- published: 04 Jul 2011
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Modern Times is a 1936 comedy film by Charlie Chaplin that has his iconic Little Tramp character struggling to survive in the modern, industrialized world. The film is a comment on the desperate employment and fiscal 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, Stanley Sandford and Chester Conklin, and was written and directed by Chaplin.
Modern Times was deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress in 1989, and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. Fourteen years later, it was screened "out of competition" at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival.
Modern Times portrays Chaplin as a factory worker employed on an assembly line. After being subjected to such indignities as being force-fed by a "modern" feeding machine and an accelerating assembly line where Chaplin screws nuts at an ever-increasing rate onto pieces of machinery, he suffers a mental breakdown that causes him to run amok, throwing the factory into chaos. Chaplin is sent to a hospital. Following his recovery, the now unemployed Chaplin is mistakenly arrested as an instigator in a Communist demonstration. In jail, he accidentally ingests smuggled cocaine, mistaking it for salt. In his subsequent delirious state he stumbles upon a jailbreak and knocks out the convicts. He is hailed a hero and is released.
Their star-light shone bright in the blackout
Like the beams of the usherette
But when the Big Bear bit deep after Yalta
There were those that came to forget.
They went out West for the screening
And they carried a sharp-tooth comb
In search of the double meaning
They were making the fur fly at home.
So get up! Go on! Grip that stand!
And press your hand to your heart
Big Mac is asking the questions
And this is only the start.
Now Mac came on hot and noisy
In his search for aid Uncle Joe
As he tracked him down to Tinsel Town
For Boise, Idaho.
And the folks that queued up for Coogan
Now queued up for the end of a myth
To sit open-mouthed at the newsreel
The night that Chaplin took the Fifth.
And the offers packed up for so many
Dropped like a Wurlitzer into the pit
And what we got for the pain was more John Wayne
And anything else that they saw fit.
Because when they needed to break resistance
And they could not go on using a fist
They took the cameras into the court-house