NEXT SCREENINGS
This May, Cine-Real presents Charlie Chaplin’s poignant and playful Modern Times alongside Peter Bogdanovich’s beautifully shot Depression-era road movie Paper Moon, both projected from original 16mm prints at The Castle Cinema.
- Sunday, 18th May at 12:00 PM Modern Times (1936) – Charlie Chaplin’s timeless satire on industrialization and the human spirit.
- Thursday, 22nd May at 7:30 PM Modern Times (1936) – An encore evening screening of Chaplin’s classic.
- Sunday, 25th May at 1:30 PM Paper Moon (1973) – A heartwarming tale of a con man and a young girl during the Great Depression.
- Thursday, 29th May at 7:30 PM Paper Moon (1973) – A second chance to catch this charming film.
Experience these classics as they were meant to be seen—on original 16mm film. Tickets are available through The Castle Cinema’s website. We recommend booking early, as our screenings often sell out.
A lot of movies are said to be timeless, but somehow in their immortality they fail to draw audiences. They lead a sort of half-life in film society revivals, and turn up every now and then on the late show. They’re classics, everyone agrees, but that word “classic” has become terribly cheap in relation to movies. It’s applied so promiscuously that by now the only thing you can be sure of about a “film classic” is that it isn’t actually in current release.
One of the many remarkable things about Charlie Chaplin is that his films continue to hold up, to attract and delight audiences. Chaplin hasn’t really been active in movies for 20 years, aside from “A King in New York” in 1957 and the unfortunate “A Countess from Hong Kong” five years ago. The millions of followers and fans who cheered him in his Little Tramp days are now mostly a memory; if 85 per cent of the American movie audience is under 35, as industry statistics claim, then 85 per cent of Charlie’s original audience must probably be over 35.
So his decision to release a series of his best films must have sometimes seemed like a risk. His name is enshrined among the greatest geniuses of film; the French have a movie magazine titled simply Charlie, and Vachel Lindsay said a long time ago, “The cinema IS Chaplin.” He had proven his greatness in every possible way; but then, at 81, he decided to put some of his films on the market again and see how they fared.
They are faring very well, you might say. Here in Chicago they’ve been booked in the Carnegie Theater, where the staff hardly knows what hit it. “Modern Times” (1936), the first of seven Chaplin programs, was SRO all weekend, and when I saw it on Sunday afternoon, the audience was just about beside itself with delight.
I go to a lot of movies, and I can’t remember the last time I heard a paying audience actually applaud at the end of a film. But this one did. And the talk afterward in the aisles, the lobby and in line at the parking garage was genuinely excited; maybe a lot of these people hadn’t seen much Chaplin before, or were simply very happy to find that the passage of time have not diminished the man’s special genius.
“Modern Times” was Charlie’s first film after five years of hibernation in the 1930s. He didn’t much like talkies, and despite the introduction of sound in 1927, his “City Lights” (1931) was defiantly silent.
With “Modern Times,” a fable about (among other things) automation, assembly lines and the enslaving of man by machines, he hit upon an effective way to introduce sound without disturbing his comedy of pantomime: The voices in the movie are channeled through other media. The ruthless steel tycoon talks over closed-circuit television, a crackpot inventor brings in a recorded sales pitch, and so on. The only synched sound is Charlie’s famous tryout as a singing waiter; perhaps after Garbo spoke, the only thing left was for Charlie to sing.
PAPER MOON (1973)
The two kinds of Depression-era movies we remember best are the ones that ignored the Depression altogether and the ones like “The Grapes of Wrath” that took it as a subject. Peter Bogdanovich’s “Paper Moon” somehow manages to make these two approaches into one, so that a genre movie about a con man and a little girl is teamed up with the real poverty and desperation of Kansas and Missouri, circa 1936. You wouldn’t think the two approaches would fit together, somehow, but, they do, and the movie comes off as more honest and affecting than if Bogdanovich had simply paid tribute to older styles. Maybe that’s why Addie Loggins, the little girl, hardly ever smiles: She can see perfectly well there’s nothing to smile about. The movie opens at her mother’s funeral on a windswept plain. Her mother (we learn from an old photograph) was a flapper of the worst sort, but Addie is a tomboy in overalls and a flannel shirt. At the last moment, an old car comes rattling up and discharges one Moses Pray, con man, alleged Bible salesman and just possibly Addie’s father. He promises to deliver the child to relatives in St. Joe, mostly so he can collect $200 in blackmail money.
But then the 9 year-old girl, who somehow resembles Huckleberry Finn more than any little boy I can imagine, turns out to be the more clever con man, and before long they’re selling Bibles to widows who are told their husbands ordered them - deluxe editions with the names embossed in gold, of course - before “passing on.” The movie is about two con artists, but not really about their con, and that’s a relief. We’ve seen enough movies that depended on the cleverness of confidence tricks - not only 1930s movies, but right down to the recent “The Flim-Flam Man.” No, Bogdanovich takes the con games only as the experience which his two lead characters share and which draws them together in a way that’s funny sometimes, but also very poignant and finally deeply touching.
By now everybody knows that Ryan O’Neal and his real-life daughter, Tatum, play the man and the girl. But I wonder how many moviegoers will be prepared for the astonishing confidence and depth that Tatum brings to what’s really the starring role. I’d heard about how good she was supposed to be, but I nevertheless expected a kind of clever cuteness, like we got from Shirley Temple or young Elizabeth Taylor. Not at all. Tatum O’Neal creates a character out of thin air, makes us watch her every moment and literally makes the movie work (in the sense that this key role had to be well played). She has a scene in a Kansas hotel, for example, that isn’t at all easy. Moses has picked up a tart from a sideshow, one Trixie Delight by name, and has designs on her. Addie is jealous and makes a liaison with Trixie’s young black maid, Imogene (wonderfully played by P. J. Johnson). Together they concoct a scheme to lure the hotel clerk into Trixie’s room and then inform Moses.
Now this could have been a hotel-corridor farce scene, as Bogdanovich demonstrated he could direct quite well in “What’s Up, Doc?” But this time, the scene is played for pathos and for the understanding of the child’s earnestness, and the two young girls are perfectly matched to it.
“Paper Moon” doesn’t come off, then, as a homage to earlier beloved directors and styles (as Bogdanovich’s “What’s Up, Doc?” did - and his “The Last Picture Show,” to a smaller extent). No, it achieves something quite different: a period piece that uses generic conventions only when they apply, so that we see the Depression through the eyes of characters who are allowed to be individuals. Whatever Addie and Moses do in this movie, we have the feeling it’s because they want to (or have to) and not that the ghost of some 1930s screenwriter is prompting them.
Roger Ebert, 1973
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