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"Modern Times" 255
nevertheless retained his position as the King of Comedy, despite his five years' absence, the fickleness of audiences, and the changing comedy styles. While not a complete success, "Modern Times" made a deep impression and its scenes were discussed for years, whereas "City Lights" came, conquered, and was virtually forgotten until its recent revival. "Modern Times" is still fondly remembered; but what average movie-goer recalls or expresses an urgent desire to see again "The Lives of a Bengal Lancer," "Becky Sharp," "The Dark Angel," or "The Plainsman" — so-called "polished" Hollywood productions of 1935
1936?
With the actor regarded by many as a "parlor pink," the opening of "Modern Times" was awaited with considerable titillation in some quarters. It was rumored that the film would dramatize "the class struggle," that it would portray the tragedy of the "petty bourgeois" under capitalism, that it would spread leftish social messages and propaganda. But, while it obviously reflects the depression and the confusions of that time, particularly in the opening sequences, Chaplin remains the artist foremost and propagandist only incidentally.
More social significance was read into it, by some, than Chaplin intended; while others dismissed the social elements as a mere new and timely background for the old rough-and-tumble farce. Brooks Atkinson, in the New York Times, commented that in "the scene in which he unwittingly carries a red flag at the head of a parade of bellicose strikers, the social significance of the new film is more technique than philosophy." Critics of the left found the same scene a "bitterly satirical cartoon on red scares." Similar critics took the humorous feeding-machine scene as a bitter comment on the machine age and even as satire on Soviet efficiency. To Robert Garland, critic for the World Telegram, the picture was "neither fish, flesh, nor good red propaganda."