Amazon.com Essentials:
Charlie Chaplin is in glorious form in this legendary satire
of the mechanized world. As a factory worker driven bonkers by the
soulless momentum of work, Chaplin executes a series of slapstick
routines around machines, including a memorable encounter with an
automatic feeding apparatus. The pantomime is triumphant, but Chaplin
also draws a lively relationship between the Tramp and a street
gamine. She's played by Paulette Goddard, then Chaplin's wife and
probably his best leading lady (here and in The Great
Dictator). The film's theme gave the increasingly ambitious
writer-director a chance to speak out about social issues, as well as
indulging in the bittersweet quality of pathos that critics were
already calling "Chaplinesque." In 1936, Chaplin was still holding out
against spoken dialogue in films, but he did use a synchronized
soundtrack of sound effects and his own music, a score that includes
one of his most famous melodies, "Smile." And late in the film,
Chaplin actually does speak--albeit in a garbled gibberish song, a
rebuke to modern times in talking pictures. --Robert Horton
