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Modern Times Clippings 369/382

World Film News, London, England, August 1936.

Alistair Cooke

(...) Photo, Broadcasting, March 27, 1961

& Ivor Montagu. undated

& Charlie Chaplin Modern Times Poster

& The Great Dictator Ad, Oct. 15, 1940, Charlie Chaplin

pictures database

& Marble Arch Pavillon, exterior by day, crowd

waiting for The Great Dictator, London, Dec. 26, 1940,

Science & Society Picture Library

„It‘s the worst film Charlie has ever made“

Editorial content. „REVIEW OF REVIEWS

      Edited by H. E. Blyth (...) 

      MODERN TIMES. (Chaplin.)

      Its inmate fault, that of clumsy and uncertain continuity,

is due I think to Mr. Chaplin‘s courageous departure

from pathos. For he knows no better continuity than the moments

of fantasy generated by pathetic incidents. And here

there are none. But untamed behind all the lavish scoring are

a few vagrant Chaplin tunes, and untailored through

all the over-dressed production is the pantomimist himself,

energetically nose-thumbing his own incongruous

prosperity, sharpening the old marvellous gestures with

a new Latin flipness, his mercurial body scribbling

through the piece like a caricaturist‘s pencil through an album

of photographs.

                                           – Alistair Cooke, Sight and Sound“

      The chief waste of time is to gas about what is good

and what is bad in Charlie‘s film: how it‘s got no plot

and no story, the incidents and even gags repeat themselves,

the end doesn‘t solve anything, the pathos flat,

the heroine hard, technique deliberately out of the Ark –

in a thousand ways we can prove to ourselves

it‘s the worst film Charlie has ever made.“ (...)          

                                                        „– Ivor Montagu, W. F. N.“

      W. F. N., World Film News.

     

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