Movie review - Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin

• Directed by: Charlie Chaplin
• Produced by: Charlie Chaplin
• Written by: Charlie Chaplin
• Music by: Charlie Chaplin
• Edited by: Willard Nico
• Release date: February 5, 1936
• Language: English

           Modern Times is a 1936 American comedy film written and directed by Charlie Chaplin in which his iconic Little Tramp character struggles to survive in the modern, industrialized world. The film is a comment on the desperate employment and financial conditions many people faced during the great depression, conditions created, in Chaplin's view, by the efficiencies of modern industrialization. The movie stars Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Henry Bergman, Tiny Sandford and Chester Conklin.

          Modern Times, American silent film, that starred Charlie Chaplin as a man at odds with modern technology. It is regarded as the last great silent film. The film, which was set during the Great Depression, centres on a luckless factory worker who finds himself to unnerved by trying to cope with the modern equipment he must operate that he suffers a breakdown.

          Modern Times was Charlie's first film after five years of hibernation in the 1930s. He didn't much like talkies and despite the introduction of sound in 1927, his "City Lights" (1931) was defiantly silent.

         With Modern Times a fable about automation, assembly lines and the effective way to introduce sound without disturbing his comedy of pantomime: The voices in the movie are channeled through other media. The ruthless steel tycoon talks over closed-circuit television, a crackpot inventor brings in a sound is Charlie's famous tryout as a singing waiter; perhaps after Garbo spoke, the only thing left was for Charlie to sing.

          He set out to transform his observation and anxieties into comedy. The little Tramp - described in the film credits as a "Factory Worker" - is now one of the millions coping with the problems of the 1930s, which are not so very different from anxieties of the 21st century - poverty, unemployment, strikes and strike breakers, political intolerance, economic inequalities, the tyranny of the machine, narcotics. The film's portentous opening - "The story of industry, of individual enterprise - humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness" - is followed by a symbolic juxtaposition of shots of sheep being herded and of workers streaming out of a factory. Chaplin's character is first seen as a worker being driven crazy by his monotonous, inhuman work on a conveyor belt to test and being used as a guinea pig to test a machine to feed workers as they work.  In this movie there are sequences of frame which constantly moves between hope and despair. It is also shown that if they dream they dream for their basic needs like food, clothes, shelter, farm, animals etc. It was a time were people has to struggle a lot to complete there and family's basic needs. The movie ends with positivity and hope as it was the morning time not an evening or fogy morning.

          Modern Times is regarded as one of the Charlie's most lighthearted films. There is certainly plenty of social criticism, but he plays the story mostly for laughs. the sight gag of Chaplin haplessly trying to keep pace with the assembly line in the factory is regarded as a classic comedy sequence.