Her reaction was funny. ‘Wait a minute,’ she said. She got up, left the boat and ran about fifty yards along the harbour and covered her face with her hands.
‘Hey! Come and get your breakfast,’ I shouted.
When she came aboard again she said: ‘I had to do that to get over the shock of it.’
Then Freddy, the Japanese cook, came up all grinning with the breakfast. And afterwards we warmed up the engines, cruised down towards the harbour and out into the Pacific Ocean towards Catalina, twenty-two miles away, where we moored for nine days.
*
Still no immediate plans for work. With Paulette I did all the witless things: attended race meetings, night spots and all the public functions – anything to kill time. I did not want to be alone or to think. But underlying these pleasures was a continual sense of guilt: What am I doing here? Why aren’t I at work?
Furthermore, I was depressed by the remark of a young critic who said that City Lights was very good, but that it verged on the sentimental, and that in my future films I should try to approximate realism. I found myself agreeing with him. Had I known what I do now, I could have told him that so-called realism is often artificial, phoney, prosaic and dull; and that it is not reality that matters in a film but what the imagination can make of it.
It was curious how by accident, and when I least expected it, I was suddenly stimulated to make another silent picture. Paulette and I went to Tijuana race-track in Mexico, where the winner of the Kentucky something or other was to be presented with a silver cup. Paulette was asked if she would present the cup to the winning jockey and say a few words with a Southern accent. She needed little persuasion. I was astonished to hear her over the loudspeaker. Although from Brooklyn, she gave a remarkable imitation of a Kentucky society belle. This convinced me that she could act.
Thus I was stimulated. Paulette struck me as being somewhat of a gamine. This would be a wonderful quality for me to get on the screen. I could imagine us meeting in a crowded patrol wagon, the tramp and this gamine, and the tramp being very gallant and offering her his seat. This was the basis on which I could build plot and sundry gags.
Then I remembered an interview I had had with a bright young reporter on the New York World. Hearing that I was visiting Detroit, he had told me of the factory-belt system there – a harrowing story of big industry luring healthy young men off the farms who, after four or five years at the belt system, became nervous wrecks.
It was that conversation that gave me the idea for Modern Times. I used a feeding machine as a time-saving device, so that the workers could continue working during the lunch time. The factory sequence resolved itself in the tramp having a nervous breakdown. The plot developed out of the natural sequence of events. After his cure, he gets arrested and meets a gamine who has also been arrested for stealing bread. They meet in a police patrol car packed with offenders. From then on, the theme is about two nondescripts trying to get along in modern times. They are involved in the Depression, strikes, riots and unemployment. Paulette was dressed in rags. She almost wept when I put smudges on her face to make her look dirty. ‘Those smudges are beauty spots,’ I insisted.
It is easy to dress an actress attractively in fashionable clothes, but to dress a flower-girl and have her look attractive, as in City Lights, was difficult. The girl’s costume in The Gold Rush was not such a problem. But Paulette’s outfit in Modern Times required as much thought and finesse as a Dior creation. If a gamine costume is treated without care, the patches look theatrical and unconvincing. In dressing an actress as a street urchin or a flower-girl I aimed to create a poetic effect and not to detract from her personality.
Before the opening of Modern Times a few columnists wrote that they had heard rumours the picture was communistic. I suppose this was because of a summary of the story that had already appeared in the Press. However, the liberal reviewers wrote that it was neither for nor against communism and that metaphorically I had sat on the fence.
Nothing is more nerve-racking than to receive bulletins informing one that the first week’s attendance broke all records and that the second week fell off slightly. Therefore, after the premières in New York and Los Angeles, my one desire was to get as far away as possible from any news of the picture; so I decided to go to Honolulu, taking Paulette and her mother with me, leaving instructions with the office not to send messages of any kind.
*
We embarked at Los Angeles, arriving in San Francisco in pouring rain. However, nothing dampened our spirits; we had time for a little shopping, then returned to the boat. Passing by warehouses, I saw stamped on some of the freight the word ‘China’. ‘Let’s go there!’
‘Where?’ said Paulette.
‘China.’
‘Are you kidding?’
‘Let’s do it now or we never will,’ I said.
‘But I haven’t any clothes.’
‘You can buy all you want in Honolulu,’ I said.
All boats should be called Panacea, for nothing is more recuperative than a sea-voyage. Your worries are adjourned, the boat adopts you, and cures you and, when finally she enters port, reluctantly gives you back again to the humdrum world.
But when we arrived in Honolulu, to my horror I saw large posters advertising Modern Times, and the Press waiting on the dock ready to devour me. There was no escape.
However, I was not apprehended in Tokyo, for the captain had obligingly registered me under another name. The Japanese authorities took it big when they saw my passport. ‘Why
