Summary
An intertitle tells us that a week has passed, and the next scene finds the Gamin dancing in the middle of a street as passersby watch. Two men watch from the entrance to a cafe, and one of them comments that she would be good for the cafe. A fluid cut shows her suddenly dressed up in a shiny dress, dancing in the same way as an orchestra plays, inside the fancy cafe. She finishes her dance to wild applause, and another intertitle appears to inform us that another week has passed. In the next shot the Gamin is dressed in expensive clothes as she waits outside the jail for the Tramp to be released. The Tramp emerges, sees her waiting, and runs to hug her excitedly. After they embrace he takes a step back and looks her up and down, inspecting her clothes and accessories with surprise. She says that she has a job for him and they walk down the street arm in arm as she tells him everything that has happened since he went back to jail. At the cafe, the Gamin desperately tries to convince the cafe manager to give the Tramp a job as the Tramp stands next to her, sheepishly smiling. The manager asks the Tramp if he can wait tables, and the Gamin answers that he can, looks at him encouragingly, and the Tramp nods emphatically that he can. The manager asks him if he can sing and the Gamin again immediately answers that he can, but this time the Tramp very slowly and with a nervous expression nods that he can. The manager agrees to give him a trial run, and as he walks away the Tramp tries to tell the Gamin that he cannot sing, but she assures him that it will be alright.
In the next scene a police captain signs a warrant for the Gamin’s arrest, citing vagrancy and her escape from juvenile officers as the reasons. He gives the warrant to the same two detectives from whom the Gamin first escaped, and they leave to search for her. Later that night the cafe is packed and the Tramp struggles to keep up with the demands of the customers. He gets his leg caught in a dog’s leash and is knocked onto the floor (though he manages to keep the items on his tray from breaking) and repeatedly gets in the way of other servers. An angry customers yells at him to hurry up and calls over a manager, telling him that he has been waiting an hour for his roast duck. The manager scolds the Tramp and sends him to the kitchen to make sure the duck comes out soon, but the Tramp opens the door for traffic coming out of the kitchen, knocking over one of the other servers trying to leave the kitchen with a full tray. When he realizes that this has happened he walks away without letting the other waiter see him, and another waiter who enters the kitchen a few seconds later gets blamed for the accident. As the other two waiters fight, the Tramp walks between them, retrieves the roast duck, and nearly walks out the “in” direction door as the other two waiters watch. He fixes his mistake in front of them and walks out the right door, but when he gets close to the table the orchestra begins playing a lively dance song and everyone in the cafe stands up to dance, trapping the Tramp in the middle of the floor. He holds the tray above his head to prevent it from being knocked over by the dancers, and for the next minute and a half we are mostly only able to see the tray as it floats around the room above the heads of the dancers, as the Tramp is pushed around the floor by the ground. A couple of times he nearly makes it to the table before being swept away again, and just before the music stops he passes a chandelier and the roast duck gets stuck to an iron hook on the bottom of the chandelier without his noticing.
When the dancers finally leave the floor, the Tramp brings the tray to the table and the customer furiously gestures to the tray and asks where the duck is. As the Tramp checks underneath things on the tray and down his own pants and sleeves, the customer calls the manager over again and tells him what has happened. The manager and the Tramp walk back toward the kitchen and see the duck stuck to the chandelier, the manager pulls some strings off the chandelier, and the duck falls onto the plate that the Tramp is holding. He brings the duck to the table and prepares to cut it, when several very drunk men take to the middle of the cafe floor and one of them begins harassing the Tramp. The Tramp pushes him away and tries to begin cutting the duck, but he does not hold in down well enough and it flies off the cutting board and into the arms of the man who was bothering him, who then proceeds to toss it around like a rugby ball with the other men while the Tramp chases it around. He eventually catches it and then runs around the floor avoiding the men as they try to tackle him, before he finally dives over the table of the angry customer, stands up to much applause throughout the cafe, and triumphantly hands it to the customer, who becomes even angrier. The manager takes him to the dressing room to scold him, and warns him that he had better be able to sing before leaving him there alone.
In the dressing room, the Tramp pulls out a sheet of paper with his lyrics on them and begins to practice while the first act of “Singing Waiters” begins performing in the center of the cafe. The Gamin enters the general dressing room from her private dressing room (marked with a star), and tells the Tramp that they should rehearse his song. Twice in a row the Gamin counts him off and the Tramp prepares to sing but then forgets his lines before he even starts. The Gamin then writes them on his cuff so he can peek at them while he performs, and she counts him off again. This time he rehearses the song well, peeking at his cuff every few lines, and dances and gesticulates humorously while performing, making the Gamin laugh. The manager enters as he nears the end of his song and tells him to get out to the floor because his song is starting. The Tramp thanks the Gamin for the idea of writing the words on his cuff and he heads out to the floor while the Gamin runs to the doorway to watch. The Tramp does a silly dance while waiting for his cue to sing, which involves thrusting his arms out to the side, but the third time he does this his cuffs come flying off, into the audience, without his noticing. Everybody in the audience loves his dance, but when his cue approaches he takes the center and glances down at his sleeve, and realizes that the cuffs are no longer there. As the orchestra continues playing his cue over and over again, he continues dancing around the floor looking desperately for his cuffs. When he cannot find them, he looks over at the Gamin and gestures at where his cuffs should be, saying he cannot remember the words without them. She mouths to him from the doorway to just sing, and not worry about the words. Meanwhile, the crowd has grown loud as they heckle him because he is just standing there while his cue plays over and over.
