CANNES: Charlie Chaplin and his funny walk are back in the limelight with a new restored version of his last “silent” movie, “Modern Times”, wowing the Cannes film festival this week.

More than half a century after its making, Chaplin as the factory worker, and Paulette Godard as the hungry barefoot “gamin” of the post-Depression years, come back to the big screen in a restored copy of the film, almost every bit as sharp as a new production.

The hilariously funny and biting 1936 classic is to close the festival on May 25 ahead of its release in cinemas and on DVD.

A satire and a social critique in typically burlesque Chaplin style, the film opens on a fleeting shot of a herd of pigs going to the slaughter-house and a big crowd bustling out of the subway.

It also features some of the best-known scenes from Chaplin’s decades-long career — pelted by corn and covered in soup by a new-fangled feeding machine on the factory floor, and swallowed up by giant cogs and wheels on an assembly line.

In the film, Chaplin the factory worker has a nervous breakdown, gets arrested wrongfully as supposed leader of the angry unemployed, spends time in jail, meets and falls in love with Paulette Godard, whose father is shot dead by riot police. And the plot goes on ...

The film is being screened using a digital projector, a fledgling technology drawing images from computer memory instead of old-style spools of celluloid.

The restorers of the film, French film firm MK2, describe the quality as “almost equal” to the copy made for the world premiere in New York in 1936. In all, 126,000 images were scanned and retouched.—AFP