Charlie Chaplin makes factory work painfully funny, with physical comedy precise enough to expose the cruelty behind the machinery. The story wanders and the romance gets less attention, but we recommend Modern Times warmly.
Modern Times is a sharp, funny film about how difficult it becomes to behave like a person when work demands that everyone behave like equipment. Charlie Chaplin, directing his own screenplay, gives the Tramp a factory job and makes the effort of keeping up the basis of the comedy. We recommend it warmly, though the story lacks the discipline of the individual routines. Its sympathy for the worker is clear without making him solemn, sensible or especially well suited to the job.
The conveyor-belt scenes depend on Chaplin making repeated movements funny without making them look effortless. His precision lets us see both the worker’s determination and the limits of what his body can manage. We laughed, then felt uneasy during the feeding-machine sequence. Watching a man subjected to a feeding machine makes the contempt for his comfort difficult to ignore. Chaplin keeps the joke going long enough for us to notice what we are laughing at.
The cinematography, credited to Bud Thackery, Ira H. Morgan and Roland Totheroh, serves those routines well. We can watch the performer in relation to the machinery, which matters more here than making the factory look impressive. Charles D. Hall’s production design gives the equipment enough presence to make the worker seem vulnerable without swallowing the performance. The factory scenes work because we can follow what the machinery demands of the body, and see the effort involved in trying to obey.
The editing, by Chaplin and Willard Nico, allows a physical joke the time it needs: we can recognise the difficulty before being asked to laugh at the response. The joins between episodes are less satisfying, and Chaplin’s screenplay does not sustain the concentration of the factory material. The film sometimes feels ready to start again with another routine when we want it to develop what is already there. At 87 minutes it hardly drags, but it can feel assembled from favourite passages.
Paulette Goddard’s Gamin gives the concern with poverty a more personal purpose, and her presence makes the prospect of companionship matter. She meets Chaplin’s comic energy, and we can understand why these two people might want to face their difficulties together. Even so, the romance is thinner than the comedy, and the screenplay gives the pair less room together than their appeal deserves. Goddard is engaging enough to make that shortage noticeable whenever the relationship has to carry the film’s more tender feelings.
Chaplin’s score gives those tender passages some warmth without making the physical comedy feel heavy. It is useful work in a film whose shifts between industrial satire and romance are not always easy. Judged as physical comedy, this is unusually attentive to the effort involved in ordinary work, giving the elaborate routines something recognisable beneath their ingenuity. The humour never suggests that people deserve hardship because they cannot keep up.
Watch it in company, where Chaplin’s timing has a chance to work on several people at once. The wandering story is worth tolerating for the factory scenes alone. We would hesitate to suggest it for a staff training evening.
