'Modern Times' (Charles Chaplin, 1936)

Title: 'Modern Times'

Release Year: 1936

Director: Charles Chaplin

Cast: Charles Chaplin, Paulette Goddard.

Plot: After losing his mind (and his job) over the frantic work life, a workman will have to struggle against the situation instituted by Industrial Revolution, while discovering a beautiful friendship with an orphaned young girl.

Review: One of the things I like the most about Chaplin is his ability to connect with the social problems of society (and how he manages to achieve this while staying silent in sound era ten years after the invention of Vitaphone). After years of higher than normal unemployment numbers, this movie was a clear reflexion of the crazy world they lived in. A world that we still inhabit sometimes.

Every scene of the film is an example of that and of Chaplin's mastery: the sheep's metaphore of workers entering the factory, how they have to deal with all kind of exigences or experiments, how they're treated like one of many who would give anything to work... Chaplin uses all this and a tramp gone crazy to exemplify his modern days situation. As always, we'll see him trying to do everything right but failing miserably with a comedy level only he owns.

Who doesn't remember this iconic scene?

But my favourite parts are, without a doubt, the ones she shares with future real life wife Paulette Goddard. Their strange relationship is a weird friendship between two human beings trying to survive. Endearing, isn't it? Chaplin films always are. And that's perhaps what made him so famous; his ability to make us laugh at the same time that he touched something inside of us. The finest example? The ending (a detail that he controls and beautifies in every movie), features both a beautiful score and one of the topics that you find in more than one of his pictures; hope, giving to the viewer the promise of a better tomorrow.