“MODERN TIMES.”

Waikato Times, Volume 119, Issue 9817, 22 February 1936, Page 21 (Supplement)

“MODERN TIMES.”

CHARLES CHAPLIN’S NEW FILM. SOME SECRETS REVEALED. (Special to Times by Air Mail.) LONDON, January 16. Stanley Lupino, just back from Hollywood, told me last night that he proposes to make two films with his old partner, Laddie Cliff, “Sporting Love” and “There’s a Pretty Thing,” before he returns to the London stage in a new show. Then he spoke of Charlie Chaplin’s new picture, “Modern Times,” a sequence from which he had been shown by the comedian. The film deals with a feeding machine whereby everything is delivered mechanically and all the feeder has to do is to absorb nourishment as fast as it can be delivered. Starving. Charlie is starving when he comes upon the preliminaries of a demonstration. The inventors are looking for a subject upon whom It can he tested, and Charlie’s emotions, as he waits eagerly with his empty tummy for an

CHARLES CHAPLIN. invitation, are conveyed in his most inspired vein of comedy and pathos. He is accepted, and the machine gets to work. Charlie, without any effort, enjoys the first square meal he has had for months. But the demonstration goes on. The little man is not sure of liis enjoyment of one full meal after another. Then the machine goes mad. Tt refuses to stop. Charlie, unable to escape from the apparatus, has food pushed into his mouth at a terrific rate. The machine has to be smashed in order to save the recently starving little man from death .through overfeeding. Never Seen Anything Funnier. “ I haven’t -seen the whole of the film,” said Mr Lupino, “but I’ve never seen anything funnier than Charlie’s performance in this particular sequence.” Mr Lupino, recalling the shock of Thelma Todd’s sensational death, said she had agreed just before to make another picture with him in England.