Modern Times ***** (1936, Charles Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Henry Bergman) – Classic Movie Review 2552

Charles Chaplin’s endlessly clever, inventive and witty 1936 satire on modern factory methods, inspired by René Clair’s famous 1931 left-wing satirical comedy À Nous la Liberté, is a silent comedy made nearly a decade after the advent of sound. It is Chaplin’s last silent film, though non-dialogue film would be more accurate as it is filled with sound effects.

Once again, Chaplin plays The Tramp character, this time A Factory Worker who is struggling to live in modern industrial society with the help of A Gamin (Paulette Goddard), a young homeless woman.

Modern Times is packed full of superb comic routines particularly in the famous sequence when Chaplin runs amuck as he breaks under the stress of the repetitive assembly line, frantically trying to keep up with production, tightening bolts. His boss believes he has gone mad and sends him to a mental hospital. Interestingly, in terms of Chaplin’s own story in the Fifties, his character here is mistaken for a communist while waving a red flag and sent to jail. Foiling a jailbreak, he is freed.

As writer-actor-director, Chaplin mixes with the greatest of skill the still-biting social comment and funny slapstick gags with touching old-fashioned pathos as the hero gives a home to lovely waif Paulette Goddard. You could call it either cold and reactionary or warm and humanistic in the way Chaplin is raging against modern society, the machine age and progress. Like making a silent movie a decade after the arrival of the talkies, there’s certainly an element of the reactionary about it, though it’s in a charming way.

Old as it is, the movie wears extremely well, as the themes are even more relevant today and the film captures the essence of Chaplin. He also writes the music score, which includes the evergreen hit ‘Smile’.

Also in the cast are Henry Bergman, Chester Conklin, Stanley ‘Tiny’ Sandford, Gloria DeHaven, Hank Mann, Allan Garcia, Stanley Blystone, Dick Alexander, Myra McKinney, Murdoch McQuarrie, Cecil Reynolds, Wilfred Lucas, Ed Le Sainte, Fred Malatesta and Sam Stein.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2552

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