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relationships, as he had already done in A Woman of Paris and The Gold Rush. Here, the relationship between Charlie and the flower-seller, spiritualized by her blindness and his chivalry, is miraculously sustained on a plane at once human and sublime, so that the cruelty of the final scenes impinge sharply. Charlie, dejected and alone, without his cane, recently released from prison, comes back to find her happily installed in her shop, her sight restored. She bursts out laughing at first sight of the funny down-at-heels little tramp staring so fixedly at her; then, ashamed, offers him a flower in apology, and some money, because he so obviously needs it. Their hands touch, and something of the extra sense remaining from her blindness tells her that here before her is her benefactor. "Yes, I can see now". The bitterest sub-title Chaplin ever used, and as tragic as the final shot of Charlie holding the flower and smiling at her with a terrified and poignant realization that reality has destroyed the illusion existing between them. Among the comedy effects, the incident of the penny whistle, where the feeble chirrup of the invisible article, swallowed inadvertently by Charlie when a boisterous girl slaps him on the chest, compels a laughter near hysteria. Fate never deals Charlie single blows. He gets hiccups and becomes a social pariah. His fellow guests are as embarrassed as he is; a singer, determined to show his prowess, cannot start, for his every beginning is marred by the faint cheep of the whistle as Charlie struggles with his hiccups. Alone in a garden, Charlie's invisible whistle calls a taxi; then some dogs, until Charlie returns to the party in despair at the head of a pack. These incidents, when the film was shown in Paris, drew the same hysterical laughter from a very cosmopolitan group of students, of most races, most nations.
1936 — Modern Times (85 minutes). Released 5th February.
Cast: Paulette Goddard, Henry Bergman, Chester Conklin, Stanley Sandford, Hank Mann, Louis Natheax, Allen Garcia, Lloyd Ingraham, Wilfrid Lucas, Heine Conklin, Edward Kimball, John Rand and Charlie Chaplin.
Music composed by Charles Chaplin.
The early part of the film is packed with comedy embracing all those forms customarily used by Chaplin. The old custard-pie technique has itself been mechanized, translated into terms of a feeding machine destined to speed up production by feeding the workers without loss of time. The feeding machine runs amok, and once more Charlie is victim to the malignant life of objects, as the machine pelts him with food, nuts and bolts, spills soup over him,