Modern Times

As a worker on an assembly line, Charlie the tramp is run through the gears of a huge machine and is force-fed by an experimental, time-saving contraption that splashes soup in his face and shoves corn on the cob into his mouth. He can’t take a second off work to scratch himself without turning the whole plant into chaos. “Modern Times” is a picture about the social disorder of the thirties. There are clashes between the unemployed and the police and a gag about a Communist demonstration, yet it is one of the happiest and most light-hearted of the Chaplin pictures.