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is as if Chaplin had overcome all his uncertainty concerning the introduction of dialogue into film, all his suffering over the calamitous ending of his second marriage, and had expressed this newly-acquired release in the astonishing dynamism and gaiety of this film.
The Chaplin hallmark is put upon the film from the opening shot of sheep rushing through a gate, followed by one of workers coming up out of a subway; and by the stupendous satire of the factory decor, shining, sterile, inhuman, endlessly working at producing nothing. Charlie the intractable, Charlie the independent spirit, has become a factory hand. But Charlie never can be a factory worker. He demonstrates his incapacity, and incidentally satirizes the inhuman mechanistion of industry, by failing to tighten a bolt on the endless conveyor belt. This small failure in routine upsets the whole complicated process until Charlie is caught in the machinery — only to demonstrate that if cogwheels are large enough, one may safely stroll among them, a ludicrous and brilliant anticlimax. In Modern Times, Charlie comes across another waif, a rebellious little guttersnipe, as different from gentle submissive Edna as any personality could be, the part admirably played by Paulette Goddard. In The Kid, Chaplin offered a dual presentation of the tramp, in childhood and maturity. Now he offers a parallel presentation of two waifs, outcast from society, and frustrated in every attempt to secure their modest needs — a roof, food, and privacy. Every effort to secure their dream ends in the Black Maria; until at the end they go off jauntily towards the horizon, towards the unknown; and this time Charlie takes his female counterpart with him.
There were many who wished to see a fundamentally political significance in this harsh criticism of modern times, this ironic indictment of the slavery of the machine. Quite apart from the fact that it is an absurdity to reduce to terms of political propaganda a work of art which shows at one level Charlie's perpetual resistance to mass law; and at another the total incapacity of society to supply the urgent needs of its people, we have Chaplin's own, constantly reiterated plea, formulated once more in 1947 — "For pity's sake, let's stop mixing up art with the shady political intrigues which go on all over the world".
The evidence of the film itself does not support any opinion, adverse or laudatory, implying political bias. The worker, the sheeplike worker of the opening shots, the striker who follows any leader who happens to have a flag, is satirized as incisively as any other aspect of existence that earns Chaplin's condemnation.
In this film Chaplin, as always, is expressing his feeling and his credo in human and universal, not in political, terms. His Little Man,