Word: chaplinitis
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Modern Times (Charles Chaplin) is the first picture made by its star since City Lights (1931) and his third in seven years. In it, Chaplin sings one song but does not speak. The other actors are heard only when the action permits their voices to be mechanized through phonographs, television sets, radios. A musical score, written by Chaplin, accompanies the film...
City Lights was produced when talkies were both so novel and so bad that silence helped rather than hindered the picture. No such advantage aided Chaplin with Modern Times. Even in 1936, however, his older admirers will be able to accept the character which he has immortalized on the screen without sense of shock at such obsolete cinematic devices as subtitles and exaggerated pantomime. What may be the reaction of 10,000,000 cinemaddicts who have grown into the audience since the days when Chaplin pictures were everyday occurrences, is a problem to be answered by the box office. Judging...
...long. He added a $75,000 episode to the plot because it made it more exciting. Despite all these novel precautions, Strike Me Pink, if it really pleased Mrs. Sam Goldwyn, did so because her taste in cinema comedies has not changed since the early days of Charlie Chaplin and Mack Sennett...
Through the first two-thirds of the picture, Eddie Cantor, as Eddie Pink, a timid amusement-park manager embroiled with slot-machine racketeers, gives a fair imitation of Chaplin's famed characterization of a peewee battling gaily against overwhelming destiny. The last third of the picture is a chase in the classic Keystone tradition, starting when the racketeers, dressed in policemen's uniforms, pursue Eddie Pink around a roller coaster, and ending when Eddie and his Greek bodyguard (Parkya-karkus) find themselves trapped in a captive balloon. Eddie escapes by falling into an acrobats...
...England sailed Author Herbert George Wells after five lively weeks in Hollywood. Last November wise Author Wells assured himself a warm reception in Hollywood by hailing the cinema as "a finer art than the novel, finer than the stage, finer far than the opera." He stayed with Charlie Chaplin, earnestly studied production methods, wrote abbreviated scenarios which he calls "treatments." Having declared himself "immune to blondes," he was taken in hand by two riotous brunettes, Writer Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) and Cinemactress Paulette Goddard, became the season's socialion. Called upon for a speech, he dodged: "Hollywood leaves...