Modern Times 1936

The story, in episodes

Chaplin's Tramp is a factory hand who tightens bolts on an assembly line. The boss watches from a screen, even in the washroom. A feeding machine, meant to do away with the lunch break, is tried out on him and goes berserk. Then the line speeds up, he is dragged through the giant gears of the machine, and he has a breakdown: he cannot stop his wrists twisting, and is taken away.

Cured, he is turned out into the street. A red warning flag falls off a lorry, he runs after it to hand it back, and a column of strikers turns the corner behind him. The police take him for their leader, and he goes to jail.

Out again, he meets the gamine (Paulette Goddard), an orphan who steals bread and runs from the police. They look for a home. He becomes night watchman in a department store, and they roller-skate through it. Later he is a singing waiter in a cafe, and loses the words of his song, which is how the nonsense song comes about. When the police come for the girl again, the two walk off down the road at dawn.

A film nine years into the talkies

Talking pictures had come in with The Jazz Singer in 1927, and Chaplin refused to join them. Modern Times compromises: it has a recorded score, sound effects and printed titles, but no dialogue between people. Voices come only from machines. The boss speaks from his screen, a salesman lets a phonograph record make his pitch, and a radio reads the news.

Chaplin's own voice is heard once, in the cafe, where he sings in gibberish, half mock French and half mock Italian, to the tune of Léo Daniderff's Je cherche après Titine. It was the first time audiences heard him on film.

It is also the last time he played the Tramp. His next film, The Great Dictator (1940), was a full talkie without him. So the careful way to put it is "the Tramp's last appearance", or "Chaplin's last film without spoken dialogue", and not simply "the last silent film", which it is not.

Where it came from

Chaplin toured Europe and beyond in 1931 and 1932, after City Lights, and saw the Depression at close quarters. On 22 September 1931 he met Gandhi in a small house in London's East End. He asked about machinery, and Gandhi's reply, as reported, was that machines had made India dependent on England. Chaplin did not share the dislike of technology, though by most accounts he granted that machinery run only for profit had thrown people out of work.

The assembly line itself is said to have come from Detroit: a reporter told him that healthy farm boys were taken on by the car factories and worn out within a few years. A popular story that the boss is meant to be Henry Ford rests on weaker ground.

Making it

Filming ran from October 1934 to the end of August 1935. The budget is usually given as $1.5 million. Chaplin is said to have written dialogue for the film before dropping the idea, fearing that the Tramp would lose his universal appeal the moment he spoke.

A studio story has Chaplin tipping a bucket of water over Goddard's carefully done hair when she arrived: the gamine was to look as if she lived on the street.

The roller-skating scene, in which the Tramp skates blindfold along the edge of a drop, is a trick. The drop was a painting placed in front of the camera, and Chaplin skated on a flat floor. The giant gears that swallow him are said to have been made of wood and rubber.

The music and the lawsuit

Chaplin composed by ear: he hummed or picked out his tunes and had them taken down. He hired the 23-year-old David Raksin, who criticised the themes and was fired, then taken back, and the two worked closely. Alfred Newman conducted, until a quarrel with Chaplin in the recording sessions. He never worked with him again. The love theme became "Smile" in 1954, with words by John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons, and Nat King Cole's recording reached number 10 on the Billboard chart.

After the release, Tobis, which held the rights to René Clair's À nous la liberté (1931), sued over the similar factory scenes. The AFI Catalog dates the suit to April 1937 and says damages of $1.2 million were claimed. Clair would not support it: he said he was honoured, and was embarrassed by the whole affair. Chaplin said he had never seen the film. The case dragged on for about a decade and, by most accounts, ended in an out-of-court settlement after the war.

Premiere, bans and applause

The film opened at the Rivoli in New York on 5 February 1936, after the planned January date was put back. It earned about $1.8 million in North American rentals and did well abroad: it is reported to have been the most popular film in British cinemas that season.

Politics followed. Germany and Italy banned it as communist propaganda, the AFI Catalog records, and Chaplin replied that he had no political aims. Graham Greene, writing in The Spectator, feared that it would be called a communist film, and thought that it offered no political solution at all. In 1945 Sartre, de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty named their journal Les Temps modernes after it.

Why it matters

It is the Tramp's farewell. Chaplin had played him since 1914. Here he gives him a voice for one song, a companion, and a road to walk away on.

It is the great comedy of work. The man fed by a machine, the man swallowed by the gears and the boss on the screen have become pictures of what the factory does to people. The screen has often been compared with the telescreen of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which came thirteen years later.

It stood out against the talkies and won. Nine years after sound arrived, a film without a word of spoken dialogue played around the world. In 1989 it was among the first 25 films chosen for the National Film Registry.