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"Modern Times" 257
ical, and erratic to work with, and walked out on him. David Raskin finished the job.
Paulette Goddard, different both from the old, passive Chaplin heroine, and the tempestuous Georgia, played the role of the gamin with vitality and spontaneity. The rest of the cast shows the familiar faces of the other Chaplin comedies.
"Modern Times" grossed but $1,800,000 in this country, a large sum for the depression period but a disappointment to the comedian. The deficiency was made up abroad. Chaplin's fortune, in 1932, was estimated at $8,000,000 and he led the tax rolls in Hollywood for many years.
Two plagiarism suits were filed against Chaplin in connection with "Modern Times." One was entered by Michael Kustoff, a former officer in the Imperial Russian Army, who claimed to have submitted the story through an agent only to have it rejected. On Chaplin's testimony that he had never seen the agent, the judge dismissed the suit.
In 1 937 the French film company, Filmes Sonores Tobis, filed suit for plagiarism, claiming that Chaplin borrowed the conveyor-belt sequence from Rene Clair's "A Nous la Liberte," released in 1931. Rene Clair himself declared, when informed of this, that he was flattered, having himself borrowed so much from his teacher, Chaplin. "A Nous la Liberte," also a satire on the machine age, may have influenced Chaplin. On the other hand, the Clair picture is full of Chaplin touches. One of its principals, Emil (played by Henri Marchand), is modeled closely on the wistful Charlie character. The hero's mistaking a girl's smile toward another man as intended for him is characteristically Chaplinesque as is the wife's tossing of the money given by her husband to the floor and then grabbing it from the butler. The picture also has a Chaplinesque chase, the classic walking-down-the-road finish,