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Modern TimesNot rated, Black & White, 89 minutes
Known as "the last of the great silent feature comedies," this picture reflects holdout Charlie Chaplin's resistance to the changing times. Synchronous dialog was everywhere ascendant by the time of the film's release, yet Modern Times contains mostly sound effects, synchronous music, and a pattern song with nonsense syllables.
Scenes for study (require RealPlayer, available as free download from www.real.com):
At the factory. The film's opening shows a seemingly endless number of sheep racing across the screen, an image followed by its corollary—factory-bound workers streaming from a subway train. Chaplin, numbered among the laborers, tightens nuts on an interminable stream of steel plates coursing along a conveyor belt. Armed with two wrenches, he nips spasmodically at the bolts as they speed on their way.
Momentarily diverted, Chaplin pursues a plate he has missed down the conveyor line, decking his coworkers in his frantic flight to tighten the fastenings that have evaded him. Finally catching the errant hardware, Chaplin returns to his normal tempo, only to have the shop boss (Allan Garcia), in a fit of boredom, speed up the assembly section. Chaplin's labors become a frenzied jazz ballet.
Sneezing, he misses a bolt, then frantically dives onto the conveyor line, hoping to catch it. As his coworkers attempt to hold him back, Chaplin is borne by the moving belt into a chute, to emerge among great cogs and gears, tightening every available nut in his path. A worker operates the mechanism that reverses the belt's direction and Chaplin emerges, still madly tightening.
Taking a brief break, Chaplin sneaks a cigarette in the washroom. Suddenly, one entire wall of the room becomes a giant TV screen bearing the image of boss Garcia, screaming at the little man to get back to work, a portent of the "Big Brother" later to appear in George Orwell's novel 1984.
Chaplin is next selected to "volunteer" as the test subject for a new automatic feeding machine, by means of which boss Garcia hopes to keep his laborers toiling during what would otherwise be their lunch period. Strapped into the huge mechanized nursemaid, Chaplin faces a turntable with arms that push food (including a rotating ear of corn) into his waiting mouth and neatly follow each course with a swipe of his soiled mouth by a huge buffer "napkin." A malfunction causes the mechanical feeding station to speed up; it spews out its own hardware, which it then shoves into Chaplin's mouth, spills scalding soup in his lap, and grinds his teeth with the rapidly whirling corncob before it flies apart.
Returning to the conveyor line after his lunchtime experiment, Chaplin resumes his frenetic labors, which finally drive him as mad as the machinery. Spotting a secretary with nutlike buttons on the back of her clothing, he chases her from the building, pausing in his pursuit only to give a few twists of his wrenches to a fire hydrant outside. Diverted again, he encounters a matronly passerby with nutlike decorations on the bosom of her dress. Again he gives chase, only to be intercepted by a policeman, who reverses the race. Running back into the factory, the berserk little laborer wreaks havoc, using a squirting oil can as a weapon before he is finally captured and led away for treatment at a mental hospital.
Jailbird. Cured and released from confinement, Chaplin wanders the city seeking another job. A truck with an oversized load whizzes past him, and its red warning flag flies off. Ever helpful, the little job-seeker picks it up and, waving it in the air to attract attention, follows after the truck. A group of indigent Communists gathers in his wake, trailing the red banner.
Arrested as their leader, Chaplin is jailed, finally finding peace and respite in his comfortable cell. A fellow prisoner—a drug addict—conceals some cocaine in a salt cellar, which Chaplin inadvertently uses. Possessed of the sense of enormous strength afforded by the drug, he foils a proposed jailbreak and, against his will, is given his freedom in reward.
Simultaneously, a gamine (Paulette Goddard) who has stolen food to save her starving sisters (her father has been killed in a labor dispute), escapes from juvenile officers. She and Chaplin meet and enjoy one another's company. When she is caught and taken to a juvenile detention center, he decides to return to a comfortable jail cell. He orders a huge meal in a posh restaurant, and, unable to pay for the meal, the minuscule mendicant is hastened into a patrol wagon by the police, where he encounters fellow passenger Goddard.
