Modern Times (1936)
(Charles Chaplin, US 1936, 87 min., 35mm)
While his work had always addressed the plight of the downtrodden in contemporary America, Chaplin’s satiric knives were at their sharpest for this masterpiece, his last “silent.” Chaplin directed, starred in, and scored this story of a factory worker who literally gets ground through the gears of his workplace. The Little Tramp then sets out into the world, attempting to escape the effects of mechanization and find a way out of his life of poverty. nearly silent classic indictment of industrialization and modernization. Costarring Paulette Goddard, Modern Times views the increasing dehumanization of the workplace through Chaplin’s everyman hero — a figure increasingly recognizable in Depression-era images of breadlines and vagrants. The scenes of Chaplin enmeshed in the cogs of an assembly line will forever remain a metaphor for our modern condition. The perfectly crafted physical humor has delighted audiences for decades, while Chaplin’s vision of the common man adjusting to a newly industrialized and urbanized world makes this one of the most thought-provoking motion pictures of the depression era.