The Tramp gestures for the crowd to settle down, and he begins singing, but the words that come out are not the same ones that the Gamin wrote on his cuff; they are nonsense words. The language sounds like an unidentified Romance language, and does indeed borrow words from these languages—Italian and French words can be made out here and there among the gibberish. While singing, however, the Tramp dances with the same movements that we saw him practicing with the Gamin, which did make sense with the first few English lyrics we see on his cuff. The audience laughs and cheers after his first verse, and he goes on in this way for almost three minutes, singing in gibberish while flamboyantly acting out the story of the song, and dancing between verses. The audience loves the whole thing, cheering and laughing throughout, and applauding raucously at the end. When the Tramp finishes he runs into the dressing room, where the Gamin hugs him and congratulates him, which seems to surprise him. The manager comes running into the dressing room after him and tells him to get back out to the cafe floor to bow for the crowd, who are still wildly cheering. The Tramp goes back out and nervously bows, and when he returns to the dressing room the manager tells him that he was great and he will give him a steady job.
As the Tramp and the Gamin embrace, the next song starts and the Gamin goes out the door to do her dance. Just as she is about to enter the cafe floor, the two detectives stand up from a table behind her and grab her wrist. She tries to wriggle free, but they hold her tight. The manager comes over and asks what the problem is, and when the detectives tell him, the four of them all return to the dressing room. Back in the dressing room the Gamin runs to the Tramp and cries into his chest while the manager argues with the detectives. When they show him the warrant, he leaves the dressing room to go get something, and the Gamin tries to run after him out the door but the detectives grab her. The Tramp runs up and pushes them off of her, and he and the Gamin run out a different door, and slam it behind them as the detectives try to pursue them. The Tramp holds the door against the detectives who try to push it open while the Gamin grabs his hat, coat, and cane. Suddenly, the Tramp lets the door push open, causing the two detectives to crash through the door into the room, and the Tramp and Gamin are able to slip past them and out of the dressing room. As they run through the cafe the Tramp pushes chairs over behind himself to slow down the detectives and they are able to escape.
An intertitle tells us that it is dawn, the next day, and the next shot pans across a wild, rural landscape with one road before stopping on the Tramp and the Gamin seated on a mound of dirt on the side of the road. The Tramp ties his shoes and the Gamin ties up a bundle, but then she collapses onto a rock next to her and cries. The Tramp tries to comfort her, but she responds, defeatedly, “what’s the use of trying?” He tries to encourage her, saying “Buck up—never say die. We’ll get along!” and her expression changes to one of fierce determination. The two stand up and walk to the center of the road, and then walk down the road toward the camera. When they reach a close angle, they stop, and the Tramp turns to the Gamin and tells her to smile. She smiles broadly and the two continue walking, with smiles on their faces, down the empty road toward a set of mountains in the distance.
Analysis
The Gamin's dancing in the street is typical of a "gamine" character type (modern viewers may recognize it as the type of thing a "manic pixie dream girl" would do), and in this situation it also proves useful in getting her a job. The fluid cut between her dancing in the street and her dancing in the cafe is used to create a smooth time jump and to demonstrate cause and effect to the audience—her dancing in the street led directly to this good luck and new job. When she waits in expensive clothes for the Tramp outside of the prison, it is clear that her fortune has turned around significantly, and that she is now doing very well for herself because of the new job. Back in the cafe, we again see that the dynamic between them is one of confidence, ambition, and direction on the Gamin's part, and confusion and acquiescence on the Tramp's part—the Gamin does all of the talking and pushes for the Tramp to get the job, while the Tramp does very little other than nod silently. This interaction is also in line with the gamine character type (and earlier characterizations of the Gamin and her influence on the Tramp) as a person whose outlook and attitude encourage the Tramp to step up and seize life in a more individualistic way. Meanwhile, the brief scene in which the detectives issue a warrant for the Gamin’s arrest sets up the final conflict of the film and introduces uncertainty to the period of good fortune that the Gamin and Tramp seem to be experiencing.
