Review of Modern Time

Modern Time, photographed by the comedian Chaplin in 1935, was regarded as a classic and epoch- making silent movie which presented the whole picture of how the capitalist and the big machine era do harm to the human beings.

With this film, Chaplin told a story of the industry world: how was the industry world like? And what was its dark side of controlling the working class. In this essay, some analyses of Chaplin’s social commentary would be concluded with some specific scenes as evidences in this film. At the beginning of the film, compared with a flock of sheep flooding in, an influx of workers is coming in succession fall over each other to the factory: what a metaphor it was. Workers were like these lifeless cattle, being messed with, and blindly hitting the place like a fly without head aimless, it reflected the industrial age of anxiety and the confused heart.

Accompanied by the sonorous sound and light machine operation of humorous musical background, we came to the Charlie’s factory. His task was to be responsible for the nut is fixed on the line: single and boring. He kept in the hands of the wrench to loosen those fast moving nuts, without a break, and with being accompanied by background music humorous and lively melody, this task seems to be a pretty thing. He took a working break, went into the bathroom and smoked a cigarette, but then the boss found him from the big screen monitor, and immediately urged him to get back to work. And in this moment, the movie changed into another beautiful piano piece which is different from the lively melody work song, so much so that Charlie had to hurriedly finish the cigarette butts, and this also reflected the capitalists could get in the life or workers by every means, and the exploitation nature of the capitalism is completely unmasked. 

To the almost end of the film, the poor women, with their dancing talents, finally found a bar hostess work, and Charlie was also introduced as a waiter. And then out of his talent of being funny, the boss let him start a solo singer. And Charlie's performance was a great success, out of sheer happiness, he and poor girl hugged in together; and the life seemed to be hopeful. However, during this time, the poor women got caught by the police, and the hand of happiness was flashing away. Because of their smartness, they again fled from under the noses of the police. Nevertheless, Charlie still used an optimistic attitude to comfort the poor girl, as the subtitle showed: as long as you work hard, the life will be better, the poor girl was inspired, and their two, holding hands, walked slowly toward the end of the road.

It was a silent, black and white movie. Throughout the film, comedy scenes acted by the actors’ body language and emotional expression were too numerous to enumerate, but they also contains the sympathy which then moved, and shocked the tears of laughter. The tone of the film was “writing sad to happy” and every scene is the true emotional flow of the protagonist, thus depicted the real harm that capitalism brought about.

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