film embodies it gets the recommendation. Of Universal’s Horror line it’s one of the better movies I’ve covered so far, if I were a grading kind of guy I’d probably place it below The Invisible Man but above The Mummy, and since it sets you up for Bride of Frankenstein (currently the best UH movie that I’ve covered) it’s a great deal. And once you’re done watching you can hop back on the Reelin’ In The Years tour bus, as we head for our next stop. It'll be a big step out of our comfort zone, but it’s a pretty big film too. 

Reelin' In The Years -- The Big House (1930), directed by George W. Hill

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune - "Lockdown Blues", by Iceage

       If there’s one thing that the United States of America loves more than endless warfare, it’s prisons. In the late 1800s, after the Civil War had thrown the entire concept of owning people as property into question, although not many of those questions involved the horrific nature of slavery, the bigwigs of the time stumbled upon what they considered an ingenious compromise. Slavery would thereafter be illegal, they declared in the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, except as punishment for a crime. Suddenly chattel slavery wasn’t just a luxury a some plantation owners in the South could enjoy, now every state could have their own little concrete box of people to play with, in as many counties as they could fit them. Nor was this centered solely around New Afrikan people (although they still make up a disproportionate amount of the prison population, because the U.S. is anything but subtle); No matter what your color or creed, if you were a member of the poor and undesirable segment of society then you too had a place in this brave new world of incarceration, and we’re still living it today. If you’re from another country and you’re wondering what it’s like living in the United States, picture a place that persistently demonizes countries like China, the Soviet Union or the DPRK for their supposedly hellish prison systems, yet at the same time makes self-aware jokes and even feature-length films about the fact that its own prisons are hotbeds of torture, rape, drug abuse and gang violence, and resists any and all attempts at addressing those problems, and then multiple it by 5. Also the healthcare sucks.

Today’s stop on our tour brings us to the year 1930, and unfortunately also marks the end of our exploration of silent film for the time being. We’ve broken the sound barrier baby. Of the potential films I could have covered from this year, the biggest name on the card was All Quiet on the Western Front, and indeed for a long time all signs were pointing towards that being the movie I watched. Given what has been going on these days with COVID-19 and everything surrounding it however, I figured that folks might relate to a story about being stuck somewhere for what feels like an eternity. Never let it be said that I can’t be timely and relevant when needed.

       Released in 1930, written by Frances Marion (with additional dialogue by Joe Farnham and Martin Flavin), The Big House was directed by George Hill, not to be confused The Warriors and Slaughterhouse Five director George Roy Hill. After accidentally killing someone while drunk-driving on New Year’s Eve, Kent Marlowe is sentenced to 10 years in prison for manslaughter. Once he’s arrived, processed, and transformed from Kent into #48642, he meets his cell-mates, mercurial former hitman “Machine Gun” Butch (Wallace Beery) and charismatic former robber Morgan (Chester Morris), and is introduced to prison life: Harsh discipline, terrible food, no room to breathe, angry neighbors,the works. It’s the kind of environment that brings out a man’s nature, and so it does for Kent. The consequences of such a change, however, might be more far reaching than Kent, his sister Anne, Morgan, Butch, or anyone in prison could have expected.

       The Big House is a film caught between worlds. We were still a ways away from the for-profit, supermax model as it’s known today, so they’re still trying to frame prison as if it's about rehabilitation. Everyone in prison is in there because they deserve it, the Warden is an upstanding gentleman who cares about the prisoners, and all you have to do is put your nose to the grindstone and you’ll be released, free to go off to some faraway island and work a plantation, which has to be one of the most ironic story beats ever recorded to film. Yet at the same time the film is trying to praise the virtues of prison, it exposes the reality of prison as well. Prison guards aren’t just humble folk trying their best to help in The Big House, they are blatantly antagonistic figures who will engage in acts of torture (and just try to tell me locking a man up in a metal box for a month with nothing but bread and water isn’t a blatant act of torture) on little more than the rumours they get from their snitches and stoolpigeons. Likewise prisoners aren’t some inhuman damnable creatures, they are human beings with all the quirks and foibles that come with it, and as human beings ourselves we naturally sympathize with them as they are dehumanized. Which isn’t necessarily by design; As I said The Big House still works under the assumption that people in jail must deserve to be in there, and this is mainly done through conversational asides by Butch of acts of horrific violence. However, since the audience is only told those things and not shown them, because of the way the information is given to the audience, and because the audience is shown the injustices put upon them by the prison, it comes across as a bit of hyperbolic dark comedy more than anything else. It all builds up an atmosphere where you start to question, even just a little, whether they were being sincere or satirical, which I think actually gives it a greater appeal to a modern audience.

       Case in point, my description of the plot would lead you to believe that Kent would be the protagonist of the film. A victim of circumstance as they say, now thrust into this den of lions and forced to survive and in the end proving that he was a good person after all and didn’t deserve to be in that dirty old jail. In actuality though Kent almost immediately takes a backseat, basically becoming a walking plot device in favor of Morgan and Butch, which is for the best because they are far and away the most entertaining and the most (pretty much only) developed characters in the film. George Hill worked with Wallace Beery on several pictures aside from The Big House, and it’s easy to see why; He’s got this rough & tumble, bulldog quality about him that comes across as lovable or scary depending on the mood he’s in, which pairs quite naturally with Chester Morris, who has the good looks and easy charm of your textbook snake oil salesman. Put them together on screen and they’ve got great chemistry, and the arc of their relationship is the backbone of this film. There’s a tiny crumb of romance in there, or ‘friendship’ as they called in those days, but the only characters I was ever invested in, the only characters you’re really able to invest in, are Morgan and Butch.

       Couple more things I feel worth mentioning, the first being the opening shot, with the truck pulling up to the prison, which is this Brutalist concrete behemoth. Very effective, and adding to a point made earlier, slightly surreal. I also liked the look of the scene where Morgan is sent to solitary, there’s some playing around with shadows that looked nice. In many ways this movie is bare bones, a lot of the characters don’t even have last names, but it’s cool to see George Hill and crew put some work into it.

       The highlight of the film though is appropriately enough in the climax, as the prisoners stage a riot and engage in a shootout with the guards. By the year 1930 the U.S. was over a decade removed from World War I and was about a decade away from World War II, not to mention barely into the sound era, and yet filmmakers had already figured out how to translate the tension and claustrophobic terror of warfare to the silver screen. Much like the ending of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, there’s visceral feelings there, a catharsis as the prisoners finally stand up for themselves and a growing sense of desperation as their ultimate fate draws near. Unfortunately a lot of the emotional resonance is undercut by the ending, which felt equivalent to your dad buying you an ice cream after you watched him beat your mom. I don’t think it’s enough to write off the movie entirely, but given what came before it does leave a sour taste in one’s mouth.

       The Big House gets the recommendation. It’s a bit bare bones to be sure, but Butch and Morgan’s story was enough to keep me engaged the whole way through, and as I mentioned there’s a degree of schadenfreude to be had in seeing a movie struggling against its own message in such a way. Check it out if you’ve got the time, and at the moment you’ve probably got nothing but time. Next stop on our Reelin’ In The Years tour we’re going ahead about 365 days, to the not-that-much-better year of 1931. While the card is always subject to change, odds are I’ll be writing about a film that I probably should have covered years ago.