Modern Times (Charles Chaplin Productions, United Artists, 1936)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, February 6) at 9 I watched one of my all-time favorite films on Turner Classic Movies: Modern Times (1936), Charlie Chaplin’s last film playing his “Little Tramp” character and, to my mind, Chaplin’s masterpiece. TCM showed this as part of a “Guest Programmer” night featuring writer/director James L. Brooks, who’s far from one of my favorite filmmakers. His best-known credit was the multi-Academy Award-winner Terms of Endearment (1984), which when my then-partner John Gabrish and I screened it on a rental videotape in the late 1980’s we disliked it so heartily we renamed it “Terms of Emborement.” Brooks co-hosted the evening with TCM host Dave Karger, and the four films they selected were Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977), George Cukor’s Adam’s Rib (1949) with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in a battle-of-the-sexes comedy-drama, and after Modern Times Harold Lloyd’s most legendary film, Safety Last! (1923), the one in which he climbs a skyscraper to win a contest and make enough money to marry his girlfriend (played by Mildred Davis, who became Mrs. Harold Lloyd for real in 1923). I’ve long thought Modern Times is Chaplin’s greatest film, mainly because he ramped up the social commentary that had always been implicit in his work and made it explicit. (Other people, including Martin Scorsese, don’t like Modern Times that much for exactly the same reason; Scorsese and others think Chaplin was a greater artist when he wasn’t being so explicitly political.) Modern Times opens in the factory of something called the “Electro Steel Corp.,” and while it’s not altogether clear just what the factory makes, Chaplin is an anonymous assembly-line worker whose job it is to tighten two nuts on a bracket and keep doing that all day as the items pass him by on the assembly line. The boss of the factory (Allan Garcia) uses a big-screen TV intercom system (something which didn’t exist yet in real life, though eventually it would) to order a speed-up – and his voice is heard in the film.

It’s a commentary on Chaplin’s view of sound in movies that until the final scene, the bits of synchronized dialogue in the film all come from the villains; though Modern Times is generally considered a silent film, and most of its “dialogue” is delivered via intertitles rather than actually heard, it’s really a “sound film” in the Eisensteinian sense: one that doesn’t use dialogue but adds depth and richness to the artistic whole via the effective use of music and synchronized sound effects. The TV’s are as omnipresent as the telescreens in George Orwell’s 1984; Chaplin’s character is even upbraided by a screen in the restroom that accuses him of taking too long in there. Chaplin is chosen as the guinea pig for a new company’s invention, an automatic feeding machine (the sales pitch for it is delivered via a record, yet another example of Chaplin anticipating later technology) that will eliminate the need to give the put-upon workers a lunch break. Only the test of it goes haywire: the machine spills a bowl of soup down Chaplin’s chest and starts feeding him bolts instead of the morsels of food it’s supposed to dispense via a lever. As the people demonstrating the machine try to fix it, it keeps shorting out and emitting sparks until the Electro Steel CEO tells them, “It isn’t practical.” After yet another intercom-ordered speed-up, Chaplin has a nervous breakdown and starts losing it completely. He’s swallowed up by the plant’s machinery and spat out again in some of the most beautiful fantasy images ever seen on screen. Then he exits the plant, grabbing his wrenches and tightening everything he sees that even vaguely resembles a nut, including the decorative buttons on the company’s secretary’s dress. Later he chases another, heavy-set woman down the street because she’s got large buttons on her breasts that look like nuts, and ultimately Chaplin is arrested and taken to a psychiatric hospital.

He’s cured of his nervous breakdown but no longer has a job, and just then the film’s heroine, “The Gamin” (Paulette Goddard in the first of her two films with Chaplin; they lived together during this period and Chaplin insisted in his autobiography that they had been married by a sea captain on board an ocean liner, but neither he nor Goddard were able to produce any written documentation, and according to Chaplin biographer Theodore Huff, Goddard’s inability to prove that she and Chaplin were legally married cost her the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind), enters the action. She’s the oldest sister of three girls who became orphans when their father dies – their mom having already passed away previously – and they become wards of the state and are placed in a foster home, but she’s determined to escape and live independently even if that means being homeless. (Chaplin was big on giving his characters identifiers rather than actual names, but later we see the arrest warrant the authorities make out for Goddard’s character and it gives her name as “Ella Peterson.”) Broke, Chaplin wanders the streets of the (carefully unnamed) city where it takes place until he sees a red danger flag fall off a truck. He picks it up and races after the truck – and suddenly he finds himself at the head of a communist demonstration. (The signs for it carry demands for peace and jobs in various languages, reflecting Chaplin’s internationalism. In 1947, when asked why he had never naturalized as an American citizen, he said, “I consider myself a citizen of the entire world; I owe no allegiance to any particular country.” One can imagine how that went over with the hyper-patriots then in power in the U.S.) Chaplin is singled out as the leader of the protest, and he’s arrested once again. All that happens in the first half-hour of Modern Times, and after that the film sags a bit – in Theodore Huff’s Chaplin biography he wrote, “It starts out with hints of social satire but these promises are not quite fulfilled. It soon gets back to the old Chaplin comedy pattern (as if that’s a bad thing?) … The last two-thirds of the picture is a sort of an anti-climax to the opening idea” – but it’s still brilliantly funny.

