Modern Times is a 'Silent Talkie'

Modern Times was made well after the invention of the talkie. It was Charlo's last "silent" film, and his last as the true Little Tramp.

But anyone who watches it knows it really isn a silent movie. It's a talkie with silence.

I think it's ingenius how he injects the spoken word into Modern Times. He refuses to use dialogue, unless it is dialogue spoken through a machine of some sort (a television, a radio, a record player). He uses song, and incomprehensible speech (e.g. the Tramp's gibberish song).

1. The factory owner speaks when the Tramp is having a cigarette in the men's room. But he's speaking from a television-type screen on the wall, and his voice is somewhat distorted as though an old radio broadcast.

2. The salesmen who bring the automatic feeding machine to the factory owner switch on a record player which speaks the benefits of their machine.

3. The factory owner tells the shirtless motor operator to speed up the assembly line Charlie's working on, again via a television in the wall.

5. Charlie and the preacher's wife are drinking tea in the prison waiting area. Her dog begins to bark audibly.

4. A voice reads a commercial over the radio in the prison waiting area.

5. The four singing waiters in the cafe who perform before Charlie does, as well as clapping and the crowd noise afterward.

6. The jibberish song Charlie sings and dances too at the cafe.

Charlie's reluctance to give into the talkie phenomenon whole-heartedly makes this movie a hybrid, a silent talkie. And the way he only allows dialogue to be spoken through indirect, mechanical means is metaphoric of his disappointment with the technology of modern times, as he knew it.