Modern Times

At the height of the industrial age, a factory worker (Charlie Chaplin) toils away all day at a conveyor belt, wrenches in hand, tightening the same two bolts on the same metal part over and over and over. The little fellow is an efficient part in the machinery of progress, and like any machine part, he eventually breaks down. Unemployed and slightly addled, he is mistaken for the leader of a Communist demonstration and sent to jail, only to be released with society's gratitude when he inadvertently foils a jailbreak. Society's gratitude doesn't mean much for a penniless tramp on the streets, however, and he soon joins up with a pretty young orphaned girl (Paulette Goddard)--they may both be hungry, they reason, but at least they can be hungry together. And so the Little Tramp, for indeed that is who he is, plunges back into the world of work, invigorated by his desire to construct a semblance of a normal family life for himself and his new companion.

When Charlie Chaplin made City Lights (1931), three years after "talkies" had take the moviegoing audience by storm, he audaciously chose to make it silent, in defiance of the trend that had ruined the careers of so many of his contemporaries; the result was an unquestioned classic that is still viewed fondly today. Five years later, when silent cinema was just a dim memory, he did it again. In Modern Times, Chaplin takes his mustachioed, cane-toting Little Tramp character--the last time he would ever play the storied role--and moves him undisturbed into the "modern" era of steam-belching machines, political strife, and the Great Depression. The film actually has a full synchronized soundtrack, with dialogue and sound effects, but the Tramp himself never speaks; his words and those of the people with whom he interacts are represented by title cards, like the silent films of earlier days. The effect is of a hapless relic trapped in a new, unknown world of dehumanizing machines and institutions--precisely the effect that Chaplin, whose leftist politics were beginning to color his films more explicitly than they had in the past, had intended.

Modern Times' political message has perhaps earned it a permanent place in the college classroom, with students or professors screening and citing it as a depiction of the conditions that fueled the class struggles of the early part of the 20th century. At heart, though, the film is nothing more than classic Chaplin, whose Little Tramp character was always an equal mix of humor and pathos, mixing pratfalls and rubber-limbed physical comedy with bashful, tentative romance amidst the down and out. Paulette Goddard's never-named "Gamin" character is an explicit echo of the impoverished yet untouched beauties of Chaplin's earlier films, played by such lovelies as Virginia Cherrill and Edna Purviance. (Goddard, who married Chaplin the year Modern Times was released, also continued the tradition of actresses in Chaplin's films being romanced by the notorious ladies' man.)

Points to ponder:

• Note that the only intelligible speech in the film is heard through mechanical devices, like intercoms and phonographs.
• Modern Times is obviously a commentary on a bygone era; technological progress and globalism has moved much of the big iron-and-steel industrial production seen in the film to other countries, or removed the human element from it partially or altogether. Still, today's audiences accustomed to multitasking will get a kick out of the famous scene in which the Tramp meets the "Billows Feeding Machine," designed to make it possible for a worker to eat a full meal without leaving his station. (Today, of course, we'd be more likely to inflict a similar machine on ourselves, rather than have it be forced upon us by management.) In what ways does Modern Times retain its relevance in a post-industrial society?
• Although Charlie Chaplin is remembered today as the quintessential silent film star, with hundreds of directing, writing, and acting credits to his name between 1914 and 1931, he made a very small number of films during the sound era, three of which—Modern Times, The Great Dictator (1940) and Monsieur Verdoux (1947)--are considered not only among Chaplin's greatest films but also Hollywood's. In the latter two films, Chaplin's character speaks, demonstrating that he could act with his voice as well as with his actions.