Modern Times

by Jerry Roberts

Chaplin didn't think much of talking pictures. He famously predicted that they would die out in five years and gleefully pressed on making silent films long after his contemporaries had abandoned the process all together. Chaplin made only two silent films after The Jazz Singer in 1927, neither were totally silent (they added sound effects and a line or two of dialogue) but both were critical of the process. First was "City Lights" which opened with a political speech in which the audience only heard sqwuaks coming out of the speaker's mouth. The other was Modern Times, a full bellied assault on madness of the machine age.

Modern Times wasn't his best film but it was his most important chiefly because it was his transition from silent to sound. Here he satires the process but there is a tone that suggests that he's ready to move on. It is the most technologically inovative of his works yet it remains silent. The only noises come from machines and the only voices are heard over a radio, a monitor and a phonograph, the message is that Chaplin will move into the sound age, but that doesn't mean he will enjoy it. The reason that the film is important is because this is the film that brings his gift for satire to the forefront (his other films had satire but it wriggles just under the surface), exposes the madness of machines, economic crisis, communist paranoia and the neverending search for food, glorious food.

Most importantly, perhaps most famously this is the film in which Chaplin finally bids farewell to The Tramp, the world's first movie character. There was some discussion of the possibility of giving the Tramp a speaking voice but Chaplin wouldn't hear of it. The studio insisted, so he created a moment in which the Tramp sings a song, an odd gibberish song called "Titiana".

Five years after City Lights, Chaplin uses The Tramp to show how the society has changed around him, how it has grown past his gentle nature and threatens to crush his fragile spirit. In the grim atmosphere of The Great Depression (this was 1936) we find that he has joined the work force, working ten hour days at a steel factory turning the bolts on a grotesque machine that frequently breaks down and constantly speeds up. As he turns the bolts on the conveyer belt, he has to catch up if he misses one. The machine finally swallows him and, in one of the most famous images in the history of cinema, The Tramp becomes a machine cog winding through the innards of the gears and belts.

Although Modern Times finds The Tramp working it also underpins the same theme that Chaplin has always worked with: survival. After going insane, The Tramp is sent to a mental institution and after having been cured, the rest of the film follows his deperate search for work. At the docks he meets a gamin (Paulette Goddard), a plucky girl stealing bananas for her brothers and sisters. Food becomes a dominating goal for these two and one of the central themes of the picture: The gamin steals bananas and later bread; The Tramp is nearly killed by an automatic feeding machine that short circuits; The couple have cake in a department store where he works as the night watchman; He eats a very large meal that he can't pay for in order to get thrown in jail where he will have decent food and a roof over his head; Later when he gets his job back at the factory he stop to have lunch even though his supervisor is stuck inside the machine; And he fantasizes about his dream house and coming home to the wife . . . at dinnertime.

The world of Modern Times is not that far removed from Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Both films present a world beseiged by the chaos of it's own technology, both present the kinds of opression that Orwell would bring to "1984". The inside world is a crush of machines and noise, the outside world is awash in riots, strikes and marches. And The Tramp, as always finds himself caught in the middle of one damn thing after another. The message is that things are tough all over, but as The Tramp confides in the gamin, keep chin up and spirits high because if you keep trying eventually it will all work out.

Most of the Tramp's efforts come to nothing, just when he has something it blows away in the wind and he finds that he has to start all over again. This has been the theme of the Tramp all along and given his determination we know that he will never give up.

It's fitting that Chaplin's Tramp bows out in "Modern Times", one more film and I think he would have become dated. The world has moved past him, it's grown too large and too fast for his gentle spirit to maintain. In the end we find him still searching for his dream, the difference is that in the end when he walks into the sunrise of a new day he doesn't go alone. With that, we know he'll be okay.