Night watchman. Overjoyed at the reunion, the two escape: segue into a dream of suburban bliss in a vine-covered cottage. Substituting the accessible for the fantastic, they move into a deserted waterfront shack. To further the fantasy, Chaplin finds employment as a night watchman in a large department store. He surreptitiously gets the gorgeous gamine into the store, where she may wallow in the luxuries intended for sale to the well-to-do. Seeking to spend as much time as possible with his love, the resourceful watchman dons roller skates to speed his way to the time-clock stations within the store. He demonstrates his proficiency on wheels to his admiring inamorata, skating perilously close to an atrium ledge with a broken safety railing.
When his one-time factory colleagues, discharged from their jobs, break into the store, Chaplin offers them all the hospitality the emporium can afford. Charged with the crime the next morning, he finds himself once more consigned to the slammer.
The singing waiter. Now Goddard must seek work; she finds a job as a cabaret singer. When Chaplin is released from prison, she prevails upon the cabaret owner to give him a job as a waiter. One evening, a celebrated singer misses his booking at the cabaret, and Chaplin is pressed into service as his hurried replacement. His featured number is "Je Cherche Apres Titine" (Leo Daniderff). Unable to memorize the lyrics to the tune in so short a time, Chaplin writes them on his celluloid cuffs, planning to peek at them during his performance.
When he strides out on stage, Chaplin shoots his cuffs in a preliminary bit of
posturing; they fly from his wrists, landing among the audience. 
Unfazed, the clever comedian extemporizes,
vamping gibberish lyrics as he carries the story in pantomime, singing such nonsense
phrases as: "Se bella pew satore, je notre so katore/je notre qui kavore, je la ku la
qui la kwa," his body eloquently speaking all the while of a flirtation with a shy
miss who finally succumbs to his amorous advances. At the song's conclusion, the cabaret
crowd applauds wildly, and Chaplin's success as a singer seems assured.
However, the police are onto the runaway gamine; the two must leave hurriedly to follow a different destiny. Dejected at first by the loss of their dream, they gaze at one another. Seeing what they still have in each other, they perk up; clasping hands, they say "We'll get along" and continue down the road.
This remarkable picture—three years in the making, like most of Chaplin's feature pictures—was hardly novel in its theme of Luddite disaffection with the mechanized society of the times. Following the film's release, Chaplin was sued for plagiarism by the French production company Films Sonores Tobis, producer of Rene Clair's A Nous la Liberte (1931), whose representatives cited similarities in the conveyor belt sequences of the two films. The lawsuit was dropped after director Clair pointed out that he would be honored and flattered to find that he had been able to render such assistance to the wonderful Chaplin. "God knows," Clair is reported to have said, "I have certainly borrowed enough from him."
Early social consciousness. There seems little doubt that Chaplin's social consciousness had been formed years before, during his impoverished London childhood. The man-eaten-by-machine theme reportedly came to the 12-year-old Chaplin in 1901, when he was apprenticed as a printer's devil and found himself dwarfed by an enormous Wharfedale printing press, which Chaplin said, "I thought . . . was going to devour me." Further ideas for the factory sequence of the film came from verbal reports of the Detroit automotive assembly lines and from an enormous automatic dishwashing machine—complete with conveyor belt—Chaplin saw in a Los Angeles restaurant.
As early as 1931, two years before production started, Chaplin expressed his concern about the social issues of the Great Depression, "Machinery should benefit mankind. It should not spell tragedy and throw it out of work . . . Something is wrong. Things have been badly managed if five million men are out of work in the richest country in the world." And again, speaking of his own adulation by an adoring public, "What kind of a filthy world is this—that makes people lead such wretched lives that if anybody makes 'em laugh they want to kneel down and touch his overcoat, as though he were Jesus Christ raising 'em from the dead."
The question of dialog. Chaplin's resistance to synchronous dialog was legend, even though this picture is the first to contain such dialog by the comic master himself (in a sort of parody, a patter song in gibberish). Chaplin had spoken for the cinema before—in a newsreel filmed in Vienna in 1931 during a world tour, in which he said "Guten Tag, guten Tag" into the microphone. But dialog simply was not his way, even as late as 1936. For one thing, he was accustomed to the silent-screen technique of cranking the camera at different rates of speed to modify the tempo of the picture; synchronous dialog had to be shot at a fixed rate of 24 frames per second.
