Chaplin: A Dog's Life (1918) and Modern Times (1936)

I once thought Chaplin appealed to everyone, though perhaps in different ways and at different levels.  My five-year-old daughter loved A Dog's Life (a short film)but did not much care for Modern Times (feature length), somewhat changing my view.  Though A Dog's Life has some dubious moral elements they are not emphasized the way they are in Modern Times, when Chaplin shows a darker and more complex side.  In A Dog's Life Chaplin and Edna Purviance escape the evil city and become successful farmers by using stolen money and that is seen as okay, since they stole the money from muggers who stole it from a rich dipsomaniac, as the class element continues to emerge in Chaplin's films.  Chaplin also steals food from a pushcart vendor and inadvertently wrecks a fruit stand while saving a dog being picked on by other dogs.  The cops are seen as fair game and Chaplin escapes them regularly, by kicking them in the butt, untying their shoes and creating chaos and confusion.  My daughter thought this was "very funny and very beautiful" and she is correct:  Chaplin moves with beauty and grace as he rescues a dog and then rescues a woman who is being forced into a job as a B-girl (is that expression for a woman who works for the house and encourages men to buy drinks still used?) and even stealing food is funny, with Chaplin timing it precisely, stealing and eating while the vendor looks away for a split second.

Modern Times is a much darker film, emphasizing unemployment and political oppression.  My daughter did not like that Chaplin kept getting thrown in jail, the first time when he mistakenly picks up a red flag and is accused of leading a bolshevist mob.  He gets out because he gets accidentally high on cocaine and foils a jailbreak.  Meanwhile he hooks up with "the gamine," played by Paulette Goddard, who sees her father killed by cops trying to break up a strike.  Even the funniest scene, of a feeding machine on an assembly line (it saves time), my daughter found somewhat distressing when the machine shorts out and dumps food on Chaplin while he is confined in the machine.  Chaplin made this film while he was struggling with the advent of sound and used some sound in the film, though when he himself spoke it was to sing a nonsense song (which my daughter did not understand at all), as he lost the lyrics he had written on his cuffs. 

When Chaplin began directing full-length films he had total control, even to owning his own studio, and he began to address serious social issues in a way he could not when he was an actor for hire.  The sound films have much brilliant comedy in them, but they are serious and even sad  in a way that the short films are not. I think my daughter will eventually like and enjoy the complexity of Modern Times, City Lights, The Circus, The Gold Rush but for now I think we may stick with the earlier shorts.