Film Class I: Fast and Furious

My film class begins with movies that deal in form, content, or both, with the transition from silent to sound: Modern Times, Singin' in the Rain, Fury, and Sunset Blvd.

I want these films to entertain my students and, as importantly, to allow a broad range of speculation, creativity, and interpretation when they write papers discussing the films.

This means that every film (approximately 15 per semester) has an underlying unity, even if it is not visible or apparent to the class, perhaps not even to me.

I show films in groups or two or three. To capture the early years of sound, my first two films are Modern Times (1936) and Singin’ in the Rain (1952). These are also elemental in terms of their makers: Charlie Chaplin and Gene Kelly-Stanley Donen.

Stanley Kubrick, who counts Chaplin as one of two chief influencers of his work, describes the silent actor as “content without form” (Sergei Eisenstein, the other, is form without content). This remark reflects one of the reasons the course starts with him.

Chaplin resisted sound films for nearly ten years. In Modern Times, he composes a series of vignettes that follow his character, the Tramp, and the Tramp's adolescent love interest, the Gamin (Paulette Goddard). Within this, he melds the theme of mechanization with that of talking pictures.

Chaplin purposefully associates the spoken word with the insane desire of the factory for maximum efficiency. The President of the Electro Steel Corp. (Allan Garcia), first seen idling at his office desk over a crossword puzzle, issues orders on televised screens, famously interrupting the Tramp catching a smoke break in the lavatory with: “Get back to work!”

However, the funniest and most pertinent use of mechanical sound comes when a salesman tries to sell Garcia the automatic feeding machine. The pitch is made via a recording device, just as in Singin' in the Rain, when studio head R.F. (Millard Mitchell), shows his party guests a sound film.

Maybe the salesman is selling sound and not a feeding-machine, but sound films are what audiences wanted to consume. Despite this, Chaplin equated sound with the dull factory routine, suggesting cinematically that audiences will be driven silly by such things the way the Tramp is driven insane.

Yet the Tramp returns to the factory to make money to afford his middle-class dream house. The dream of a future with the Gamin impels him, against his nature, to seek financial security. Chaplin references the Great Depression and the difficulties it places upon Americans seeking to earn a living in a way that was unusual for Hollywood at the time.

Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936) is the third film I add, because Lang is one of the most influential and elemental filmmakers.

(Fury can also represent a transitional film for the class to another phase of film history: film noir. If I want to press the silent-to-sound transition while still allowing myself a transition to film noir, I usually also show Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd. (1950) here.)

Although Fury does not have method stars, it does introduce examples of the strong leading performers who carried the movie industry into the 1950s and 1960s: Spencer Tracy and Sylvia.

The couple (Tracy and Sidney) in Fury are equally impelled to grasp for the American Dream. Fury’s first scene shows them standing before a storefront window staring at a luxurious bedroom. They want to get married but Tracy (as Joe Wilson) cannot find work (another rare, direct reference to the Great Depression in a film of the 1930s).

The Tramp and the Gamin briefly touch their Dream the night Charlie works as a department store nightwatchman. They sample many wares throughout the store; finally, she sleeps in a large bed under a fur coat.

Both films show how people struggle and find daily impediments to the dream of economic security. While the Tramp is in jail, the Gamin finds work as a dancer and gets him a job as a singing waiter.

Joe’s fiancé, Catherine, leaves him for a school job, whereas Joe has few prospects, and his brothers are tempted to join the local criminal mob. Joe condemns them and idealistically maintains a work ethic, which promises rewards for those find honest employment.

Joe does everything correctly: owns a business, keeps his brothers straight, finally has enough money to marry Catherine...and for all his efforts is unduly arrested, attacked by a lynch mob, and nearly burned to death.

In Modern Times, the Tramp's trip to prison gets him a home and regular meals. In Fury, instead of walking away with his fiancé, glad to be alive, Joe seeks revenge, sacrificing his business, his relationship with Catherine, and taking to the gallows the very lynch mob that nearly killed him.

Lang and Chaplin also use the movie-within-a-movie framework as social critique in Modern Times and Fury. Chaplin uses the big screen to express a form of Big-Brotherism; no matter where you are in the factory, you are being watched.

Similarly, Lang's camera is a dispassionate, unblinking eye that delivers a newsreel as a voyeuristic instrument of justice whereby individual members of Joe's lynch mob are “caught on film,” nullifying their alibis.

Yet earlier in the film, newsmen filming the lynching are salivating over the exciting footage...when they run out of film. It takes several minutes to replace reels, during which some of the action goes undocumented.

What everyone subsequently sees on the screen in court appears authentic, real, and undeniable—the Court certainly thinks so—but the audience knows it is incomplete. Lang posits that is therefore only a small leap to conclude that a conscienceless state could intentionally manipulate such footage to serve its own ends.

Here, the two films part company a final time. The events of Fury have left Joe bereft of all faith in the goodness of humanity. Meanwhile, the Tramp and Gamin maintain a dream of a better tomorrow in the face of such adversity because they have each other. Despite the string of injustices the Tramp suffers, his spirit endures because he has found love.

Collingswood resident Bob Castle is an author, teacher, film critic, and playwright. In town, he is also the founder of the Collingswood Movie Club, which meets monthly in the public library for film showings and discussion.

Castle's writing has appeared in Bright Lights Film Journal, Film Comment, and The Film Journal. His plays have been performed during the Philadelphia New Play Festival, the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and at the the Gone in 60 Seconds and "In a New York Minute" festivals.