For another, he felt that he had no need of dialog . Five days after the premiere of Modern Times, Chaplin—with his protege Goddard and her mother—sailed for Honolulu and a well-deserved vacation on the SS Coolidge, aboard which he met poet-painter-filmmaker Jean Cocteau. Although neither artist could speak the other's language, Cocteau was to say, "Yet we talked without the slightest difficulty . . . What is this language? It is a living language . . . the language of mime, the language of poets . . ." As early as 1922, Chaplin had compared sound in films with painting statues): "I would as soon rouge marble cheeks," he said, and in 1931, "I give the talkies six months more, at the most a year. Then they're done."
Chaplin's view echoed the antimechanistic theme of the
film. Sadly observing the mountain of equipment gathered together for transport to a
location site during shooting, he said, "We used to go to the park with a stepladder,
a bucket of whitewash, and Mabel Normand, and make a picture."
Still, with all his reservations about the talkies, Chaplin fudged the issue, viewing synchronized dialog as, perhaps, "an addition, not as a substitute" for the visuals on the screen. Indeed, in November of 1934, Chaplin and Goddard made sound tests at the studio to hear how they might sound should dialog be decided on for the film. Both had good voices, and Chaplin ordered a dialog script prepared. The script was choppy and failed to follow the tempo Chaplin wanted for the film, so he trashed it, going with his first instinct instead.
Music and sound effects. Music and sound effects were a different matter altogether; Chaplin felt that these belonged, and he took infinite pains with them. He handled many of the sound effects for Modern Times personally; the stomach-rumbling sounds made by the hungry job-seeker in the film were created by Chaplin blowing bubbles in a pail of water. Work on the musical score took months, with Chaplin and his musical collaborators screening and re-screening sequences of the film.
Goddard's big break. Modern Times was costar Goddard's first big break in pictures. Chaplin had met the actress aboard cinemogul Joseph Schenck's yacht when she was doing bit parts in Hal Roach comedies. He formed a close personal relationship with the young actress—22 years his junior—was to live with him as his wife and serve as mother to his children. (According to some accounts they were secretly married at sea in 1933 but did not reveal their marriage until 1936, the year Modern Times was released.)
Goddard is a perfect gamine in the picture, as she was in life—a charmer, lovely, vibrant, and active, with a fine sense of humor and a compassionate nature. Many of Chaplin's features had him similarly befriending a homeless girl, including The Vagabond (1916), The Circus (1928), City Lights (1931), and, later, Limelight (1952). He never befriended a more appealing waif than Goddard, who was unique among Chaplin's adoptive waifs in many ways. She was less distanced from him than most of the other orphans of a stormy, unsettled society. Indeed, the gamine is very like her protector; their stories parallel one another in many ways, even prior to their first meeting. This affinity surely contributes to Chaplin's close relationship with his likable costar.
Unlike many of his previous films, Chaplin was able to do the planning and much of the scripting of Modern Times in privacy, away from his hectic, acolyte-ridden home, aboard the "Panacea," the 38-foot Chris-Craft motor cruiser he purchased in 1933.
Chaplin as social critic. Modern Times was enormously successful in the U.S. It was less so in the U.S.S.R. (where the Stakhanovites were interested in speeding up production, not slowing it) and was banned completely as Communist propaganda in Fascist Italy and in Nazi Germany (whose Fuehrer was soon to be parodied in Chaplin's next film, The Great Dictator, 1940).
Still, the film was not a novel departure into social criticism for Chaplin; all his pictures had their share of that, even the old two-reelers. Indeed, one critic said of Modern Times that it was really just four two-reelers strung together: "The Shop," "The Jailbird," "The Watchman," and "The Singing Waiter." It is true enough that each of the four sequences can stand on its own; its creator inflexibly followed the muse that had served him so well in his earlier work.
Passing of an era. This is the film that truly marked the passing of an era; despite its sound-on-film technology, it is the last of the great silent feature pictures. Although he retained much of his silent style—and all of his talent—when he created his later films, the master of mime was finally forced to adapt to modern times.