A well-oiled comedic machine

Once Warner Brothers’ The Jazz Singer debuted in 1927, the era of talking pictures was born, signaling an end to the dominance of silent movies. But Charlie Chaplin never got the memo. He continued making (mostly) silent films through 1936, as evidenced by Modern Times, released that year, and which celebrated a 90th birthday last month.

The film serves as a poignant critique of the dehumanizing effects of the Great Depression and the industrial age, following a nameless Factory Worker (Chaplin) who suffers a nervous breakdown due to the relentless pace of a high-tech assembly line. After a series of comedic mishaps involving a mechanical feeding machine and a stint in jail, he encounters “The Gamin” (played by Paulette Goddard), a homeless young woman fleeing the police after stealing bread. The two form an endearing partnership, struggling to survive and find employment in a harsh, automated world. Chaplin was partially inspired to muse on this subject matter after talking with Mahatma Gandhi and meeting with Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, and Bernard Shaw during a 16-month world tour when he traveled the globe following the success of City Lights (1931).

To listen to a recording of our CineVerse group discussion of Modern Times, conducted back in 2023, click here. To hear the latest Cineversary podcast episode, which celebrates the 90th anniversary of Modern Times, click here.

This is surprisingly relevant and evergreen for a 90-year-old movie, as Chaplin biographer Jeffrey Vance wrote: “Modern Times is perhaps more meaningful now than at any time since its first release. The twentieth-century theme of the film, farsighted for its time—the struggle to eschew alienation and preserve humanity in a modern, mechanized world—profoundly reflects issues facing the twenty-first century. The Tramp's travails in Modern Times and the comedic mayhem that ensues should provide strength and comfort to all who feel like helpless cogs in a world beyond control. Through its universal themes and comic inventiveness, Modern Times remains one of Chaplin's greatest and most enduring works. Perhaps more important, it is the Tramp's finale, a tribute to Chaplin's most beloved character and the silent-film era he commanded for a generation.

Debatably, this is Chaplin’s funniest feature film, comprised of unforgettable set pieces and scenarios. As with several Chaplin feature-length works, Modern Times is built around a handful of vignettes strung together, in this case four main segments: the factory, which includes famous bits like the Tramp trying to keep pace with an impossibly fast assembly line, passing through the gears and cogs of a giant machine, and being mechanically force-fed food; the jail, in which he enjoys being behind bars more than the chaos of the outside world and thwarts an escape attempt; the department store, where the Trap works as a night watchman and engages in a blindfolded roller-skating stunt; the machine works, where the Tramp gets his supervisor caught in the gears and has to feed him lunch; and the restaurant/nightclub, where he performs as a singing waiter.

The film sends off the Little Tramp character in grand style. “The unique triumph of Modern Times is that it maintains the playful aura of the early Tramp and the comedic sophistication of The Gold Rush and City Lights, all while carefully balancing the humor with sentiment, charm with political awareness,” per Criterion Collection essayist Saul Austerlitz. “It is Chaplin before life, and the world of which he was an ever more careful observer, began to weigh him down. With it, he bid a fond farewell to the silent film, and to the character who had made him the most famous man in the world. For Chaplin, it was the end of an era...It is a recapitulation of his earlier work, the director taking a triumphant final lap around the style he did so much to invent, before reluctantly turning to the new challenges of sound. In it, the Tramp bows one last time to the audience that has loved him so much, before disappearing forever.”

Many regard the music, composed by Chaplin, as the greatest score among all his films. This film introduced Chaplin’s melody for a later pop hit, Smile, to the world, which became one of the most beloved songs of the 20th century.

Fun fact: This is widely considered to be the last silent film produced by Hollywood, not including experimental works or spoofs like Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie. Although Modern Times includes some voices and sound effects, it plays and is intended as a true work of silent cinema. Yes, it serves as the only film in which the Little Tramp utters words, which occurs during the restaurant singing scene. Technically, however, the character is singing gibberish, not any comprehensible language. Interestingly, other than that nonsensical song, the only words spoken are delivered through a machine, such as the inventor speaking via phonograph and the factory owner talking through his screen, which serves as a thematic comment on mechanical soullessness. Per Rob Nixon of TCM, “Modern Times represents more than a refusal to move into talkies, for the film actually comments on sound and plays with the conventions of both silent and talking pictures. In exploring this new technology, the form of the film becomes part of the content and the story itself becomes a reflection of the cinematic ‘modern times,’ an observation on the increasingly mechanized, factory-like production of movies, something far removed from the improvisational and leisurely way Chaplin was accustomed to working.”

To create and distribute such a picture in 1936 – nine years after the introduction of sound in cinema – was gutsy but risky. The film proved to be a commercial success, earning $1.8 million in North American theatrical rentals and becoming one of the highest-grossing movies of 1936. Records indicate the film was the most popular title at the British box office between 1935 and 1936. Yet, although the movie performed well financially, its domestic earnings trended downward relative to the box office highs of Chaplin’s previous silent hits, The Gold Rush (1925) and City Lights (1931). By the mid-1930s, talking pictures had dominated the market for years, causing a shift in American tastes away from the traditional pantomime that had long been Chaplin's signature.

Modern Times shares striking aesthetic parallels with the degrading machinery of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and the factory-line satire of René Clair’s Liberty for Us (1931). The film also synthesizes the "man versus object" slapstick Chaplin perfected in his two-reeler The Pawnshop (1916) with the mechanical ingenuity seen in Buster Keaton’s The Scarecrow (1920). King Vidor's The Crowd (1928) also possibly influenced Modern Times through its stark, visual depiction of the individual as a tiny, replaceable unit trapped within a vast, soul-crushing urban and corporate bureaucracy.

