The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Charlie Chaplin · a film · 1936 · about 87 minutes · with a synchronised score and effects, its dialogue in intertitles
Mode
Silent comedy of the body turned on the industrial order; slapstick, social satire and romance in one
Mythos
The man swallowed by the machine and given back whole; the herd; the holy fool at the end of his road, given a partner, a voice and a way out
Phase
A year of the Depression in one city, from a factory clock at the start of a shift to a road at dawn, through four jobs, four arrests and a stay in hospital
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, 1.37:1, about 87 minutes; a synchronised score and effects, dialogue in intertitles, speech heard only through machines, and one human voice, singing, near the end
Register
From the assembly line at speed to a blindfold skate at an open drop and a song in no language; pathos in the girl’s scenes, lift on the road
Scale
One worker, one girl, a city and its machines
Governing Proposition
A factory worker, Chaplin’s Tramp in his last appearance, is broken by the assembly line and passed from job to cell to job through the Depression, until he finds a partner in an orphaned girl and walks out of the city with her at dawn. The wager of the film is that the industrial order takes hold of the body before anything else, that in this order the machine has a voice and the worker has none, and that a comedy of pantomime made against the coming of sound can show both, until the worker at last sings, and the words he sings mean nothing.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a clock. Then herded sheep crowd the frame, and the image dissolves into workers leaving the subway on their way to the factory. The comparison is made once, without comment, and the film never takes it back: before there is a man there is a herd, and before there is a story there is the time of the shift.
Inside, a worker stands at the assembly line tightening bolts. He is Chaplin’s Tramp, in his last appearance, and here he is a part of the line. When he steps into the washroom, the face of the company president appears on a screen on the wall and orders him back to work. The president speaks; the worker does not. Speech in this film will be heard only in this way, through a machine, until near the end, and the boss and the machine will share one voice.
Charles Chaplin wrote, produced and directed the film, plays the worker, and composed its music, which Alfred Newman conducted. Roland Totheroh and Ira Morgan photographed it in black and white. Paulette Goddard plays the girl, and Henry Bergman, Chester Conklin, Stanley Sandford and Hank Mann take the supporting roles. United Artists released it, and it premiered in New York on 5 February 1936, nine years into the era of sound. It runs about 87 minutes, with a synchronised score and effects and its dialogue in intertitles, and it survives in the one version in which it was released.
Movement II
A machine is brought to the president that will feed a worker at his post and abolish the lunch hour. Its sales pitch is a recording, a voice that belongs to no one, and the worker is put into the machine to test it. The soup goes into his face, and the corn on the cob runs away with itself. The machine is sold by a voice, and the man in it cannot answer.
The worker’s body takes on the rhythm of the line, and when the shift is over he goes on tightening bolts that are not there, his arms still twitching in the street. At last he breaks down. He is drawn into the machine, and the film shows him passing through its great wheels, carried among the gears with a calm that makes him one of their parts. The machine swallows him and gives him back whole.
What follows is a breakdown performed as a dance, with spanners and an oil can, as exact as a ballet. He is taken away to hospital. The first law of the film has been laid down: the industrial order takes the body before it takes anything else, and the only answer the body has is to go wrong in a way that can be danced.
Movement III
Out of hospital, in the street, he picks up a red flag that has fallen from a lorry, and the police arrest him as a leader of demonstrators. Political identity, in this city, is an accident of where a man happens to be standing and what he happens to be holding.
In prison he eats powder hidden in the salt cellar without knowing what it is, and, carried by it, foils a break. He is given a comfortable cell, warm, fed and quiet, and release, when it comes, is a sentence to hunger. The inversion is the film’s second disclosure: in a slump the cell is shelter, and freedom is want. Outside, he takes a job in a shipyard, knocks away a wedge, and the hull is launched. The job lasts one gag.
The girl enters with bananas. Her father is shot dead in a street demonstration, and the juvenile officers take her sisters. The film now has a second person, and a stake that is hunger as well as labour. Goddard plays her with real energy, and the film directs her in the register of silent melodrama, so that her hardship comes as pathos more than as a social fact traced to its cause.
Movement IV
A loaf of bread is stolen, a meal is eaten in a cafeteria, and the two are thrown together in a paddy wagon, and out of it. He dreams of a suburban house of their own, with a cow that comes to the door to offer milk. The dream is of food before it is of comfort, and it obeys the film’s hunger.
He takes a job as night watchman in a department store. On the top floor he puts on roller skates and, blindfolded, glides along the edge of an unrailed drop, never seeing how close he comes. It is the film’s comic summit, lyrical and terrifying at once. In the night burglars break in, led by Big Bill, and they turn out to be hungry men.
