NFR Project: ‘Modern Times’
Dir: Charlie Chaplin
Scr: Charlie Chaplin
Pho: Ira H. Morgan, Roland Totheroh
Ed: Charlie Chaplin, Willard Nico
Premiere: Feb. 5, 1936
87 min.
Charlie Chaplin resisted the coming of sound longer than any filmmaker. A stunningly gifted pantomimist, he knew his kind of comedy worked best without dialogue. He was simply capable of evoking whatever emotions he wanted to – laughter, tears, pity – through the vehicle of the camera. A decade after sound came in, Modern Times is his farewell to silence, and to his famed Little Tramp character.
Chaplin’s last silent picture is not a silent picture. There is music, of course, a score composed by Chaplin himself, and a plethora of sound effects as well. Some characters are given the power of speech – most notably, Chaplin’s micromanaging boss at the factory he works at in the opening of the film. As the Little Tramp, Charlie himself remains voiceless until the end of the film when, forced to sing without knowing any lyrics, he sings a long string of nonsense words, telling the song’s story eloquently through his face and body. So there, he seems to be saying. I don’t have to say a blessed thing to get my point across.
Chaplin starts out as just another worker in a great factory, tightening nuts on an assembly line speedily and spasmodically, working so hard that he keeps jerking his arms about when off the line. The pace is doubled and redoubled. Finally, Charlie goes berserk, has a nervous breakdown, and starts tightening anything that resembles nuts – buttons, noses, nipples. He spies a shapely young woman, and the wrenches he wields turn to horns athwart his head, and he pursues her like a stag. The human animal reasserts itself.
Charlie is taken away, cured, and released, only to fall afoul of the law when he is mistaken for the leader of a Communist rally. Charlie winds up in jail, where ironically, he finds stability, peace, and contentment. Meanwhile, we are introduced to the Gamin, a scrappy young girl (Paulette Goddard) who lives by her wits on the streets.
The two meet in a paddy wagon. She and Charlie wind up together, and dream of a happy domestic life. It is not to be. Charlie gets a job as a night watchman, then spoils the Gamin with food from the store, letting her sleep there in the furniture department. Meanwhile, real crooks try to rob the store and Charlie proves to be little match for them. Again he goes to jail.
Again and again, Chaplin and the Gamin try to go straight and play the game according to the rules – and again and again, they run afoul of the law. They are free spirits, and so don’t conform to the normalcies of the proper and upstanding. Society has no place for them.
Eventually, the two end up in a tumbledown shack, and they get jobs entertaining at a café. But the law gets wise and seeks to arrest the Gamin and put her in a reform school. Once again, the two break away and hit the open road, journeying side by side down the center stripe of the road. The Little Tramp is still rootless, but here in the end, he has someone to share his wanderings with.
Chaplin’s grim assessment of the modern world, with its industrialization, riots, strikes, injustice, and inequality, is balanced by his unending playfulness, a refusal to take the human world seriously. It is subversive (the Nazis banned it) and thought-provoking. Chaplin could say so much with his movies; it is difficult to find a more profound cinematic influence.
The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: My Man Godfrey.