Date Seen: 7/30/17
Score: 5/5
DIRECTOR: Charlie Chaplin
PRODUCER: Charlie Chaplin
STUDIO: United Artists
SCREENPLAY: Charlie Chaplin
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Ira H. Morgan & Roland Totheroh
 |
| Herding livestock- a powerful visual metaphor for masses of workers |
 |
| Chaplin's bathroom smoke break is interrupted by his all-seeing boss |
 |
| The feeding machine |
 |
| Taking the pie-in-the-face gag to a whole new level |
 |
| A cog in the machine |
 |
| Accidentally leading a group of communist protestors |
 |
| Paulette Goddard |
 |
| The "nose powder" smuggler considers his options |
 |
| Chaplin's Tramp accidentally ingests cocaine |
 |
| "Look! I can even do it blindfolded!" |
 |
| Lunch break |
Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times marks the legendary comic's transition into overtly politically-conscious films. While earlier Chaplin films featuring the Little Tramp deal explicitly with themes of poverty, consumption, and the cruelty of authority, Modern Times is his first blatant, if cautious, step into specific sociopolitical criticism and satire, which would reach a head in 1940's The Great Dictator, and continue throughout the remainder of Chaplin's career. Modern Times is a noteworthy point in Chaplin's repertoire for more than its transitory significance, however; it's also his last film to feature the Little Tramp, and his last mostly-silent film, and it includes the first instance in which his voice appears in a film. The Chaplin films that would follow Modern Times- The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Limelight (1952), A King in New York (1957), and A Countess from Hong Kong (1957), would all be very different from his earlier silent hits, and not just because they no longer made protagonist his Little Tramp. The Chaplin of later years, troubled by political and ethical chaos both in the United States and abroad, made films to reflect the pessimism of the time- darker, more apocalyptic, and certainly more obscene. Modern Times stands as a masterpiece wedged between the earlier, more lighthearted films of Charlie Chaplin, beloved silent comic, and the later, darker films of Charles Chaplin, exiled sociopolitical critic.
Modern Times, while far less overtly political than The Great Dictator, seeks to explore the consequences of society's marriage to industrialization, and in doing so addresses concerns regarding the struggle between man and machine, and industry's effects on human psychology. Chaplin had long been obsessed with machines by the time he made Modern Times- in his autobiography, My Life in Pictures, he details an encounter with a printing press from his youth, during which he felt a deep sense of disturbance from the machine: "The first day I was a nervous wreck from the hungry brute wanting to get ahead of me." This childhood trauma would become a constant point of reference and inspiration for Chaplin while staging some of the film's most dramatic machinery scenes, such as the one in which Chaplin's Tramp is swallowed by the conveyer belt and ends up a literal cog in the machine. Chaplin relies heavily on this sort of ingenious visual pun, early on depicting the inhumanity of mass labor by editing together shots of herded livestock with shots of huddled laborers massing into factories. Each of these clever visual metaphors delivers a blow to the inhumanity of industrialization, while also demonstrating the ways in which individual freedom is violated by machinery. Not only does Chaplin endure the physical violation of his body by machines like the Feeding Machine and the giant wheels that he must slink through like a cog, but he also endures the mental disturbances that lead him to a nervous breakdown in which he demonstrates the extent to which he cannot separate his labor duties from his civilian duties.
The film finds its strength in its ability to portray the anxiety of industrialization through Chaplin's gift for physical comedy gags, anxiety that permeated society during the mid-20th century. As David Denby writes, "Henry Ford had introduced the assembly line roughly twenty years before Modern Times was made, but the shock of that invention- its implication of man's final, utter subordination to the machine- must still have been strong enough to make people wonder if the future had not invaded the present and robbed it of its human grace." Chaplin's fascination with this anxiety finds a perfect mode of expression: The Little Tramp, the cinematic character famous for his "representation of common humanity." If the long-suffering Tramp must find unending strife in such a challenge as The Gold Rush (1925), why not put him in the middle of the Great Depression? Throughout the film the Tramp embodies the very "modern" troubles of the day, including the inability to find individualism when serving as a pawn in an apathetic capitalist scheme, unemployment, starvation, visions of the American Dream clashing violently with consequences of the American Reality, and the feeling of always having something- like the law- to run from. As Denby points out, "One of the greatest of American comedies is also one of the most pessimistic. Given the stress of modern work and society, the movie only holds out three choices: jail, insanity, escape... if the Tramp embodies all of us and there is literally no place for him except on the outside, then we are not at home either."
Overall I liked Modern Times very much; perhaps not as much as I liked The Gold Rush or even The Kid, but certainly enough to delight in its cleverness and visual splendor. It's always a treat to watch a Chaplin film, no matter where the satire is targeted; every movement elicits a gasp of awe, every combination serves as another act in his comedic ballet. He is so good- simply so good at what he did. I also found much enjoyment from Paulette Goddard's performance, as well as her screen presence. She looks like an actress of a later time- someone I would see in a New Hollywood film of the 1970s. Her timeless beauty and breezy natural talent is just one of the film's many anachronisms- don't think it was lost on me either that the film, so obsessed with modernity and innovation and futurism, is a mostly-silent film made in 1936. Chaplin, you've done it again!
Sources Used:
"Modern Times (1936)" by David Denby, published in Film Comment, Vol. 8 No. 3 (September-October, 1972)
"Modern Hard Times: Chaplin and the Cinema of Self-Reflection" by Garrett Stewart, published in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 3 No. 2 (Winter, 1976)
"Rediscovering Charlie Chaplin" by Jonathan Rosenbaum, published in Cineaste, Fall, 2004
"Modern Times" from Wikipedia
All photos from Film-Grab.com, and all GIFs from GIPHY and Google Images.
