Modern Times (1936) - film review

Unable to cope with the interminable monotony of work on the assembly line, a factory worker has a nervous breakdown and begins wrecking the machinery.  After a spell in hospital, he is arrested when he is mistaken for leading a Communist demonstration.  When he accidentally thwarts a prison escape, our hero is rewarded with his freedom, but his attempts to find work only end in failure.  He befriends an orphan girl and immediately their thoughts turn to building a home together.  To realise this dream, they set about trying to find work.  Unfortunately, Fate does not appear to be on their side...

Chaplin’s undisputed masterpiece, Modern Times has the distinction of being the last great silent film to come out of Hollywood.  For almost a decade, the world’s favourite Charlie had resisted the advent of sound, but in the end had no choice but to move with the times – a tough challenge for a man who had built his reputation on visual comedy.  Audiences now wanted clowns who could talk.  

Modern Times was originally intended to be a sound film and Chaplin’s original screenplay included dialogue.  However, at an early stage in the production, Chaplin convinced himself that dialogue was unnecessary and so reverted to the silent format.  The film does, however, have a synchronised soundtrack consisting of a full musical score and sound effects.  There is some human speech, but this (tellingly) comes through machines, not through actors’ mouths.  And there is of course the famous nonsense song (sung to the tune of Léo Daniderff’s popular French ballad Je cherche après Titine), which is the first time audiences heard Chaplin’s voice (although the meaning is clear, the words are unintelligible).

This was the film in which Chaplin’s Little Tramp took his final bow.  Over the preceding two decades, the Tramp had become known to millions of people across the world and he remains one of the most familiar icons of the Twentieth Century.  He may not be as nice to look at as Marilyn Monroe, he may not have radically altered our views about time and space in the way that Albert Einstein did, but the Little Tramp deserves his status as an icon.  He has made audiences laugh for almost a century, and will probably continuing do so for many years to come.

But there is clearly far more to Modern Times than just comedy.  This was Chaplin’s first overtly political film.  For the past decade, Chaplin had interested himself in the great economic and social problems of the day and had published his thoughts on an alternative to the prevailing systems of capitalism and Communism.  His Utopia, a vision shared by such notable contemporaries as the English writer H.G. Wells, was one in which wealth and labour were distributed more equitably.  

Chaplin’s frequently voiced concerns over the downside of capitalism are never more evident than in Modern Times.  The film is an all-out attack on the dehumanising influence of mechanisation which is introduced primarily to drive up company profits.  With its hilarious portrayal of human beings reduced to little more than cogs in a gigantic corporate machine, the film brings to mind scenes from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), where human slaves are routinely sacrificed to a mechanical Moloch so that the elite can live in comfort.

Made towards the end of the Great Depression, the film vividly portrays the hardship experienced by many at that time, making this an important social record of the era.   Those who could find work, even tedious work in factories, were considered the fortune ones.  The alternative was starvation and death.  This grim state of affairs was deemed by many, including Chaplin, to be an inevitable by-product of capitalism.  The hand that feeds can also strangle.

Whilst the film lambastes capitalism, it also celebrates the individual.  Its underlying message is that human beings are fundamentally free spirited creatures who can never be happy whilst they allow themselves to be enslaved by a system that exploits them.  Chaplin, himself an outsider of the first order, does not present any clear alternative but implies, in the film’s upbeat ending, that one day we shall find it.

Chaplin made the film during one of his happier periods.  He had met and fallen in love with Paulette Goddard, who would star alongside him in this film and the subsequent The Great Dictator (1944).  The couple’s scenes together in Modern Times are amongst the most poetic and poignant of any Chaplin film.

After the film’s release, the Franco-German film company Tobis filed a plagiarism lawsuit against Chaplin, believing that he flagrantly copied material from one of their films, À nous la liberté, directed by René Clair.  There are some obvious similarities between the films (particularly the ending) but Chaplin repeatedly rejected the plagiarism charge, although he later agreed a financial settlement with Tobis in 1947, just to get them off his back.  

The social and political themes that are explored in Modern Times continue to be highly relevant today and the film still has a resonance.  Indeed, it is remarkable how little has fundamentally changed since the time when Chaplin made this film, in spite of a world war, huge technological progress and enormous political changes across the world.  If anything, people are less free today than they were when the film was made.  Those in the developed world are still willing slaves to a capitalist system that works them harder and harder so that they can buy all the things they think they need, whilst their poorer cousins are, by and large, unwitting victims of the same system.  The near-collapse of capitalism at the start of the third millennium, coupled with impending global ecological disaster, suggests that Chaplin may have had a point.  There has to be another way, surely...?

© James Travers 2009

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