Slideshow
MODERN TIMES
U.S., 1936
Written and directed by Charles Chaplin
Starring Charles Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Henry Bergman, Tiny Sandford, Chester Conklin
Approx. 87 min. 35mm.
The Tramp gets trapped in the coils of automation; plays the guinea pig for a feeding machine gone amok; helpfully waves a red flag dropped by a departing truck — just as a Communist demonstration marches up behind him; and accidently sniffs “happy dust.” A corrosive satire on the dehumanizing effects of technology, but also one of his most lighthearted works, with the additional exuberance of Paulette Goddard as “the Gamin.”
Reviews
“A COMEDIC MASTERPIECE!”
– Time Out
“Made under the twin influences of Walt Disney (the cartoon-like use of sound effects) and Fritz Lang (the vast art deco factory that initially employs the Little Tramp)… Chaplin's opening montage joke, comparing the proletariat to sheep, may be ABC Eisenstein, but the comic Metropolis of the movie's first half-hour is one of his greatest conceits.”
– J. Hoberman, Village Voice
“A lot of movies are said to be timeless, but somehow in their immortality they fail to draw audiences… One of the many remarkable things about Charlie Chaplin is that his films continue to hold up, to attract and delight audiences… With MODERN TIMES, a fable about (among other things) automation, assembly lines and the enslaving of man by machines, he hit upon an effective way to introduce sound without disturbing his comedy of pantomime.”
– Roger Ebert
“To the best of my knowledge, with the arguable exception of Dickens, no one else in the history of art has shown us in greater detail what it means to be poor, and certainly no one else in the history of movies has played to a more diverse audience or evolved more ambitiously from one feature to the next. The opening sequence in Chaplin's second Depression masterpiece (1936), of the Tramp on the assembly line, is possibly his greatest slapstick encounter with the 20th century.”
– Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader