Chaplin was touring the Far East when he decided to make Modern Times. When he returned to Los Angles, he started preparing a script for the film, his first in five years. This was highly unusual for Chaplin; he had never before produced a film from anything but rough notes. But despite having a script, the film took ten months to shoot, at a cost of about $1.5 million, which at the time was an extravagant amount of money. Actually, this was a relatively swift shoot for Chaplin, who usually took a long time to make a movie; maybe the script made a difference. Still, Chaplin ended up shooting 215,000 feet of film, an enormous amount of excess film stock.

    This landmark film features Chaplin's beloved Little Tramp, a character you should all be familiar with, for the eighty-second time. But this would end up being his last filmic incarnation. As usual, here he's at the mercy of the social order, confronting hardships of the Depression and modern industrial technology. In fact, Modern Times is the film's second title; it was originally called The Masses, referring to the huge numbers of unemployed people at the time. Chaplin had started expressing his concern about social issues four years earlier, as when he claimed, "Machinery should benefit mankind. It should not spell tragedy and throw it out of work. Something is wrong. Things have been badly managed if five million men are out of work in the richest country in the world." In other words, Chaplin laid some of blame for the Depression on technology, and this is well-illustrated in the film.

    It’s also a timely concept. Think about the Unabomber, who has espoused an anti-industrial belief. Like many technophobes, the Unabomber is anti-computer in an age when computers seem to be dominating our existence more and more. Many of these people consider themselves Neo-Luddites (See the handout on Luddites for more detail.)

    The movie opens with a title proclaiming "Modern Times is a story of industry, of individual enterprise-humanity crusading in pursuit of happiness." This is followed by an overhead shot of sheep rushing through a chute (ostensibly on their way to being slaughtered), then a shot of workers pushing into/out of a subway at rush hour. This bit of associative editing makes the filmic metaphor clear: according to Chaplin, modern men and women are like sheep being led to the slaughter. Modern civilization and nature are incompatible and mutually exclusive; each of us must decide which of the two we want to embrace.

    It’s also an indictment of the city as an impersonal place, where you don’t know neighbors; you could be assaulted openly in the street and nobody would come to your aid. This is not an unusual notion in Hollywood films. Lots of moviemakers have promoted the idea that the city is bad, and people need to go to the countryside, if only for a  while, to nourish or replenish their bodies/spirits. Think of the Capra classic It’s a Wonderful Life: George Bailey has a case of wanderlust but never gets to leave his home town of Bedford Falls.  He eventually discovers that his "heaven on earth" is in this idyllic place. In the cult favorite Harold and Maude, the title characters "rescue" a tree being stifled by smog in L.A. and take it out to a forest where it can thrive. A third example is the story Camille, which has been a book, a play, at least one movie, and the basis for the opera La Traviata. In this much-told story, a beautiful French prostitute falls in love with a handsome young man from a good family.  He takes her out of Paris, into the countryside, to recuperate from consumption. While there, she does rally, but then she returns to the city, and ends up dying. You get picture.

    Back to Modern Times: In addition to metaphoric imagery, the film is replete with visual references to industrialization. At one point, we see an elaborate machine of rollers, cogs and gears; of course, Charlie gets stuck in it. Then there's his inability to keep up with an assembly line. One of the largest sets Chaplin ever had built was used in this film. Made of rubber and wood and painted black to look like steel, it cost $50,000, an enormous amount at the time. Believe it or not, it actually worked! But not even Charlie knew what it was supposed to manufacture; it could have been sausages or Model T cars.

    So much for the film’s message. Now let’s tackle technique. Modern Times is significant because it is, for all intents and purposes, a silent movie. When it previewed in February, 1936, audiences were stunned by the audacity of doing a silent film when talkies had become the norm.

    While Chaplin’s resistance to synchronous dialogue was legend in Hollywood, he had, in fact, spent time and effort at the studio preparing dialogue for each scene in the film, and making sound tests. But eventually, he nixed idea; Chaplin felt that the addition of dialogue would erode the rhythm of film. This is because Chaplin was accustomed to the silent screen technique of cranking the camera at different rates to modify the tempo, the speed of the picture. However, synchronous dialogue had to be shot at the fixed rate of 24 frames per second.

    In the end, only sound effects were used, with occasional bits of spoken words. When people in movie converse with each other normally, we read their words, via title cards that punctuate visuals -- what you’d expect to find in silent movies. But when machinery is involved, then we hear words. In fact, the first articulate words spoken in any Chaplin film come across a big video monitor in a factory, spoken by owner: "Speed up." (Shades of 1984.) Anther innovative use of sound is the rumbling of the hungry Tramp's empty stomach. Chaplin created this sound by glowing bubbles in a pail of water.

    Towards the end of the film, Chaplin uses sound in an especially sly way. Here he's doesn't talk sense, as we'd expect, but sings nonsense, in a song called "Je Cherche Après Titine," French for "I'm Looking for Titine."  But the song itself is a mixture of French and nonsense words. (FYI, this scene required 12 days of shooting and 250 extras, and was both the first and the last time the Little Tramp’s voice is heard on screen. Chaplin had spoken on camera only once before -- as himself -- in an Austrian newsreel made in 1931, when he was on a world tour. His spoken words? "Guten tag," German for "good day.")  

     Some reviewers reviewed Modern Times negatively because they felt it was a rehash of previous Chaplin works.  This has some validity, as it is full of references to earlier Chaplin comedies.  The roller-skating sequence was taken from The Rink, and the restaurant scene was stolen from The Gold Rush.  Chaplin's use of comic Chester Conklin and other players from the silent days also evokes earlier films.  Even the heroine, the "gamine, played by Chaplin's vivacious wife, Paulette Goddard, is echoed in other Chaplin films.  For example, the Little Tramp also rescues a young attractive woman in earlier movies such as The Vagabond, The Circus, and Chaplin's big tearjerker, City Lights.  (He'd do it again in his final film, Limelight, as well.)  However, those other works did not evoke the provocation that Modern Times did when it was first released.