One of the most powerful and unsettling devices in film fiction is the years later epilogue, which usually takes us, with wistful sadness, from the concentrated time of a story in which everything was briefly possible, to the singular destiny that ensued. At the end of Jean Renoirs A Day in the Country, Henriette (Sylvia Bataille) is seen unhappily married to the man with whom she was betrothed at the start, the gormless clerk Anatole (Paul Temps). But in between these points, nothing is so fixed or certain.
Adapted from the story of the same name by Guy de Maupassant, the film was unfinished in the form originally envisaged by Renoir. It stands, however, as a self-sufficient gem. Its central action is devoted to the illicit pairing off of two local adventurers, Rodolphe (Jacques Borel) and Henri (Georges DArnoux), with Henriette and her mother, Juliette (Jeanne Marken). Renoir constructs a superb diagram of contrasts between these characters: Rodolphe and Juliette are lusty and frivolous, while Henri and Henriette are overwhelmed by grave emotion. So what started, in Henriettes words, as a sort of vague desire that calls forth both the beauty and harshness of nature, ends badly, as the years pass, with Sundays as melancholy as Mondays. AM
See all movies from the 1930s
1930s
MODERN TIMES (1936)
U.S. (Charles Chaplin, United Artists) 87m BW
Director: Charles Chaplin
Producer: Charles Chaplin
Screenplay: Charles Chaplin
Photography: Ira H. Morgan, Roland Totheroh
Music: Charles Chaplin
Cast: Charles Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Henry Bergman, Tiny Sandford, Chester Conklin, Hank Mann, Stanley Blystone, Al Ernest Garcia, Richard Alexander, Cecil Reynolds, Mira McKinney, Murdock MacQuarrie, Wilfred Lucas, Edward LeSaint, Fred Malatesta
Modern Times was the last film in which Charles Chaplin portrayed the character of the Little Tramp, which he had created in 1914 and which had brought him universal fame and affection. In the years between, the world had changed. When the Little Tramp was born, the nineteenth century was still close. In 1936, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, he confronted anxieties that are not so different from those of the twenty-first centurypoverty, unemployment, strikes and strike breakers, political intolerance, economic inequalities, the tyranny of the machine, and narcotics.
These were problems with which Chaplin had become acutely preoccupied in the course of an eighteen-month world tour in 193132, when he had observed the rise of nationalism and the social effects of the Depression, unemployment, and automation. In 1931, he declared to a newspaper interviewer, Unemployment is the vital question. . . . Machinery should benefit mankind. It should not spell tragedy and throw it out of work.
Exposing these problems to the searchlight of comedy, Chaplin transforms the Little Tramp into one of the millions working in factories throughout the world. He is first seen as a worker driven crazy by his monotonous, inhuman job on a conveyor belt and being used as a guinea pig to test a machine to feed workers as they perform their tasks. Exceptionally, the Little Tramp finds a companion in his battle with this new worlda young girl (Paulette Goddard) whose father has been killed in a strike and who joins forces with Chaplin. The couple are neither rebels nor victims, wrote Chaplin, but the only two live spirits in a world of automatons.
By the time Modern Times was released, talking pictures had been established for almost a decade. Chaplin considered using dialogue and even prepared a script, but he finally recognized that the Little Tramp depended on silent pantomime. At one moment, though, his voice is heard, when, hired as a singing waiter, he improvises the song in a wonderful, mock-Italian gibberish.
Conceived in four acts, each one equivalent to one of his old two-reel comedies, Modern Times shows Chaplin still at his unrivaled peak as a creator of visual comedy. The film
survives no less as a commentary on human survival in the industrial, economic, and social circumstances of the twentiethand perhaps the twenty-firstcentury. DR
See all movies from the 1930s
1930s
SWING TIME (1936)
U.S. (RKO) 103m BW
Director: George Stevens
Producer: Pandro S. Berman
Screenplay: Erwin Gelsey, Howard Lindsay, Allan Scott, from the story Portrait of John Garnett by Elwin Gelsey
Photography: David Abel
Music: Jerome Kern, Dorothy Fields
Cast: Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Victor Moore, Helen Broderick, Eric Blore, Betty Furness, Georges Metaxa
Oscar: Jerome Kern, Dorothy Fields (music)
Oscar nomination: Hermes Pan (dance)
A song-and-dance fantasia, George Stevenss Swing Time is an audiovisual spectacle organized around a backstage musical. Certainly a high-water mark for the mid-1930s, the film is equally a tease of things to come in the combination of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
Assembled by legendary RKO producer Pandro S. Berman, Swing Time is the story of Lucky Garnett (Fred Astaire), a well-regarded hoofer engaged to the pleasant, though uninspiring, Margaret Watson (Betty Furness). When hes forced to secure a large dowry to continue with his betrothal, their matrimonial plans are put on hold so he can seek his fortune in New York City. Once there, he meets Penny (Ginger Rogers), his true love, and thereafter the film more or less works through various disturbances before allowing them to fall into one anothers arms.