So this is another Charlie Chaplin movie — actually the last one to feature his “Tramp” character, apparently. And it definitely feels like it should be, like the Tramp has run his course. Because at this point, it’s 1936, and this is still a silent-ish movie: Chaplin felt (rightly, I think) that the Tramp shouldn’t speak because that would ruin the character, and so even though silent movies hadn’t been a thing for a long time, the Tramp still has no voice.

(I say “silent-ish”, though, because there is sound in it: sound effects in particular, and some singing; but also speech, always from machines: A boss appearing on a television in a factory, a radio broadcast, etc. This feels like it’s probably significant, somehow.)

So beyond the mere existence of it being something of an anachronism, what’s surprising about this movie is how political it is. It starts off with an assembly line in a factory, where Chaplin’s slapstick antics actually serve to illustrate the inhumanity of assembly line work and the drive toward ever-higher productivity. Shortly after that scene, there’s a union march that’s broken up by police; there’s a riot of the unemployed; there’s a poor girl who steals bananas off a ship at the docks. These are by a mile the strongest and most interesting bits of the movie.

They’re also only about 30 out of its 90 minutes. The rest is more traditional fare — a tacked-on romance, a song and dance number, and plenty of slapstick with roller skates and floorboards and doors and crowds and whatever else. It has a vignette structure that, while it has a through-plot, still feels more like a series of skits than a coherent whole — and to my tastes, it’s about three times as long as it needs to be.

Still and all, if you’re going to see only one Chaplin movie (which seems like a reasonable approach), I think this is much better than the higher-ranked City Lights, so there you are.