The girl finds them a shack by the water, and he calls it a paradise. The beam collapses and the water is shallow; it is Eden in a slump. He goes back to the factory, where a mechanic is caught in a machine and must be fed his lunch where he is held. Then come the strike and the lockout, and the cycle the film began with comes round once more: work, mishap and arrest.
Movement V
He finds work in a café as a singing waiter. He carries a duck through the crowd of dancers, and the routine is a body meeting a mechanism once again, this time a floor of moving dancers.
Then he must sing. The words of Léo Daniderff’s “Titine” are written on his cuffs, and the cuffs fly off. He sings anyway, in a language he makes up, words that are no words, with a mime the room follows without a word of sense. It is the first time his voice was heard on screen, and the one human voice in the film. After a film in which only machines and those who own them have spoken, the worker’s voice arrives, and it says nothing, and everyone understands it.
The officers return for the girl, and the two escape. At dawn an intertitle begins “Buck up”, and the two walk away down the road, the city behind them. The ending answers what the film has disclosed, the line, the cell and the hunger, with a resolve to keep going: a change of mood where the material conditions of the whole film asked for more. But the last image has lift, and it gives the Tramp, at the end of twenty years of films, what those films withheld: a voice, a partner and a road out.
Act III · The Twelve
The film is picaresque, and the subtractive test finds give. The factory is required: it sets the law the rest obeys, the body taken over by the line. The return to the factory and the strike close that law. The girl’s entrance, her father shot in the street, is required: it gives the film its second person and its stake in hunger. Much else is a station of one cycle. The prison could go; the shipyard is a single gag; the department store, the comic summit, could be another night job without loss of meaning. The repeated arrest is the argument, but the stations are chosen for comic yield, not compelled by it, and that is what holds the axis lowest of the twelve.
Score: 7.8 / 10
What the film brings into the open can be stated, and image and sound carry it. The Taylorised body: the twitch that outlasts the shift, a feeding machine sold to abolish the lunch hour, the president’s face on the washroom wall ordering the worker back to the line, surveillance at work shown before such images were common. Political identity as accident: he picks up a red flag fallen from a lorry and is arrested as a leader. Prison and freedom inverted in a slump: the cell is warm and fed, and release is a sentence to hunger. The machine has a voice, the worker none. Held a tenth below the gate because the analysis closes in sentiment: the road at dawn answers it with a resolve to cheer up, and the girl’s hunger is pathos more than a social fact traced to its cause.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Elevation here is comic transport, and it comes often. The ride through the gears, the worker carried through the wheels with a calm that makes him their part, is an image of grandeur as well as a joke. The blindfold roller skating along the unrailed edge of the store’s top floor is lyrical and terrifying at once. The breakdown is danced, with spanners and an oil can. The song is the height of the film: the lyrics fly off with his cuffs, and he makes a language and a mime that the room understands without a word of sense. The last shot, the couple walking away down the road, has lift. Between these the prison and the shipyard are flat, and the girl’s hardship reaches pathos more often than height.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The myth is built, not evoked, and it bears load. The man swallowed by the machine and given back whole is the film’s central image and its argument: Jonah in the gears, the fool whose body cannot be made a part. The opening dissolve, sheep into workers, lays down the herd as the film’s ground. The Tramp is the holy fool and the outcast at the close of a long career, given at last a voice, a partner and a road out; the shack he calls a paradise, with its falling beam and shallow water, is Eden in a slump. Held at the gate rather than above it: the couple leaving the city at dawn draws on stock sentiment, and the Tramp’s myth was built across twenty years of films, which this one spends as much as it builds.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The stake was real: in 1936, nine years into sound, Chaplin made a film without dialogue, on his own money, at the top of the industry, against what the industry and its audiences then expected. But much of the turn is refusal, a wager on the proven path of his own silent comedy, and such a wager is not a swerve. The departure is in what he made of the refusal: sound given to machines and power alone, the human voice withheld until it arrives as nonsense, so that the coming of speech becomes the subject. That is an invention, as is the joining of slapstick to satire of the industrial order, and both were prepared: the hybrid in City Lights (1931), and the satire of the assembly line in René Clair’s À nous la liberté (1931).
