Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp walks into the machine age and gets chewed up by it. Modern Times (1936) is his last performance as the character, and it is the one where the gag has teeth. Chaplin produced, scored, co-edited, wrote and directed the film. He also plays a factory worker whose body becomes a casualty of the assembly line. It runs 87 minutes, in Comedy, Drama and Romance.
Trailer, via American Film Institute.
The Assembly Line Breaks Him
During the Great Depression, the Tramp works a factory line and suffers under the stress and pace of the repetitive work. He has a nervous breakdown, runs amok, gets stuck inside a machine and throws the factory into chaos. He is then sent to the hospital.
What follows is a run of bad luck that never stops being funny. He is mistaken for the leader of a communist demonstration and arrested. In jail he accidentally ingests smuggled cocaine. When a jailbreak comes, he knocks the convicts unconscious and gets hailed as a hero. Told he will soon be released for it, he argues unsuccessfully that he prefers life in jail.
The film’s supporting cast does real work:
- Paulette Goddard as A Gamin, the orphaned street urchin Ellen
- Henry Bergman as the Cafe Proprietor
- Tiny Sandford as Big Bill, a fellow factory worker
- Chester Conklin as the Mechanic
- Al Ernest Garcia as the President of the Electro Steel Corp.
A Home He Cannot Keep
The Tramp wants one thing: a home with Ellen. He keeps failing at it. He loses a shipbuilder job after causing an accident. He tells police he is the thief who stole her loaf of bread, trying to save her from arrest, until a witness exposes him. He then eats an enormous unpaid meal at a cafeteria to get arrested, and meets Ellen again in a paddy wagon. It crashes, and she convinces him to escape with her.
He takes a night watchman post at a department store and runs into three burglars led by Big Bill, a fellow worker from the factory, who explains that they are hungry and desperate.
“He stands alone as the greatest entertainer of modern times! No one on earth can make you laugh as heartily or touch your heart as deeply…the whole world laughs, cries and thrills to his priceless genius!”
That is the studio’s tagline, and the picture is stranger and sadder than the pitch.
Modern Times was one of the first 25 films selected by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry, cited as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” It holds a 9.6/10 on Metacritic, a 96/100. The factory and jail sequences run on the same joke: a man who cannot fit any system, punished for it, then briefly celebrated. That honor and that score are deserved.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
