Word: chaplinitis
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...Charlie Chaplin is back, and he brings back with him the gay, mad tempo of the days when movies grinned and didn't chatter. There is the syncopated whirl from one wild gag into the next, slapstick at its subliming, and hands and eyes and faces that talk without torturing your ears and making you supply the gaps. You grasp it all while lolling at your ease. And best of all, you recall the happy days ten years ago when you sneaked out of the back yard at sunset, slapped down your dime on the counter that you could barely...
...your head over the social doctrines that may or may not be in "Modern Times". True, it is all about factory workers, strikes, red demonstrations, public hospitals, and jails. But if you remember that you are watching lowly-born moderns struggling through today's sea of sorrows, while Mr. Chaplin is doing his level best to scatter your attention over a vast series of ingenious gags, you can also study the differential calculus in the proverbial boiler-factory...
...worker in a steel factory, Chaplin has to screw nuts on plates in an assembly line. He is dexterous but uneasy. A fly lights on his nose. He brushes it off. The belt gets ahead of him. He follows it into the maw of a gigantic machine which has to be reversed to return him to the line. At lunch time, the president of the factory uses him to test a new eating machine which throws soup in his face, jams a corncob against his teeth, pounds his face with a blotter. After this hideous experience, Chaplin goes wild. First...
...shipyard, a foreman asks for a wedge. Chaplin knocks one out of a cradle, thus launching an unfinished boat. He goes back to work in the steel factory. The workers go on strike. He gets a job as night watchman in a department store where he enjoys roller skating through the corridors at night. When three old cronies break into the store, Chaplin is constrained to share a snack with them in the wine department. Next morning he wakes up on a counter under a mass of lingerie. He goes to jail...
...this time Chaplin has made the acquaintance of a Gamin (Paulette Goddard). She has patched up a shack where both can live in airy disdain of the Hays organization. When Chaplin gets out of jail, the Gamin is dancing in a cabaret whose proprietor agrees to employ Chaplin as a singing waiter. There occurs a scene of tray juggling, followed by the Chaplin song, in gibberish. Juvenile court officials descend on the cabaret to arrest the Gamin. Escaping, she and Chaplin are last seen walking together up that desolate and endless road upon which so many of his films have...