Modern times ( Modern Times ) is an American film carried out by Charlie Chaplin, left in 1936.

Synopsis

Charlie Chaplin works with the chain in a gigantic factory. With a key in each hand, it tightens nuts. The director orders an increase in rate. Not being able to follow the rate/rhythm, Charlot is grabbed in the belly of the machine and rolls between the gears. Made completely insane, it starts to dance in the middle of the factory, to tighten all that makes him think of bolts, the nose of his colleagues, the buttons of the dress of the secretary, until decision is made to evacuate in a medical van.

Left the hospital, Charlot is found without work. Following a misunderstanding at the time of a demonstration, police officers take Charlot for the leader and take along it in prison. With the refectory of the prison, Charlot absorbs by error of the Drogue that a neighbor at table had dissimulated in a salt box, and it is at the time to turn over in its cell that Charlot, without knowing why nor how, finds itself outside. Trying to turn over in its cell, Charlot is pilot of an escape bid and, at him all alone, puts an end to the mutiny. In reward, one offers a comfortable cell to him while waiting for his release.

Once outside, its only concern is to turn over to comfort in prison. An orphan gamine is stopped to have flown of the bread, Charlot tries to be made stop in its place but in vain. It enters a restaurant then and swallows all that it can before calling a police officer to be made stop, because it does not have a penny. In the van, it finds the gamine, but the car has an accident and the small one benefits from it to be run away by beckoning with Charlot to follow it. He hesitates, then decides, and both flee while running.

Again with the street, Charlot is made engage as night watchman in a department store. The first night it invites the small orphan one in the store, they are restored at the cafeteria and have fun in the ray of the toys. At the time to point, giving up the gamine on the floor of the rooms to be slept, Charlot falls on burglars including one former colleague. The following day, Charlot is found deadened and drunk in the middle of the ray linen room. Accused of complicity, it turns over in prison.

At its coming out of prison, Charlot and the gamine are installed in an old hut on a waste ground. By reading the newspaper, Charlot learns that a close factory réouvre and engages. Finally work, but hardly it started that the workmen put themselves in strike. Striking a police officer inadvertently, it is of return in prison.

Its coming out of prison the gamine awaits it; it found a work of dancer in a restaurant-cabaret where it presents Charlot to her owner. This one engages it with the test like waiter and singer. Charlot out of waiter… the service leaves has to wish, but as a singer it arrives by mimicry and incomprehensible nonsense to allure crowd. The only trade for Charlot, it is Charlot! But to disturb this moment when it is finally in its place, of the civils servant of the public assistance want to take along the gamine. This one flees with Charlot and they take the road.

Data sheet

  • French Title: Modern times
  • original Title: Modern Times
  • Realization: Charles Chaplin
  • Scenario: Charles Chaplin
  • Production companies: Chaplin - United Artists
  • Producing: Charles Chaplin
  • Music: Charles Chaplin (musical loans: Hallelujah, I' m has Bum, Prisoners' Song (Massey), How dry amndt I, In the evening by the Moonlight (Bland) and I seek after Titine (Duncan - Daniderff))
  • Director of the photography: Roland Totheroh, Will go Morgan
  • Montage: Charles Chaplin
  • Country: The United States
  • Format: 35 mm, 1.37:1
  • Kind: comedy
  • Lasted: 89 minutes
  • Coming out date: The United States: February 5th 1936
  • All public

Distribution

  • Charles Chaplin: a workman

  • Paulette Goddard: the gamine
  • Henry Bergman: the owner of the restaurant
  • Tiny Sandford: Big Bill/un working
  • Chester Conklin: the mechanic
  • Hank Mann: the propriétére of the cabaret
  • Stanley Blystone: the father of the gamine
  • Al Ernest Garcia: president del' Electro Steel Corp
  • Richard Alexander: a prisoner
  • Cecil Reynolds: the chaplain
  • Reflected McKinney: the woman of the chaplain
  • Murdock MacQuarrie: a prisoner
  • John Rand: a prisoner
  • Wilfred Lucas: the young officer
  • Edward LeSaint: the sheriff
  • Sammy Stein: the foreman
  • Juana Sutton: the woman who has buttons on her dress
  • Ted Oliver: the assistant of Billows

Comment

Analyzes

This film presents a critical image of the capitalist industrial society. In this company, the man became a simple wheel, the Taylorisme delivering alienating mechanical tasks to him - alienating with all the directions of the term, because Charlot becomes indeed insane about it. Left work, Charlot preserves the reflexes which the rate/rhythm of the machines imposes to him, so much so that it cannot be prevented from unbolting the buttons of dress of the ladies. The Assembly line work is made even more inhuman by the frantic rate, and unceasingly accelerated, which a concerned owner of profitability dictates, comfortably installed in an armchair, and whose only function consists in supervising in a quasi police or penitentiary way work of the workmen.

The industrial society widens the gap between two populations: on a side an upper middle-class, which have the capacity and the factories, and other an increasingly poor working class, condemned to misery, often obliged to fly to survive, and where the children finish orphan. The machines are dangerous and cause more than one industrial accident: workmen grabbed by machines, etc

Moreover, the working class does not have even the possibility of asserting better living and working conditions: some peaceful that they are, the demonstrations, in particular communist, is severely repressed, their leaders are imprisoned by a police force defending the interests of the only middle-class.

In the middle of the years of economic depression, Chaplin thus gives an indication of the consequences of the capitalism, which sacrifices lives in the search of profitability. And in same time, it clarifies the nonsense of the hunting to the Communists, which started in years 1920 in the United States, diabolisation which is only used to mask that the true problem is not the riot, but the living conditions which cause it. Behind the comic gestural one which made the celebrity of Chaplin, Modern times is thus an engaged film, whose criticism does not relate as well to industrialization in general as on its only social consequences.

External bonds

  • Historical of Modern times on the official site

Media

Extracts vidéos:

  • First extract (lasted: 04 min 38 S)
  • Second extract (lasted: 55 S)
  • Third extract (lasted: 01 min)
  • Fourth extract (lasted: 04 min 37 S)
  • the film on archive.org

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