Modern Times (1936)

Modern Times was Charlie Chaplin's commentary on what he saw as workers' being disadvantaged by the industrialization of the world. It's ironic that though some of the themes he explores still resonate today, they are for different reasons. Workers still get the shaft, but diffferently.

Chaplin plays his Little Tramp character, who at the beginning of the film is a worker in a factory. He is a "nut tightener," who works on assembly line at a frantic pace. Stopping to scratch your nose gets you behind. The president of the company, in a bit of futuristic accuracy, watches over the proceedings via video (which did not then exist) and tells them to work faster (in a nice bit of comedy, he is introduced doing a jigsaw puzzle and reading the funny pages). Eventually Chaplin goes nuts, using his wrenches to tweak everything in sight, and chasing a woman with big buttons on her breasts.

He is hospitalized. He is discharged, bu without a job. He innocently picks up a flag and ends up leading a workers' strike, and is arrested for being the leader. In prison he accidentally foils a breakout (he has ingested cocaine, thinking it was salt, and this was daring even for 1936). He is treated well, but is pardoned, having to back out in society to look for a job. Often he tries to go back to prison, where at least he is fed.

He meets a "gamin," a homeless girl (Paulette Goddard) who steals food and avoids the juvenile authorities (Goddard is mussed up enough to look homeless, but she has great teeth). The two team up in (platonic) relationship and help each other out. Chaplin gets a job as a night watchman in a department store, but that goes awry when he gets drunk. The film ends with the two of them walking off into the sunset, determined to get a better life.

Modern Times is episodic in nature, and sometimes the momentum isn't strong enough to go from one scene to the next, and thus it's greatness is built on individual scenes, such as him roller skating blindfolded near a hole in the floor or, as a waiter, his attempting to bring a roast duck to a patron amid a throng of dancers (this scene is so funny that I couldn't even laugh, it just sort of kept me breathless). Throughout the comedy, he exposes the devastating poverty of the Depression, such as when he and Goddard find a shack to live in. "Paradise!" he says, though it is completely falling apart.

The ironic part is that the people of this film hunger for jobs, but that industry is demeaning them (an early scene has Chaplin being the guinea pig for a test of a machine that can feed workers so they don't have to stop for lunch). Today the job of "nut tightener" is completely mechanized, and there are no manufacturing jobs any more. America is today primarily a service economy, with workers working long, low-paid hours in retail or something similar, jobs that can not be taken by machines (except some, like cashiers in supermarkets, have been replaced by self-checkout lanes). Another difference is that the burgeoning union movement of the '30s has waned considerably, and American workers are mistrustful of organizing, preferring to grimly accepting their long hours, low wages, and poor benefits.

Modern Times is almost entirely silent, with the only speech being in synchronized sound, such as recordings (the boss at the factory does speak). This was the last silent film Chaplin would make, as he gave in to sound for his next film, The Great Dictator.