Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (United Artists), released in the United States in 1936, was the only film dealing in a direct way with the impact of the Great Depression to have emerged from within the Hollywood system and to have been widely viewed by popular audiences during the mid-1930s. It made plain that many people in America were poor, unemployed and hungry, and that there were major inequalities in society in general. It confronted the effects of the Depression in a way unique at the time for its realism. As social critic Kyle Crichton, the pseudonym of left-wing writer Robert Forsythe, commented in the New Masses on the film's release:

In this chapter I analyse how Modern Times was received by critics in the United States, Britain and France. The political situations of the three countries were very different of course when the film was released in 1936: in the United States, a liberal president in the person of Franklin D. Roosevelt was coming up for re-election; in the United Kingdom, a National Government under Stanley Baldwin relied on the Conservative Party for the bulk of its support; and France was about to head in a leftward direction with the election of its first ‘Popular Front’ government. But all of them were experiencing the effects of the Great Depression, and what makes looking at the differences (and sometimes parallels) in the film's reception easier is that - unusually for a Chaplin film - it came out in all three countries at much the same time. It was first shown in New York on 5 February 1936, in London on 11 February, and in Paris on 13 March.

THE US RECEPTION

Among American critics generally, reviewers split into conservatives or left-wingers. Conservatives denied that the film had political implications, minimised the extent of such implications, or simply declined to discuss them.