Charlie Chaplin, Director

7. Dangerous Voices: Modern Times and The Great Dictator

Part III THE SOUND ERA 209 7 Dangerous Voices Modern Times and The Great Dictator M odern Times may be the only film in history that reversed its course creativelyandchanged ,mid-production,fromasoundpicturetoanessentially silent film—the opposite of Harold Lloyd’s silent-to-sound film Welcome Danger. Despite the critical fanfare and financial triumph of the dialogue-less City Lights, Chaplin was originally convinced that he could not repeat the trick, and in 1934 he began shooting his next film as a talkie. Gone was the bravado of the artist who had declared in a 1931 New York Times editorial that “because the silent or nondialogue picture has been temporarily pushed aside in the hysteria attending the introduction of speech by no means indicates that it is extinct or that the motion picture screen has seen the last of it.”1 In his place stood Chaplin the worried studio head, who told one reporter, “The talking films have come. They have come to stay, I believe. They have vitality—more vitality than the silent film, though less of beauty.”2 It was no small matter. To shoot Modern Times in the new style, he had to finally enclose his studios—the last open-air stages in Hollywood—at great expense. He had to purchase new technology and bring in new technicians. He and his new costar Paulette Goddard had to submit to voice testing. And he had to find a way for his famous Tramp to speak. The prospect of a speaking Tramp had worried Chaplin since the days when synchronized sound was just a matter of experiment and speculation . “If I did make a talking picture, no matter how good I was I could never surpass the artistry of my pantomime. . . . If I talked I would become like any other comedian,” he recalled in his autobiography.3 Yet Chaplin, thinking he was facing the inevitable, dutifully composed a screenplay for his next film that covered the opening factory segment through the department store sequence and that had at its center a speaking Tramp—a soft-spoken, somewhat aloof man, not unlike the barber figure who would take the Tramp’s place in 210 the sound era The Great Dictator. But Chaplin could not follow through on the commitment: one day he told his crew that they would begin the film’s fantasized domestic sequence with dialogue and sound as planned; by the next day, the film had become a silent picture. It was an agonizing decision, perhaps even more so than his calculations about City Lights. It was now almost ten years since The Jazz Singer had premiered. As Chaplin’s son would later recall, “Every day he was forcefully reminded of how he was sticking his neck out. His silent picture making was the gossip of the town. There were lugubrious headshakes from his fellow producers and friends and tongue-in-cheek speculations by columnists. Sometimes he must have been appalled himself at his own conservatism.”4 In fact, Modern Times would not truly be a silent film or even a sound film without dialogue like City Lights; more than sound effects and music, the soundtrack would actually have spoken words. But neither would it be a talkie. At no point would a character utter a spoken word to another character. Intertitles, the coin of the realm in silent film, would be used for that purpose. They would actually in some scenes exist side by side with audible voices, producing a kind of palimpsest of cinematic approaches to dialogue. From a sonic perspective, Modern Times is actually one of the most sui generis works ever produced by Hollywood, almost avant-garde in the degree of its singularity and unclassifiability. As much as it is about anything, it is about sound itself: the struggle of how to present it and specifically the destruction it can wreak, the way that it invades and controls and forecloses. If in City Lights Chaplin manages to hold back sound and all the surety that it brings—to negotiate with sound and incorporate it into his existing technique as a kind of natural extension and enhancement—then Modern Times shows his first signs of aesthetic collapse, the world of speech penetrating and reordering the universe of “gentle skepticism” that he had so carefully been crafting almost from the moment he first stepped behind the camera. In this way, the film is of...