MOVIE · 1936

Modern Times

ComedyDramaRomance87 min

Charles Chaplin is the Little Tramp, an assembly-line worker trying to keep up with an industrialized 1930s world that keeps spitting him back out. After a breakdown at the factory, he drifts through unemployment, mistaken arrests, and odd jobs, still clinging to the idea of a home. Paulette Goddard is the young woman he hopes to build that life with, and together they scramble from one setback to the next during the Great Depression. Chaplin threads broad slapstick through conveyor belts, jail cells, and street-level hardship, turning the Tramp’s bad timing into a portrait of people squeezed by machines, work, and poverty.