Modern Times used the Tramp to look at factory life, unemployment and the pace of the machine age.
Modern Times was released in 1936, during the Great Depression. Chaplin played a factory worker on an assembly line, whose job was to tighten bolts again and again. The work drove him to a breakdown, and he lost his job. He met a young woman, the gamin played by Paulette Goddard, who had also lost her home and family, and the two tried to make a life together.
The film’s most famous sequences were built around machines and work: the Tramp was fed by a mechanical feeding machine, he was pulled through the gears of a factory, and he roller-skated blindfolded near a dangerous drop in a department store. The comedy was physical, but its subject was serious: what happened to people when work became repetitive and when jobs disappeared.
Modern Times was largely silent, like City Lights, although it included music, sound effects and a song sung by Chaplin in nonsense words. It ended with the Tramp and the gamin walking away together down a road, a hopeful image in a film about hard times. It remains one of Chaplin’s most widely seen films, and one of the best-known screen portraits of industrial life.