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''Modern Times'' is a 1936 comedy film written and directed by Charlie Chaplin in which his iconic Little Tramp character struggles to survive in the modern, industrialized world. The film is a comment on the desperate employment and fiscal conditions many people faced during the Great Depression, conditions created, in Chaplin's view, by the efficiencies of modern industrialization. The movie stars Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Henry Bergman, Stanley Sandford and Chester Conklin. ''Modern Times'' was deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress in 1989, and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. Fourteen years later, it was screened "out of competition" at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Festival de Cannes: Modern Times )〕 ==Plot== ''Modern Times'' portrays Chaplin as a factory worker employed on an assembly line. There, he is subjected to such indignities as being force-fed by a "modern" feeding machine and an accelerating assembly line where he screws nuts at an ever-increasing rate onto pieces of machinery. He finally suffers a nervous breakdown and runs amok, throwing the factory into chaos. He is sent to a hospital. Following his recovery, the now unemployed factory worker is mistakenly arrested as an instigator in a Communist demonstration. In jail, he accidentally ingests smuggled cocaine, mistaking it for salt. In his subsequent delirium, he gets out of the jail. When he returns, he stumbles upon a jailbreak and knocks the convicts unconscious. He is hailed a hero and is released. Outside the jail, he applies for a new job but leaves after causing an accident. He runs into an orphaned girl, Ellen (Paulette Goddard), who is fleeing the police after stealing a loaf of bread. To save the girl, he tells police that he is the thief and ought to be arrested. A witness reveals his deception and he is freed. To get arrested again, he eats an enormous amount of food at a cafeteria without paying. He meets up with Ellen in the paddy wagon, which crashes, and she convinces him to escape with her. Dreaming of a better life, he gets a job as a night watchman at a department store, sneaks Ellen into the store, and even lets burglars have some food, one of whom is his former colleague at the factory of the start of the film, Big Bill, who explains that they are only robbing because they are hungry and desperate. Waking up the next morning in a pile of clothes, he is arrested once more. Ten days later, Ellen takes him to a new home – a run-down shack that she admits "isn't Buckingham Palace" but will do. The next morning, the factory worker reads about an old factory re-opening and lands a job there. He gets his boss trapped in machinery, but manages to extricate him. The other workers decide to go on strike. Accidentally paddling a brick into a policeman, he is arrested again. Two weeks later, he is released and learns that Ellen is a café dancer. She tries to get him a job as a singer and a waiter. At his new job, however, he finds it difficult to tell the difference between the "in" and "out" doors to the kitchen, or to successfully deliver a roast duck to table through a busy dance floor. During his floor show, he loses a cuff that bears the lyrics of his song, but he rescues his act by improvising the story using an amalgam of word play, words in (or made up of word parts from) multiple languages and mock sentence structure while pantomiming. His act proves a hit. When police arrive to arrest Ellen for her earlier escape, they escape again. Ellen despairs that there's no point to their struggling, but the factory worker assures her that they'll make it somehow. In the final scene, they walk down a road at dawn, towards an uncertain but hopeful future. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Modern Times (film)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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