Chaplin gets a job as a night watchman in a department store, but three burglars (including Chaplin’s old Keystone colleague Hank Mann) break in. Instead of reporting them, Chaplin recognizes one as a former Electro Steel co-worker who’s been laid off and treats them to an ample meal, for which he gets fired and arrested again. When he’s released he and Goddard’s “gamin” locate a tumble-down shack and move in, calling it “Paradise” even though an overhead beam keeps conking Chaplin on the head and the furniture keeps falling through holes in the floor. Ultimately Chaplin reads a paper announcing that the Jetson Mills are re-opening and he applies for a job there – he gets hired because he’s the last one who makes it through the factory gates before they close. He’s assigned to assist an older mechanic (another former colleague of Chaplin’s from his Keystone days, Chester Conklin) repairing the Jetson machinery (I found myself wondering if William Hanna and Joseph Barbera got the name of their futuristic cartoon sitcom, The Jetsons, from the factory in this film). Chaplin’s incompetence flattens the pocket watch Conklin’s character carried as a factory heirloom, and ultimately Conklin gets stuck inside the machine and Chaplin has to feed him (an ironic reflection, perhaps, of the opening scenes of Chaplin being fed automatically at Electro Steel and getting caught in its machines). But just as Chaplin appears to be settling in at his new job, the workers go out on strike and Chaplin is unemployed and homeless again. Then a café owner (long-time Chaplin associate Henry Bergman) sees Goddard’s character busking in front of his place and offers her a job as a dancer, and she in turn arranges with him to hire Chaplin as a singing waiter. Chaplin is supposed to sing a song based on a 1917 French ditty called “Titina” (actually the full title is “Je Cherche après Titine”), and since Chaplin can’t remember the lyrics, Goddard writes them out for him on his shirt cuff. Only the detachable cuff comes loose and Chaplin is forced to sing gibberish – part English, part French, part nonsense. I’ve long thought of this scene as probably the closest we have to what it was like to see Chaplin in his early days in the British music halls before he came to America and started making movies. He’s quite a good song-and-dance man!

Unfortunately, just as Our Hero and Heroine seem to have settled down into stable employment, fate intervenes again in the form of two authorities from the city’s juvenile department, there to arrest Goddard – and the two beat a hasty retreat to their encampment, where she bitterly says, “What’s the use of trying?” During the latter part of the film Chaplin, his own composer as well as producer, director, writer and star (only two major directors since, Victor Schertzinger and Clint Eastwood, have also composed music for their films), has written a beautifully bittersweet love theme for himself and Goddard. In 1954 two British songwriters, John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons, turned this theme into a pop song called “Smile,” and while Chaplin didn’t have anything to do with creating this incarnation, the lyrics were inspired by Chaplin’s intertitles in the final scene. “What’s the use of trying?” became the more optimistic “What’s the use of crying?,” and the overall theme of the lyrics was the typically Chaplinesque one of smiling through adversity. Modern Times ends with Chaplin and Goddard walking down a street together (many of Chaplin’s previous films had ended with him taking similar walks alone after the heroine had jilted him), saying, “We’ll get along” and ready to face whatever the world throws at them with determination and pluck. Modern Times is a film that at once looks backwards and forwards; the scenes inside the department store include references to films Chaplin made during his Mutual period (1916-1917), including the escalator from The Floorwalker and the roller skates from The Rink. Yet a lot of the movie looks ahead to Orwell’s Big Brother and the increasing regimentation of work as well as the advances in surveillance technology that allows the big, bad authority figures to keep us under observation 24/7.

When Hugo Chávez was president of Venezuela in the early 2000’s he organized screenings of Modern Times to send a message to Venezuelan workers that they didn’t have to take what the bosses dished out to them, but could fight back. He was widely ridiculed for this in the American press, but Chaplin himself would have approved. In 1937, when United Auto Workers members literally occupied the plants of General Motors and staged what became legendary as the “sit-down strikes,” Chaplin air-lifted them a movie projector and a supply of films. While he included some normal Hollywood productions as well, the film the workers liked best was his own Modern Times; when they saw the scenes of Chaplin literally losing his mind on the assembly line, they hooted, hollered and showed they understood exactly what this film was about. This time around I found myself wondering if Chaplin had seen Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), since the huge factory sets seemed reminiscent of the ones that almost literally swallowed the workers in Lang’s masterpiece (they were the biggest sets Chaplin had ever built for one of his films and he hired Universal’s art department head, Charles Hall, to help design them). Modern Times is one of Chaplin’s most audacious films, and it’s indicative of how carefully Chaplin husbanded his money that he was able to finance it himself and therefore didn’t have any capitalist bean-counters breathing down his back telling him to make the film less radical in its social pronouncements. Modern Times is one of the few genuinely anti-capitalist films ever made, and though its message is more individualist than socialist, it renders explicit what had been implicit in Chaplin’s work all along: that people just need the chance to get along and be free from authority figures that inhibit them and stifle their creativity and ability to provide for themselves.