in detailed discussion. ( See
New Masses,
March 10). The
characters--members of the British proletariat-live
on the
subsistence level; they are drugged by poverty, and by petty
bourgeois British
respectability.
The social level treated is
analogous to that in Sean O'Casey's great plays of the Dublin
Irish,
Juno and the Pay cock,
and
The Plough and the Stars,
or to that of Pat O'Mara's excellent book,
The Autobiogra-
phy of a Liverpool Irish Slummy.
The drama can be classified
as a case history of the cost of capitalism; its cynical ending
underlines it with effective irony. The first two ac.ts are a
bit dull, and the dialogue is literal and somewhat colorless.
The play is redeemed by a moving, even powerful last scene,
when the meaning of the destinies here treated is made strik-
ingly clear and forceful. The authors however, mussed their
work up somewhat because of their ineffectual treatment of
the hero. Intended as a class-conscious working class leader,
he is actually a peg on which the heroine's love is hung.
The direction stupidly enhances this weakness. Thus, in act
CHARLIE'S CRITICS
Inspiration for making this comment on Charlie Chaplin's
Modern Times
came a few nights ago at the ringside in St.
Nicholas Arena. A rangy middleweight
called Willie Neg-
lis,
154!/z,
was fighting Frank Taibi,
1490,
a bartender by
profession. Taibi fought a crouch and did alright in the first,
but toward the end of the second a wild looping left caught
him flush on the mouth and as he straightened at the impact
Neglis chopped short to the chin. No blood, it was very
clean and Taibi went cold flat on his back. It was minutes
before some of his muscles began to quiver, at first he lay
with his head in the resin maybe two yards from me. His
jaw hung loose to the side and the mouthpiece bulged red.
His cheeks were hollowed by the loose jaw and the whole
face was inanimate and stupid with the final stupidity of the
knocked out man. He looked so gruesomely,
terrifyingly
stupid it became impossible for me to avoid thinking of the
reviews Chaplin received in the capitalist press, in
The Na-
tion
and
The New Republic,
and, alas, the
Sunday Worker.
At this point it might be advisable to observe that, among
other things, Chaplin's film contains the finest satire on the
speedup system ever to appear on screen, canvas or paper.
It contains a starving family of four where the father is shot
in an unemployed demonstration,
two of the hungry children
are whisked away by callous orphanage officials, the other
is forced to live by stealing. It has a blustering,
ferocious
boss, hundreds of unemployed gathering helplessly outside the
factory gates, brutal police, the spectacle of a barefoot tat-
tered girl let loose among the luxuries in a department
store, and it has burglars who ply their trade out of desperate
necessity, and it has scenes of life in a Hooverville shanty.
These are some of the representative sequences. Remember
them while you read the following sentence out of Joseph
Gollomb's review which appeared, by one of those curious
quirks of modern times which Chaplin will undoubtedly in-
clude in his next picture, on a page of the
Sunday Worker:
"If our intellectuals try to find social meaning in the film
the joke will be as good as any in
Modern Times."
Now
since revolutionaries have been known to wield a certain
influence in editing the
Sun'day Worker
presumably "our
PARTISAN
REVIEW AND ANVIL
two there is an offstage demonstration of the unemployed who
have been stricken off the dole. The hero, already ill, rushes
out to save the men from the machinations of a raving agita-
tor. The issue is one whether the demonstrators will march
down a street forbidden by the police, or whether they will
take a course chartered by themselves. In the succeeding riot,
the hero is killed. From offstage, we hear the demonstrators
singing
The Internationale.
If they are politically advanced,
the motivation of the play suffers, because then they would
not be so blindly led by this agitator. He comes on the stage
as a raving and unmotivated fanatic who is contrasted to the
ostensibly more sane hero. Such inconsistencies, in both the
writing and the direction,
are inexcusable.
However,
the
authenticity of the material, the plodding sincerity of the au-
thors, plus the fine acting of Miss Wendy Hiller, and the
moving last act all tend to make
Love on the Dole
a drama
that is decidedly worth bothering about.
JAMES T. FARRELL
intellectuals" does refer to Communists,
the very folk who
for so many years have insisted that every picture had social
meaning. Even assuming that Gollomb means
conscious
so-
cial meaning, call it be that the sequences above escaped his
attention? No, he lists them all in his answer to a protest
letter. At the same time, he contends that all this well-in-
tentioned satire was invalidated by "a series of minuses."
Two minuses, to be exact.
l\tlinus One is that Charlie secures a job "through a letter
of warm commendation given him by a sheriff because Charlie
had sided with the authorities against some of his fellow
boarders in jail." Obviously, this is nothing but a harmless
device for liberating Charlie that he might continue his ad-
ventures.
Minus Two is that "When Paulette and Charlie meet,
fall in love and make a home together they are radiant in
having each other with not a thought of how the youngsters
(her little brother and sister) are faring •..
This is no
way, I submit, for any hero and a heroine to behave, es-
pecially in a film supposed to have social meaning." The two
kiddies were by then in an orphan asylum. What should
Charlie and Paulette have done--collect a demonstration and
storm the joint?
Also, there are two minor minuses, one that Charlie is
but an inadvertent
member of the unemployed demonstra-
tion, two, that the factory's "machinery turns out to be
gadget for comic use, like a trick cigar. Charlie and another
worker get caught in the steel maw of this machinery; and
the sequence sets the audiences roaring with good belly
laughter." For the life of me I can't see anything wrong or
anti-social in these things.
Substantially, in
The New Republic,
Otis Ferguson makes
the same point as Gollomb: "Well, the truth is that Chap-
lin is a comedian; he may start off with an idea, but almost
directly he is back to type again, the happy hobo and blithe
unregenerate,
a little sad, a little droll. Whatever happens
to him happens by virtue of his own naive bewilderment,
prankishness, absurd ineptitude and the constant support of
very surprising coincidence." And l\!1ark Van Doren in
The
Nation
says "Chaplin has not changed. The little monkey
. . . stilI expresses himself in terms of the purest, the most
disinterested comedy ...
it is something quite timeless and
priceless." Then he compares Charlie to Harpo Marx.
