Modern Times

Though Modern Times was made in the mid 1930s, many of its themes and situations are just as relevant today as they were back then.  Men are still slaves to machines in more than just the workplace.  We strive to keep up with the latest, fastest technology, though these days our machines are much smaller.  And earning a living is still not easy to come by or easy to keep.  Much of the working class is still toiling and scraping by working to make the machines of industry turn.  

In the film, Charlie Chaplin plays a factory worker.  His job is to mindlessly tighten bolts on a conveyor belt assembly line.  The work is fast paced and makes for some great gags, some of the most memorable scenes in the film.  After the worker suffers a nervous breakdown and is released without a job, he accidentally gets in a union protest parade and arrested for being a communist leader.  His time in jail is peaceful and happy once he wins over the guards.  Being released back into society, with no job or home is tough and he tries to get back in jail.  But a young girl (Paulette Goddard) trying to make it on her own helps him make another try in these harsh modern times.

There is a wonderful daydream scene in the film that inspires the worker to get back to work when he and the girl are down on their luck.  He imagines owning a cozy little home with the girl.  There is comfy furniture, a big piece of meat in the skillet, ripe grapes to pick right out the door and a cow that walks up and automatically dispenses fresh milk. Everyone has their pie in the sky fantasies of the American dream, and this one is more sweet than outlandish.

My favorite scene in the film is testing out the feeding machine.  With the feeding machine, workers will not have to stop working to eat their lunch.  To keep up production, the machine will feed them, brilliant!  Our innocent Trampy worker is the guinea pig for the machine and can’t move as the machine pushes bites of food into his mouth and malfunctions splashing soup all over him.  When the rotating corn cob feeder goes haywire and spins against his face so hard it must have nearly rubbed off his iconic mustache, I laughed much more than I expected. The whole scene is hilarious and wonderful fun.

What Modern Times is to me is Chaplin’s commentary on where he thought the world was heading.  Henry Ford’s assembly line was still a new concept and the depression was leaving men desperate to do any work they could.  Tensions over unions made work even harder to find and less secure.  Too much industrialization was making men lose their individuality and become parts of the machines.  How wonderful that Chaplin didn’t have to say a word to convey that idea, he just needed an image of a man moving along the massive gears and still bent on tightening those nuts.  

“Hey you!  Get back to work!”

 

Hold Back the Dawn

With hopes of entering the United States faster, Georges Iscovescu (Charles Boyer), originally from Romania, moves to a Mexico boarder town.  As he applies for his visa, he learns that it will take five to eight years before he can become an American citizen.  This feels like a prison sentence to him and he sinks into depression.  On the Fourth of July he learns how a friend of his, Anita (Paulette Goddard), became a citizen so quickly, she married an American.  What a great idea, so Georges starts scoping out available American women.

He finds Emmy (Olivia de Havilland), a school teacher having car trouble that he met earlier in the day.  With his ultimate goal in mind, Georges offers Emmy multiple acts of kindness, including letting Emmy and the children stay overnight in his apartment building.  Throughout Emmy’s stay, Georges puts on an act of mystery and charm.  It’s not cheesy, but a wiser kind of manipulation, just as sultry.  He talks about being lonely and she connects with it, hook, line and sinker.

On July fifth, they marry, meaning that Georges can enter the US in about four weeks, but inspector Hammock (Walter Abel) is in town.  He tries to casually keep track of all the people awaiting immigration and he is becoming wiser to how some people will marry just to get into America.  For a while, Georges has to juggle Emmy and the Inspector to keep them both in the dark to his plan.

As Georges and Emmy travel Mexico together for their honeymoon, they start to connect more and Georges starts to regret the way he is taking advantage of sweet naive Emmy.  Just as Georges is feeling his lowest, Emmy is in an accident and he risks everything, including his passage to America to try to help Emmy.

Along with Georges’ struggle to become an American citizen are smaller tales of people just as desperate.  Most of them can only wait patiently in anxious hope, but for a young couple with a child on the way, time is running out.  The mother sneaks across the boarder to give birth, ensuring that her child is an American citizen.

While we may not like Georges for taking blatantly taking advantage of Emmy and manipulating the system, by the end he has made up for his wrongdoing.  As happy as that is, the film is not very satisfying.  These issues with immigration are brought up but nothing is done about them.  It seems that the only quick way across the border is marriage, just make sure you are honest about your intentions and find an understanding host to latch onto.

“You see, we are like … two trains, halted for a moment at the same station. But we’re going in different directions. We can’t change our course, any more than we can hold back the dawn.”