... sound would inevitably mean the retirement of the Tramp and in this matter he would not compromise; it was either the sound film or the Tramp - the two could never co-exist. By the end of the 1930s, Chaplin had made The Great Dictator (1940) and had finally moved on to make 'talkies' - a decade later than most Hollywood film-makers. However, before The Great Dictator, Chaplin had criticised the arrival of sound cinema in City Lights and, more importantly, Modern Times. Chaplin saw that the time of the Tramp was gone and he would have to give in to advancing technology, but he could not resist making a gripe against this modernization. Thus, the full-length motion picture production of Modern Times by the United Artists (a production company started in 1919 by Chaplin himself together with his friends, some of the other leading figures of early Hollywood; Mary Pickford, ...

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