Modern Times

Today is 2 October, Gandhi's birthday.

On 22 September 1931, at 45 Beckton Road in Canning Town, east London, two of the most famous men alive met in an ordinary house. One was Gandhi, newly arrived in London for the Round Table Conference. The other was Chaplin, on a European tour to promote City Lights.

They talked about machinery. Chaplin did not understand why Gandhi opposed modern technology in general, but he accepted the harder half of the argument: machinery made with only profit in mind puts people out of work and ruins lives.

Several accounts list that conversation among the seeds of Modern Times, alongside the misery Chaplin saw across Depression-era Europe. Four years later he made the film: a man driven mad by the assembly line, swallowed by the machine and spat out again. So today's pick is not arbitrary.

The second reason is structural. The archive now holds twelve films, from Metropolis (1927) to Parasite (2019), spanning nine decades — and the 1930s are the one decade still missing. Modern Times is the least arguable landmark of that decade; with it in place, the timeline closes.

Third, it stands exactly on the sound barrier. Metropolis, already here, is silent. Modern Times is the work of a man who, in the first years after cinema learned to talk, deliberately chose not to. It was shot in 1934–35, seven years after The Jazz Singer, when Hollywood had long since gone over to sound — and Chaplin still insisted on intertitles, letting only machines, footsteps and music make noise.

The last point is a coincidence, but a clean one: yesterday's film was Pather Panchali, from India. Today's film was seeded by India too — by Gandhi.

美国，大萧条最深的几年。

一个男人在工厂的流水线上拧螺丝。传送带的速度由别人决定，他只需要跟上。他跟不上。

接下来是一连串的错位：一次精神崩溃，一次被当成闹事者的逮捕，几份做不长的工作——船厂的、百货公司的、餐馆的。他在这些地方反复遇到同一个姑娘。她叫 Ellen，父亲失业后死了，两个妹妹被福利机构带走，她在码头边偷香蕉给她们吃。

两个人凑到一起，因为除此之外没有别的办法。

影片讲的就是这段日子：想活下去，想有个家，想要一点点体面，而每一次努力都被外面的世界碾过去。全片没有一句完整的对白，只有一首歌——而那不是任何一种语言。

（这里不再往下说。）

One man, the whole film

Chaplin directed, wrote, produced and scored Modern Times, and edited it too (with Willard Nico). He was born in London in 1889 and spent his childhood in the worst poverty of Victorian London — his father drank himself to death, his mother was committed to an asylum, and he and his brother spent time in a workhouse. He became one of the richest and most famous performers alive, and spent his career filming the poor.

That is at its most direct here. Nobody in the film speaks for the powerful; the protagonist has exactly one identity from beginning to end — a man who wants a job.

Why he would not let the Tramp speak

The Jazz Singer brought sound to cinema in 1927. When Chaplin began preparing this film in 1934 he intended it as a talkie: he wrote a dialogue script and enclosed the studio's open-air stage to experiment with recorded sound. He then scrapped the results.

His conclusion was a long-standing conviction: once the Tramp spoke English, the character's universality would be gone. He had huge audiences in non-English-speaking territories, and the Tramp was legible to all of them precisely because he used no language at all.

So he reverted to a silent format with synchronised sound effects, music and sparse dialogue, still using English intertitles. In 1936 that was a decision taken against the entire industry, and it drew criticism. The result: this is the last time he played the Tramp, and the only time the Tramp makes a sound — gibberish.

The two machines

The two most famous sequences are both about machinery. One is the assembly line, running faster and faster until the worker loses control and is swallowed by the gears. The other is the automatic feeding machine, pitched to the factory by an inventor named Billows, which promises to feed workers without stopping the line and then goes wrong.

The second is pure slapstick, but its target is specific: any technology whose purpose is to eliminate downtime. Ninety years on, the joke needs no explaining.

Camera and speed

Rollie Totheroh, Chaplin's regular cameraman since the 1910s, shot it with Ira Morgan. Most of the film was shot at silent speed, 18 frames per second, and projected at sound speed, 24 — which made the slapstick look even more frenetic than it was performed. Today's circulating prints correct the discrepancy, so what you see is the rhythm Chaplin intended.

The famous blindfolded skating sequence used a matte painting: the audience sees the Tramp spinning near a precipice, while Chaplin skated on flat ground. At one moment his rear skate briefly disappears behind the painting; he left it in.

The score, and a melody that became a standard

Chaplin composed the score himself, with Alfred Newman assisting, and David Raksin and Edward B. Powell handling arrangement and synchronisation — Raksin went on to score Laura and The Day After. By his account Chaplin would hum tunes, often in the washroom, and tell Raksin to write them down.

The romance theme was later given lyrics and became the pop standard "Smile", first recorded by Nat King Cole. The 2019 film Joker used Jimmy Durante's cover in its trailer, and its protagonist watches scenes from Modern Times.

The trouble it caused, and where it ended up

After release, Germany's Tobis Film sued Chaplin, arguing the assembly-line sequence plagiarised René Clair's À nous la liberté (1931). The suit failed; Tobis sued again after the Second World War — widely read as retaliation for The Great Dictator — and settled out of court. Clair himself was an outspoken admirer of Chaplin, was embarrassed by the suit, and was never part of it.

Its influence runs long: Disney's Der Fuehrer's Face (Donald Duck alternately assembling shells and saluting Hitler's portrait) and the "Job Switching" episode of I Love Lucy (Lucy and Ethel stuffing chocolates into their mouths and hats) both come directly from the assembly-line sequence. Sartre, Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty named their journal Les Temps Modernes after the film.

When the Library of Congress created the National Film Registry in 1989, Modern Times was among the first 25 films chosen. The AFI ranked it 81st on its 1998 100 Years...100 Movies list and 78th in the 2007 revision; the BBC's 2017 poll of 253 critics placed it 12th among the greatest comedies ever made. Rotten Tomatoes records 98%.