The “coarse” and “vulgar” movie that offended Orson Welles by existing: “That’s the bad picture”
Paul Thomas Anderson once chastised John Krasinski when the Quiet Place director said he hated a movie, insisting that no filmmaker should criticise the work of their peers when “we’ve all got to support each other”, a sentiment that would have Orson Welles rolling in his grave.
The wunderkind responsible for Citizen Kane had always been an outspoken presence, and the older he got, the less inclined he was to hold his tongue. He wasn’t immune to a phoned-in performance, a paycheque gig, or a misguided passion project, but he also seemed remarkably keen to shit all over anyone and anything he didn’t like.
The list of people and pictures that Welles hated with an intense and burning passion only continued to grow as the years went on, with the once-mercurial auteur unleashing both barrels on Elia Kazan, Alfred Hitchcock, Marlon Brando, Laurence Olivier, Spencer Tracy, James Stewart, and Richard Burton, all of whom can rightly be ranked among the all-time greats in their chosen field.
That was barely even the tip of the iceberg, and the more he continued to unleash verbal tirades on the great and good of Hollywood, the more it felt like sour grapes. After all, by the end of his career, Welles was shooting adverts while pissed out of his tits and voicing alien robots in animated Transformers films, so it wasn’t as if he was firing his shots from the moral high ground.
Another influential icon he loathed was Charlie Chaplin, whom he called “arrogant” and “deeply dumb”. Despite his personal misgivings, surely Welles, a student of cinema who pushed the medium forward just like Chaplin had done before him, could at least appreciate the man’s finest work through an unbiased lens?
Not quite, since he fucking hated Modern Times. Viewed by many as Chaplin’s magnum opus, the 1936 comedy has been celebrated for almost a century as one of America’s most important motion pictures, and it was one of the first 25 features preserved by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. It’s a classic, even if Welles thought the complete opposite.
He couldn’t even remember its name at first, but when he did, he didn’t hold back, and he even started with some light praise. “The visual difference between City Lights and the movie he made with Paulette Godard is extraordinary,” he told Henry Jaglom, agreeing that it was Chaplin’s finest work, albeit with an addendum: “But that other film is bad.”
“Modern Times!” he exclaimed when the identity of “that other film” finally clicked. “That’s the bad picture. I saw it again just six weeks ago. It doesn’t have a good moment in it. It is so coarse, so vulgar.” Welles seemed offended by the mere existence of Chaplin’s masterpiece, and he was firmly in the minority in thinking it was awful.
He was never one to toe the party line, but there must have been some personal bias involved, because no rational cinephile can watch Modern Times and think it’s a waste of celluloid.