Score: 8.0 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Made as a talkie, the worker would speak and argue, and the film would become a social drama with gags. Its knowledge is that in this world the machines and the bosses speak and the worker does not, and that his only answer is the body and, at last, a song in no language. The form is pantomime against a mechanised soundtrack, and the opposition is the content. Every routine is a body meeting a mechanism, the line, the feeding machine, the gears, the skates, the open floor, and comedy becomes the instrument of the analysis. Held short of the top by the second half, where the girl’s story runs in conventions of silent melodrama that the form carries rather than requires.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Ninety years of return are evidence. The film has been read as labour satire, as a farewell to the silent form, as a study of the voice at the coming of sound, as a document of the Depression and as a portrait of the body under industrial time, and those readings stand together. The song yields more on return, as a statement of what speech is worth when the words are lost. But much of the film gives itself fully at first sight. The gags are perfectly legible, which is their power and the limit of their depth, and the politics rest on images more than on a structure that keeps opening. The well is real, and shallower than in the films that sustain the most return.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Released in 1936, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: a film that made the coming of sound its subject and joined the comedy of the body to an argument about industrial labour, when the field had moved to dialogue comedy and the musical. It closed one road more than it opened another: it is the last great work of silent pantomime, and the field did not turn back. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the man in the gears became the common shorthand for the worker under the machine, quoted and parodied for ninety years; its machine comedy is commonly placed in the line that runs to Jacques Tati, and the conveyor-belt routine of I Love Lucy (1952) is often traced to it; the theme later set as “Smile” (1954) lives apart from it. Reach as image is wide; reach as changed practice is narrow.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric across ninety years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in one version, and reissues and restorations have repaired it without altering it. Its presence is as wide as a film’s can be: continuous in repertory, on television, on every home format and in teaching, and beyond the cinema in the gears and the song, known to many who have not seen the film. The surface belongs to its moment, the Depression, the line and the strike, and the late silent form was already of an earlier day at release; but the film is about its moment and the industrial body has not aged, so the surface ages as history, not as fashion. The fabric, monochrome photography and a mono track of its period, is the smallest charge.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight in Chaplin’s own performance, a command of the body at its height: the twitch carried into the street, the roller skating, the spanner dance, the song, each timed to the frame. The gags are built exactly, and the sound design is economical and controlled: machines that speak, a stomach that gurgles beside the parson’s wife. Chaplin’s score carries the film’s feeling without words. The costs: the camera is plain and largely static, the cutting serves the gag but rarely makes meaning of its own, the undercranked chases show their method, and the girl’s scenes are directed in a register of melodrama that the rest of the film has outgrown. Paulette Goddard’s energy is real; the supporting playing is broad.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the death of the girl’s father, shot in a street demonstration, and a jailbreak foiled by a man who cannot tell what he has eaten. One law governs both: violence and accident come from outside without reason, and the Tramp survives by a body that cannot be made to fit. The sound rule holds from the first reel to the last: machines and authority speak, people do not, until the song. The dream of a house with a cow at the door obeys the film’s hunger. The law breaks at the edges: the closing resolve, an intertitle that begins “Buck up”, meets the material conditions of the whole film with a change of mood its law has not earned, and the episodic stations obey the comic law more than the social one.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 87 minutes holds, and it holds labour fully, which few films do: the line, the shipyard, the store, the café, the strike and the lockout, unemployment as a condition. The state enters as police, prison, the juvenile authorities and demonstrations broken up with gunfire. Class and property come in the store, the dreamed house and the burglars who are hungry men; hunger and the city run throughout; technology is power. What holds it: consciousness is rendered from outside, as pantomime requires; the sacred is absent; history is the present only; the family is the girl’s lost one and the dreamed one, never lived. Many orders, held in one structure through one body.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.8, The Made at 8.7 and The Living Form at 8.6. A film that survives whole in one version with a presence beyond the cinema itself, a command of the body at its height timed to the frame, and a form in which pantomime set against a speaking machine is the knowledge the film has.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.8: the factory, the girl’s entrance and the strike are required, but the prison, the shipyard and the store are stations of one cycle, chosen for comic yield rather than compelled. Above it, The Encompassed at 7.9, where labour, the state, class, hunger and technology are held through one body while consciousness is rendered from outside and the sacred is absent, and The Swerve at 8.0, a real stake in which much of the turn is a refusal to leave a proven form.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.7, The Living Form at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three axes: The Imperishable at 8.8 clears the bar of 8.5 and The Archetypal Deep meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls a tenth short, Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 three tenths short and The Swerve at 8.0 five tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 7.8, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.9. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.3 from a sum of 99.7, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Modern Times as released by United Artists in 1936, about 87 minutes, in its one version, from the clock to the road at dawn: written, produced and directed by Charles Chaplin, who plays the factory worker, photographed by Roland Totheroh and Ira Morgan, with music composed by Chaplin and conducted by Alfred Newman. No print, script or intertitle file was consulted. The film has a synchronised score and effects and gives its dialogue in intertitles; an intertitle is quoted only where its words are certain, and otherwise described. Later reissues and restorations repair the version of 1936 and do not alter it, and no other cut is judged. Details that could not be verified, among them the arrangers of the score, the credit for the editing, the makers and date of the modern restoration, the dates of production, censorship abroad, how the film’s politics were received, and any dispute with the makers of À nous la liberté, are not given.