Modern Times (film)
"Modern Times" is a 1936 film directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin, marking his venture into the age of synchronous sound films. The film opens with a striking juxtaposition of sheep being herded and men entering a factory, setting the stage for its central theme: the dehumanizing effects of industrialization. Chaplin's iconic character, the "tramp," works on an assembly line, where the relentless pace of machinery drives him to madness and highlights the indifference of corporate management. The narrative unfolds during the Great Depression, reflecting the struggles of the unemployed and the working class, making it resonate deeply with contemporary audiences.
The film features a romantic subplot involving Chaplin's character and a spirited young woman, referred to as the "gamin," played by Paulette Goddard. Their relationship serves as both a sympathetic exploration of the hardships faced by citizens during this time and a critique of social inequality. Notably, the film includes sequences of incarceration and escape, underscoring the characters' fight for survival in a harsh economic landscape. "Modern Times" has been recognized as one of the greatest films of the twentieth century, with its memorable imagery, particularly Chaplin's entanglement in machinery, symbolizing the struggle between humanity and industrialization.
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Subject Terms
Modern Times (film)
Identification Film about the dehumanizing effects of industrial labor
Director Charles Chaplin
Date Released on February 6, 1936
Aptly described by film critic Charles Maland as “a cultural artifact of the mid-Depression year,” Modern Times contains some of Charles Chaplin’s most inventive comic sequences in the service of a distinctly humane vision of individuals struggling amid a ruthless social system.
Chaplin ventured into the era of synchronous sound films in 1936 with the somewhat sardonically titled Modern Times. The opening shot of shorn sheep herded in a chute juxtaposed with men entering an industrial complex establishes strikingly the primary theme of machines figuratively consuming the men who are operating them. Characteristically, Chaplin located his iconic protagonist—the “little chap” or “tramp,” who represents the average human—in a daunting environment: the modern industrial assembly line. He is employed in a factory that embodies corporate indifference, epitomized by a chief executive officer with access to a closed-circuit network permitting him to watch every moment of the workers’ lives.
As the assembly line accelerates its pace, Chaplin is gradually and comically driven out of his mind and is eventually sucked into the elaborate mechanism in a shot that has become world famous. When he emerges, his wild anarchic reaction to the entire corporate arrangement is a satisfying and hilarious counterstrike against an upper management that is not interested in distinguishing between a human and a productive device. Not surprisingly, he is subdued and confined following his liberating spree and diagnosed as mentally unstable after his determined assertion of individuality. In the middle of the Depression, with more than one-quarter of American workers unemployed, this kind of resistance was extremely unlikely but gratifying for viewers who felt exploited and misused in jobs they could not afford to lose.
These unforgettable factory sequences are the most memorable sections of the film, which shifts its focus in an extended romantic interlude in which Chaplin’s character joins a woman described as the “gamin,” a description that indicates her free-spirited, unconvential approach to life. Paulette Goddard, who played this part, was chosen by Chaplin because her physical presence evoked the mood of innocent exuberance and energetic defiance that Chaplin’s factory worker exhibited in his encounters with the machine-dominated world.
During a world tour to promote City Lights (1931), Chaplin often commented on the financial crisis of the Western nations, to which Albert Einstein, in Germany, remarked, “You are not a comedian, Charlie, but an economist.” The relationship between the factory worker and the gamin is constructed as a sympathetic exploration of the condition of citizens affected by the Depression. Establishing a pattern of incarceration and escape, Chaplin’s character is arrested as the accidental leader of a communist protest march when he picks up a red flag in a parade. The gamin avoids institutional restriction when juvenile authorities take custody of her sisters following her father’s death. Chaplin’s character actually attempts, successfully, to get back into jail when the couple cannot find sufficient food to survive; this is followed by another escape. A sequence in a department store results in another arrest, and after Chaplin’s character returns to the factory, he is arrested again. The couple then find temporary employment in a café, before their final release to a life on the road at the film’s conclusion.
Chaplin was particularly sensitive to a critique of his career by political activists who felt that his comic style ought to include what they called “social realism.” In spite of the fortune that his films earned, Chaplin’s background as the child of two struggling London music-hall performers left him acutely conscious of economic realities. The first working title for the film was the suggestive Commonwealth. Chaplin also considered The Masses, referencing the name of the radical journal New Masses, while the film was in production prior to its release as Modern Times. The sequence in which Chaplin’s character and the gamin dream of a comfortable, conventional, middle-class life is both an acknowledgment of many viewers’ basic desires and a biting portrayal of many people’s realities as the couple are actually residing in a collapsing hovel. The last shot of the couple on the road, perhaps heading toward a better life, both offers encouragement and implies ongoing obstacles to their survival.
Impact
In 1989, Modern Times was included among the twenty-five films selected by the National Film Preservation Board for the National Film Registry. It appears on many lists as a top film of the twentieth century, and its iconic image of Chaplin entangled in the gears and pistons of a huge machine has become an emblem of the dominance of machinery over human endeavor.
Bibliography
Lynn, Kenneth. Charlie Chaplin and His Times. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
Maland, Charles J. “Modern Times (1936), Charlie Chaplin.” In Film Analysis: A Norton Reader, edited by Jeffrey Geiger and R. L. Rutsky. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005.
Steward, Garrett. “Modern Hard Times: Chaplin and the Cinema of Self-References.” Critical Inquiry 3 (1976): 295-315.