Charlie Chaplin Does Cocaine and Twists off a Woman’s Nipples

Everyone thinks of Charlie Chaplin as a loveable scamp. The outfit and mustache, the little waddle, the pratfalls…the man was a clown through and through. Although his most famous character – The Little Tramp – found himself sitting below the bottom rung of society’s ladder he always came out on top or at least got the girl. He faced the tragedy of every day life during the depression with a cheerful grin. Things certainly never got dark.

Except, of course, for Modern Times (1936) in which Chaplin does some pretty crazy things. Like cocaine. And trying to twist of a woman’s nipples with a spanner.

Intending (and succeeding) in parodying the desperate circumstances of the unemployed masses it was never going to be a cheerful film, even for a comedy, but the Tramp gets into some surprisingly heavy stuff in this outing. The film opens with the Tramp working on a production line in a factory. His job is to tighten the bolts on plates as they are pushed along a conveyer belt. The manager (in between doing jigsaw puzzles) constantly demands faster work and uses video screens to yell at workers who slow down. After a disastrous test run with an automatic feeding machine the poor tramp can’t take any more.

This is when things get weird.

The Tramp suffers a complete nervous breakdown. Beginning with nervous spasms as a result of the repetitive work he descends further and further into madness. After he’s been dragged through one of the machines he begins dancing uncontrollably and taking to everything within reach with his spanners. After twisting off his co-worker’s buttons and – rather painfully – their noses, he takes to the streets. Encountering a woman with large, hexagonal buttons of her jacket he takes after her will the sole purpose of twisting her nipples off.

Needless to say this gets him on the wrong side of the law and gets thrown in hospital. Upon his recovery he is released back into the world and finds that everyone from the factory is now unemployed. Mistaken for the leader of a communist rally the Tramp is promptly thrown into jail where he is abused and tormented by his cellmate, who even prevents him from eating. At this point another prisoner hides his stash of cocaine in a salt shaker and the Tramp inadvertently takes a large quantity of it. In his now drug fueled state he accidentally foils an escape attempt and is pardoned. The Tramp is none too happy about this – the outside world is so hopelessly depressing that he frequently attempts to get himself arrested again.

So…in this comedy film the clownish lead character goes on an accidental drug bender, sexually assaults a woman, gets checked into the nut house and finds prison to be a better option than the crappy society that awaits. And this is considered a classic. It’s like if The Hangover was considered a pioneering moment in cinema a hundred years down the track.

The sometimes dark subject matter aside this is one of Chaplin’s finest films. His physical comedy is second to none and he’ll have you laughing from beginning to end using something as simple as roller skates. It features one great sequence after another and should be viewed by, well, everyone. It’s just so…twisted!