BROOKE GLADSTONE: "This month marks a hundred years since the debut of The Great Train Robbery," noted the Spokane Spokesman Review. It's the first silent movie with a plot. Gilbert "Bronco Billy" Anderson played three parts in that movie and would have played a fourth, except Bronco Billy didn't know how to ride a horse. As breakthroughs in technology make for ever more convincing special effects and allow audiences to enter stories through ever more interactive video games, silent films are gaining ground in home video. On Thursday, Warner Home Video announced the upcoming release of The Chaplin Collection, Volume II, including such classics as The Kid and City Lights. It was just this summer that Chaplin lovers were able to get their hands on digitally remastered versions of The Gold Rush, the Great Dictator and, possibly the greatest Chaplin film of them all, Modern Times. The resurgence of interest in Chaplin led WNYC's Sarah Fishko to ponder the peculiar timing of the original release of Modern Times.

SARAH FISHKO: I remember when the tune from Charlie Chaplin's Limelight finally became a hit in 1972, [TUNE FROM LIMELIGHT UP AND UNDER] 20 years after the film had opened. McCarthyism had chased him out of the country in the '50s, and his popularity had diminished. But not the popularity of The Tramp; never the early, silent Charlie. Chaplin's tramp is still the most emblematic, familiar image in the world. The films are in something of a resurgence now, as new DVD restorations have appeared, and a new documentary on Chaplin is making its way around the world. And a restored version of Chaplin's Modern Times is opening in New York next week, too. Modern Times is an interesting case -- a nearly silent film made in 1936, [SONG FROM MODERN TIMES UP & UNDER] almost a decade after sound had turned Hollywood upside down. In fact, what an incredible decade that was -- those years just after 1927, when The Jazz Singer forced filmmakers to completely re-think how films were made. [AUDIENCE CLATTER]

AL JOLSON: Wait a minute, wait a minute -- You ain't heard nothin' yet. Wait a minute, I tell you!

SARAH FISHKO: Writers and filmmakers have understandably made much out of this period, especially the film Singin' in the Rain, which poked wonderful fun at the technical pitfalls for the silent film star who suddenly opened her mouth.

WOMAN: What's wrong with the way I talk?! What's the big idea? Am I dumb or something?

SARAH FISHKO: This was, of course, the start of something big, but it was the end of something too.

RICHARD SHICKEL: It was a huge, incredibly sudden shutting down of a kind of expressiveness.

SARAH FISHKO: Film critic and filmmaker Richard Shickel's new film, Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin, is coming to New York in February.

RICHARD SCHICKEL: People like George Lucas have said to me that he didn't feel that visually the movies have yet recovered from the impact of sound coming to them; that the visual language of movies was more sophisticated then than they have become since -- and there may be something in that.

SARAH FISHKO: One of the things that happened is that the choreographic quality of movies changed.

RICHARD SCHICKEL: People started grouping around hidden microphones -- you know, they'd have a microphone in a flower pot, and there'd be four people sitting around the table, trying to talk into the microphone, and you know that just rendered the movies incredibly static very quickly.

SARAH FISHKO: Charles Chaplin resisted the change with a vengeance. "Movie pictures need sound," he said in 1928, "as much as Beethoven's symphonies need lyrics." [MUSIC FROM MODERN TIMES UP & UNDER]

RICHARD SCHICKEL: He was not alone in resisting sound. I mean, there were theoreticians who resisted it; there were certainly people who made movies who resisted it.

SARAH FISHKO: In Modern Times, there are copious amounts of music, including another tune by Chaplin, [BELL RINGING] sound effects, and even some talking, which comes from a 1984-ish screen occupied by the company president, who observes Charlie on his breaks--

MAN: [SHOUTING] Hey! Quit stalling. Get back to work.

SARAH FISHKO: -- and barks out commands to the factory workers.

MAN: Section 5 - speed her up - 4 - 1.

SARAH FISHKO: But Charlie and co-workers and his partner, Paulette Goddard, never talk. This approach resulted in one of the most famous images in the history of cinema -- Charlie in the gears of the assembly line.

RICHARD SCHICKEL: It's just a brilliant comic sequence. And I include in that the eating machine which is kind of a scary statement about de-humanization.

MAN: Don't stop for lunch. Be ahead of your competitor.

SARAH FISHKO: In that scene, Charlie is used to test a machine that spoon-feeds workers--

MAN: Notice the revolving plate with the automatic food-pusher.

SARAH FISHKO: --wipes their mouths, presents the next course, spins the corn cob for the eater. Chaplin was able to make statements about industrial politics and make us laugh. This was less easy once he conceded that sound had truly arrived. There was, after all, really no way to make the Tramp talk. Chaplin wrote in his autobiography, "I had thought of possible voices for the Tramp --whether he should speak in monosyllables or just mumble. But it was no use. If I talked, I would become like any other comedian."

RICHARD SCHICKEL: I think he perhaps knew that he did not have a great voice for, for the movies. I mean his voice was very kind of cultivated, a little bit high-pitched. It's not a voice that is appropriate to his great character, to the Tramp.

SARAH FISHKO: The closest he gets is a scene in Modern Times in which the Tramp sings a nonsense song, to a restless cafe crowd, making up the words as he goes. [SNIPPET OF CHAPLIN'S NONSENSE SONG] So in that strange combination of silence and sound, you might have even called it a transitional film, if the transition hadn't already been made years before. Modern Times, after all, was made five years after Little Caesar, three years after King Kong and 42nd Street.

RICHARD SCHICKEL: That was a past that had to dwindle. I mean there came a moment where Chaplin had to talk.

SARAH FISHKO: And at that point, he phased out the Tramp. In fact, in Modern Times, the Tramp, along with his waiflike pal, Paulette Goddard, walked down the road for the last time.

RICHARD SCHICKEL: The tramp is a figure that's uniquely dependent upon there being an open road for him to stroll down at the end of the movie. That figure was, among other things, a great exemplar of personal freedom. You just up and go. Well it got harder and harder to up and go in the '30s and '40s in this country and in every country. You know, there were oppressive dictators on every hand. There was industrialism. I think the world was really closing in on the Tramp, and his demise, this comic figure, was, I think, inevitable.

SARAH FISHKO: It's poignant to think of Chaplin making a film about man surviving the modern age with humanity intact, all the while holding on to his own methods and his own humanity, as he watched technology move forward. A look at a film like Modern Times tells us a lot about those mysterious years of tumultuous change when films stopped looking like dances and started sounding like real life. For On the Media, I'm Sarah Fishko. [THEME MUSIC]

BOB GARFIELD:That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Janeen Price, Katya Rogers, Megan Ryan and Tony Field, engineered by Dylan Keefe, Irene Trudel, Jennifer Munson and Wayne Shulmeister, and edited-- by Brooke. We had help from Dave Goldberg. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Arun Rath is our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and get free transcripts and MP3 downloads at onthemedia.org, and e-mail us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media, from NPR. Happy Holidays, everyone. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.