Modern Times (1936)

Director: Charlie Chaplin
Story: Charlie Chaplin
Cast: Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard  
Music: Charlie Chaplin
Time: 87 minutes
Bottom-line: As good as City Lights 

  This Chaplin film wasn’t made in modern times, but it certainly continues to amaze and enthrall the audience even today. Unlike City Lights, which was purely a rom-com, Modern Times is also somewhat social, as it portrays the mechanical nature of the industrialists in a satirical manner. With a running time of less than one and a half hours, Chaplin makes sure that not even a single minute is wasted while providing entertainment to the viewers.

A factory worker (Chaplin) gets a nervous disorder after being made to rigorously and mechanically in the assembly line. He gets arrested by the police soon after. In jail, he is caught for cocaine possession, which he takes from a neighbouring prisoner, mistaking it for salt. But, in his delirium, he catches some other convicts who are about to escape, and so he is released as a hero. As the story goes on, he meets an orphan girl (Goddard) and falls in love with her. Both of them survive for some time by stealing goods, and with the deep recession causing havoc, the couple tries to find some job or the other to sustain them. What happens to their relationship, with the recession in the background, forms the rest of the film.

Chaplin as the worker. The scene where is used
to test the new machine.

Modern Times looks into the sad nature of the workers in the factory, and it also looks into the wide-spread unemployment crisis of the 1930s. We see Chaplin as an assembly line worker, who cannot even afford to scratch himself: in those two seconds, a number of un-tightened bolts go further in the line, due to which all the other people working in the assembly line are affected. We see that Chaplin becomes so mechanized that he cannot control himself from ‘tightening’ some designs in a woman’s frock which look like bolts. This practice of making humans work like machines was criticized in a brilliant manner in Modern Times.

The romance comes only later in the film. This film has lesser romance content, but tons of slapstick comedy. It also deals with things other than just love. But, like the previous film, the comedy will make you laugh hard, but you realize only later how painful and sad the actual situation is. One of the scenes where I couldn’t help laughing was the scene where some men bring a new machine into the factory: a machine that feeds the workers, so that they can work while eating (at least, that’s how I interpreted it). Chaplin is chosen to test the machine, and soon, the machine goes cranky. It starts feeding nuts and bolts to Chaplin, and also keeps banging corn into his mouth. When you see this sequence, you will not feel sorry for a man who is having metal forced down his throat, but rather, you laugh even more. The facial expression of Chaplin is such that we can only laugh, even if don’t want to.

Paulette Goddard as the orphan girl

 Another emotional scene is when the couple finds a house to stay in. We may live in an independent house, with all luxuries, or we may live in a simpler apartment, but the house they find is a simple one with a wooden roof, from where a plank keeps falling on Chaplin’s head whenever he opens the door, and the roof bursts open when someone removes the broom holding it in place. The girl says, “It’s no Buckingham Palace.” But Chaplin says, “It’s paradise.” When you are in such deep poverty, even this simple house seems like a five star hotel. Chaplin’s and Goddard’s expressions when they see another happy couple, and their expressions when they find this home, are brilliant, and this acting makes you laugh and cry at the same time.

Perhaps the most famous still from all Charlie Chaplin films.

Chaplin’s acting, like in all his films, is simply superb. And when it comes to his films, you know it is mainly a one man show, as in most of his films, the direction, story and even the music are done by him, and not by anyone else. Such a versatile genius needs to be recognized and praised by everyone, even the teens and kids of today’s times, for whom films before the 1990s are all boring and lame. Today’s actors like Tom Cruise, Robert Downey Jr. or even older stars like Will Smith and Johnny Depp may win the favour of the audience, but will never ever equal the class of Chaplin.

To sum up, Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 classic Modern Times was, is, and will always be remembered as a masterpiece, and as I said before, even if it wasn’t made in modern times, it will still continue to win praise from viewers of today’s generation. Brilliant acting by Chaplin and Goddard, some very funny sequences, and a simple but effective story make this film one of his best, and along with City Lights, is one of the best films in the rom-com genre ever made.

My Rating: 4.5/5
Rotten Tomatoes rating: 100%