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seems somehow clumsier and more antiquated here than in "City Lights," suggesting that, in the intervening years, Chaplin himself may have lost familiarity with the old style, without the constant reminders of other silent films, and was now merely making "a silent talkie."
To some people Chaplin now seemed like a creature from another world. His comedy was so remote from the new types — the new realistic comedy of such films as Frank Capra's "It Happened One Night" (1934) and W. S. Van Dyke's "The Thin Man" (1935). Slapstick had become streamlined in this so-called "haywire" or "screwball" school, featuring fast American humor that fused the old Sennett slapstick with hardboiled modernism. In these, laughs were built on unusual situations, wacky dialogue, mildly eccentric characters, and sudden slapstick in straight scenes. Its climax was reached in Wellman's "Nothing Sacred." The later Preston Sturges comedies belong to the same category.
During the middle thirties, W. C. Fields attained great popularity. His drawling comments and bibulous pantomime in the role of henpecked husband or pompous faker made him regarded by many as "the funniest" of comedians. However, he did not create a type as universal as Charlie. Neither comedian would acknowledge the existence of an equal. Fields contemptuously dismissed Chaplin as the "ballet dancer" and himself records an amiable conversation with Chaplin in which the latter failed to make a single reference to Fields' work on the screen. Animated cartoons — especially those of Disney — had also contributed a new concept of comedy, a combination of violence, speed, and the sort of fantasy possible to pen creatures freed from the restrictions of gravity or human limitations. It is significant that one New York critic found the Donald Duck curtain raiser to "Modern Times" funnier than the feature.
It is therefore remarkable that Chaplin, with this film,