The legacy of The Little Tramp’s swan song resonates through the somber, dignified visual framing of displaced laborers in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), the satirical take on poverty and transient life in Sullivan’s Travels (1941), and the repetitive, assembly-line nightmare of the Donald Duck cartoon Der Fuehrer's Face (1943). Its influence on Jacques Tati is evident in the rhythmic mechanical mishaps of Jour de fête (1949), the automated house gadgets in Mon oncle (1958), the dehumanizing glass-and-steel maze of PlayTime (1967), and the highway gridlock of Trafic (1971). Chaplin’s comedic DNA reached television through the frantic assembly line chaos of that beloved I Love Lucy episode and in the legendary opening of The Dick Van Dyke Show, where Rob Petrie’s famous trip over the ottoman serves as a direct homage to the Tramp’s pratfall in Modern Times. Woody Allen further channeled this bumbling subversion in the prison chain-gang slapstick of Take the Money and Run (1969) and the malfunctioning automation of the "Orgasmatron" in Sleeper (1973). Chaplin’s film also likely served as the spiritual blueprint for the surreal, soul-crushing workplaces in Brazil (1985).

With Modern Times, Chaplin made more of an overt sociopolitical statement in his art than ever before, against a backdrop of the Great Depression. Consider how he critiques corporate America, authority figures, the government, and law enforcement, while representing down-and-outers and commenting on the struggles of the working man, the dangers of dehumanization in a world of encroaching technology, and a social system tilted against the underprivileged. This is the film that contributed to the American government’s suspicion that Chaplin was a communist or at least a communist sympathizer. The key moment in Modern Times that his detractors would point to is when, in a classic comedic misunderstanding, the Tramp simply attempts to return a red warning flag that fell off a passing truck, only to inadvertently lead a surging crowd of unemployed protesters and find himself arrested as a communist agitator.

Also unusual for Chaplin, this movie has a strong female lead, the Gamine, who is arguably not a love interest but more a platonic partner who is from the same lower rung of the socioeconomic ladder as the Tramp. In past films, the Tramp often pined for more unattainable females. Additionally, many shorts and films featuring the Little Tramp end with him walking off alone. This movie concludes with him arm in arm with a partner. It’s also rare and gutsy for a 1936 film to include a cocaine comedy sequence. Depicting the use of illegal drugs would have normally been a no-no in the production code era.

The lessons here are obvious but evergreen: The dangers of increased reliance on mechanization, industrialization, and technology over human beings. Modern Times repeatedly demonstrates how technological advancement comes at a high cost to humans, particularly workers dehumanized and exploited by big business, and how we need to prioritize people and human ingenuity over machines or risk obsolescence. Deep Focus Review essayist Brian Eggert believes this theme is easily proven by the waif’s presence: “The Tramp and Gamine are like children, free of responsibility, while adults remain mindless and controlled automatons.”

Modern Times also plays as a classic David versus Goliath tale. “Industry, labor strife, and government are all the enemies of the common man. Chaplin has no suggestions for the masses, and can only offer his lumpen Tramp as an involuntary anarchist, knocked around like a pinball but always ready to bounce back…The theme is really innocent Tramp against the world,” according to DVD Savant Glenn Erickson.

We are reminded how good people pushed to extremes. Most characters in Modern Times, including the Little Tramp, the Gamine, and even the department store intruders, are good at heart but may have to break the law for basic needs like food and shelter during a time of extreme financial duress.

The Tramp and the Gamine are forced to be creative, improvisational, and cleverly spontaneous when put on the spot. They rise above their limitations with the help of pluck, inventiveness, and cunning, which espouses another key theme: grace under pressure.

Modern Times is also strongly concerned with time itself – being on time, punching the clock, watching the clock, and good and bad timing. There’s a strong focus on food, eating, or the lack thereof, with several comedic mishaps involving edibles. There is a distrust of and anger toward authority, especially police officers and bureaucrats. And this is a time of social unrest, as evidenced by depictions of work strikes, public protests, jailbreaks, and revolts.

History has been exceedingly kind to Modern Times, which in 1989 was honored as one of the initial 25 motion pictures selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, recognized for being culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant. Today, the film maintains a 98% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes derived from 108 reviews, carrying a weighted average of 9.4/10. Metacritic identifies the film as having "universal acclaim," reporting an aggregated score of 96/100 based on the evaluations of four critics.

The American Film Institute ranked the production at number 81 in its 1998 list of the 100 Years... 100 Movies. In 2000, the AFI placed the film at number 33 on its 100 Years... 100 Laughs list. The movie moved to the 78th spot in the 2007 10th Anniversary Edition of the AFI list. The Village Voice conducted a critics' poll in 1999 that placed the film at number 62 on its list of the Top 250 "Best Films of the Century." In January 2002, the National Society of Film Critics included the work on its "Top 100 Essential Films of All Time" list. The prestigious French publication Cahiers du cinéma voted the film number 74 on its 2008 list of the "100 Greatest Films." 

Meanwhile, in the 2022 Sight and Sound rankings, Modern Times was voted the 78th greatest film of all time in the critics' poll and ranked 46th in the directors' poll, maintaining its status as one of only nine silent films to remain in the top 100. In the 2012 Sight and Sound polls, the movie was ranked as the 63rd-greatest film ever by critics and the 20th-greatest by directors. In an earlier 2002 version of the Sight and Sound list, the film held the 35th position among film critics. A 2015 BBC poll of global film critics resulted in the film ranking 67th on the "100 Greatest American Films" list. In 2017, the BBC conducted a poll of 253 critics from 52 different countries, which voted the film number 12 on the list of the 100 greatest comedies of all time. And Time Out magazine ranked the film 49th on its 2021 list of the 100 best movies ever made.