Back in the cafe, the Tramp has again found himself in a situation in which the environment seems to have turned against him. He is knocked over, delayed, scolded, and generally interfered with, usually through no fault of his own, and still has to bear the consequences of many issues beyond his control. Of course, he does make a few mistakes that are his fault, but even these seem forgivable, given the situation (for example, it is understandable that he would go through the wrong door by accident after being yelled at and threatened about the roast duck, even though he is working as hard as he can). The difference this time is that he actually overcomes most of the situations presented in the sequence: he falls but keeps the items on his tray from spilling; he keeps the duck from being knocked onto the floor while trying to navigate the dancing crowd; and he wins the duck back when the four men try to play rugby with it. Though the slapstick element is in some ways played down in these instances, it is actually this subdued aspect that gives these scenes their particular humor—situational irony is created by the audience’s expectation that certain actions will follow some of the issues presented. We expect the Tramp to drop all the items on his tray in a big clumsy crash when the dog knocks him over, and we expect the duck to be knocked off his tray and trampled by the dancers, but none of these things happen. The almost gratuitous amount of time in which we are shown the duck floating safely above the heads of the dancers seems to draw this irony out, as well as demonstrate the Tramp’s will not to mess up in his new job.
The stakes are much higher for his singing performance because of how badly he did as a waiter, and the manager explicitly puts this pressure on him, which primes the audience to think that something is likely to go wrong. It soon becomes clear that the major issue will be his failure to remember the words, but the Gamin solves this problem by writing the words on his cuff. When he seems to do a great job practicing for the Gamin while reading from his cuffs, it becomes unclear exactly how the performance will go wrong, but the audience still feels a lingering expectation that something bad will happen. This expectation is satisfied when the Tramp’s cuffs come flying off, and we watch as the Tramp prepares to sing, knowing full well that he will check his sleeves and be unable to sing upon finding the words not there (in yet another moment of dramatic irony). His ridiculous dance becomes funny in a different way, as it is clear to the film’s audience that he is now dancing the same moves in order to try to find his cuffs, while the cafe audience fails to understand why he will not just start.
When the Tramp finally starts singing, his choice of words (or actually, lack of any real words) is an interesting and important detail. This scene marks the first time that Chaplin’s voice is heard in a film, and his decision to sing in a made-up language is deliberate. Part of what helped him achieve massive international success in his career was the accessibility of his work across language barriers, and he did not want the first use of his voice in a film to be specific to any one language or culture. Because of this, he sings in a gibberish language, so that an understanding of his song must rely only on his actions and facial expressions, which would be the case were the film to be completely silent, like much of his earlier work. This may have been a criticism of the trend toward ‘talkie’ films and the pressure he felt to move into talkies. At the very least it is an ironic twist on critic and audience expectations of him at the end of the silent film era.
The meaning of the song itself can only be discerned from his actions, though it is not particularly relevant to the plot. We catch a glimpse of the first verse on his cuffs in the previous scene, and we see him act that verse out in front of the Gamin. He repeats the actions for that verse at the start of the song in the cafe, indicating that he will be doing his planned choreography despite the lack of any real lyrics. Though it is not entirely clear, the story seems to revolve around a fat, old, wealthy man and his pursuit of a lovely young woman, which ends with a slap and a break-up or rejection of some kind. The fact that the audience in the cafe seems to understand the song (and find it hilarious) is further evidence that the made-up language stands as a criticism of the trend toward talkie films. His success here and the excitement of the Gamin and the manager indicate that things are finally turning around for him and the Gamin. However, this good fortune only serves to raise the stakes for the two of them, as the audience knows that the final conflict between the Gamin and the detectives will soon arise, given the issuing of the warrant that we were shown a few scenes prior.
The detectives’ attempt to arrest the Gamin carries further implicit criticism of the police and the government’s treatment of poor people. The Gamin is old enough and responsible enough to care for herself, and has reached a point where she is a productive and independent member of society, and yet the police still insist on arresting her and placing her in their custody. The way that the Tramp foils them, in which he also makes them seem foolish and pathetic, is then especially satisfying to the audience. The next morning, when the Tramp and the Gamin sit on the edge of a deserted patch of road, we see the extent to which life in the city (or in ‘Modern Times’) has beaten down and broken the spirit of the Gamin—she collapses, crying, and wants to give up. It is a stark contrast with her attitude and actions throughout the film, when she faced even very difficult situations with a positive attitude and inspired the Tramp to take more control of his life and work for a better, happier existence. Indeed, perhaps the most important aspect of this final scene is that the Tramp and Gamin switch roles, and the Tramp, having been inspired and encouraged by the Gamin throughout the film, now needs to encourage the Gamin to ‘buck up,’ and keep going. This change in dynamics shows us that, at the end, the two of them have reached a point where their relationship will continue to push them to find a good life, and they will support each other in this pursuit, which helps to end the film on a positive, optimistic note.
