About 90 years ago, Modern Times was released. Its title carried a warning. The film railed against the new industrial age and the misery it inflicted on workers amid the Great Depression. Yet a film about the dangers of modernity was being told through an almost-silent medium, nearly a decade into the era of sound. Charlie Chaplin, who wrote, directed, produced, and scored the film, in addition to starring in it, was deliberately resisting Hollywood's shift into the future.
Chaplin's Tramp caught in the machinery of the factory floor, in one of the defining images of Modern Times.
By 1936, Chaplin had spent more than two decades working in an industry that had been in its infancy when he entered it. He had become one of its greatest beneficiaries while repeatedly playing a man who could not keep up with the world it was creating. It was against this backdrop of constant change that he decided to embark on a long journey. His son, Charles Chaplin Jr., wrote in his book about the trip: "His churning mind began to grope for something new and exciting upon which to fasten itself. And he settled upon a visit to the Orient, which had so impressed him when he went there on his trip around the world.”
Paulette Goddard in a publicity photograph for Modern Times, the film she starred in alongside Chaplin before travelling with him to Hanoi.
In February 1936, Modern Times premiered in New York and Los Angeles, in the midst of Hollywood's Golden Age. However, once Chaplin had finished promoting the film, he and Paulette Goddard, his co-star and soon-to-be wife, left for the trip to Asia that saw them land in southern Vietnam, before making their way north towards Hanoi.
Travelling aboard the Aramis, a ship operated by the Messageries Maritimes company, they disembarked in Saigon on the morning of April 13. From Saigon they travelled through Phnom Penh and Angkor, before continuing through Đà Lạt, Đà Nẵng and Huế towards Hanoi. Chaplin and Goddard arrived in Hanoi on the evening of April 29 and stayed at the Metropole Hotel on Ngô Quyền Street, in Hanoi's French Quarter.
Hanoi was entering its own “modern times,” though not the one Chaplin had imagined. The city was changing rapidly, with new buildings, electric trams, cinemas, newspapers, schools and railways reshaping daily life. But this was not yet the industrial world of assembly lines and mass unemployment that Chaplin was satirizing. Under French colonial rule, in the region then known as Tonkin, a new cultural identity and class was emerging along with it.
The Hôtel Métropole, where Chaplin and Paulette Goddard stayed during their visit to Hanoi in April 1936.
Much of the city Chaplin walked through is still recognisable today. St. Joseph's Cathedral, with its towers modelled on Notre-Dame, remains a major landmark in the Old Quarter, while the Hanoi Opera House sits close to the Metropole itself. Across the Red River, Long Biên Bridge still carries trains and traffic, while the red Thê Húc Bridge remains one of Hoàn Kiếm Lake's most recognisable landmarks.
Cinema arrived in Hanoi during the First World War, initially as a new form of entertainment in a city undergoing cultural change. The Metropole hotel played an important role in introducing Hanoians to this new medium. According to Tuổi Trẻ, films were first screened here from June 1916, Chaplin's among them. Four years later, in August 1920, the Pathé cinema opened next to Bà Kiệu Temple, becoming Hanoi's first purpose-built cinema. Journalist Nguyễn Ngọc Tiến, in his book Walking Across Hanoi, notes that Hanoi's first picture houses showed only silent films, with sound films not arriving until the mid-1930s, beginning with All Quiet on the Western Front.
Cinema in the city was divided by class. First-class and balcony tickets cost between 1.00 and 2.00 Indochinese piastres, several times more than the roughly 0.50 piastres the city's working class earned in a day. Second-class tickets cost around 0.50–0.80 piastres, while third-class tickets cost 0.30–0.50 piastres. At those prices, cinema was an expensive type of entertainment for Hanoi's working class, meaning many of the workers Chaplin's film was depicting may not have been able to afford to see it.
The former Pathé cinema, rebranded 'Le Variétés' by 1933, on the corner of Boulevard Francis Garnier — the same street where Chaplin would later stop for drinks at the Taverne Royale.
By 1936, Chaplin needed no introduction in Hanoi. He was known as Charlot (Sác-lô in Vietnamese) across Indochina, after the French nickname for his character The Tramp. Chaplin and his travel group stopped for drinks at the Taverne Royale on the then Francis Garnier Street, which is now Đinh Tiên Hoàng Street, next to Hoàn Kiếm Lake. Hà Thành Ngọ Báo reported that he was signing autographs for fans there, an early glimpse of celebrity culture in the city. On another occasion, he and Paulette Goddard visited the Tây Hồ dye shop on 46 Hàng Trống Street to buy silk, clothes and souvenirs. The street remains a popular destination for tourists looking for similar items more than ninety years later.
Chaplin developed the idea that machinery driven by profit could create misery, after a conversation with Gandhi, and placed it within his own concerns about a changing world. He turned that sentiment into the central conflict of Modern Times, taking aim at industrialization, unemployment and a system in which efficiency and profit came at the expense of workers. His Tramp character was still the familiar figure of hardship from Chaplin’s earlier films, but in Modern Times, the struggle felt more layered. The changing world around Chaplin was becoming part of the character too, giving the Tramp a sense of uncertainty that had not been as visible before.
In an interview, Thạch Lam recalled Chaplin describing the plight of the hero in Modern Times, explaining how a production line worker was reduced to a twitching, traumatized state. Thạch Lam's reply cut straight through it: “In our land, there's no machinery, no factories at all.” The exchange exposed the distance between Chaplin's industrial world and the one he had encountered in Hanoi.
A 'Procession du Génie' passes through Hanoi's Old Quarter, goods carried entirely by hand, in a city still without the machinery Thạch Lam described to Chaplin.
Yet the parallels between the film and the city may run deeper than Thạch Lam suggests. Hanoi satirist Vũ Trọng Phụng published Số đỏ (Dumb Luck) that same year, a book that shows starkly contrasting sides of the city, from the “emergent Francophile northern upper classes” to the “filthy sidewalks of Hanoi's old commercial quarter.” Its protagonist, Red-Haired Xuân, rises through this world not because of who he is, but because of what people believe him to represent. In Modern Times, the machinery of modern life has become so dominant that the individual is forced to perform his role within it, whether he belongs there or not. Both works find comedy in societies trying to manufacture the appearance of progress while revealing how easily the people caught inside the illusion can be discarded.
Saigon newspaper L'Impartial, a conservative publication, described Chaplin's visit to Hanoi as “quiet, serious, slow-speaking and touched by sadness.” It's a description that sits oddly against the Tramp's slapstick, but not against the man who played him. Chaplin's characters often bore the hardships of the world, reflecting some of the difficulties of his own upbringing. The Tramp's vulnerability was therefore not entirely separate from the man playing him, even if Modern Times gave it a new social dimension.
Chaplin (centre, in white) photographed with a group in Hanoi, inscribed to him from the newspaper Đông Pháp and dated April 29, 1936 — the day he arrived in the city.
Vietnam left a profound impression on Chaplin, who said: “In my eyes, this land is vastly different from the places I have previously visited.” In Hanoi, he found himself in a city where that industrial world had not yet arrived in the same form. On May 5, the couple visited Hạ Long Bay, concluding their stay in Northern Vietnam, before boarding a ship bound for Hong Kong via Hải Phòng, continuing on afterwards to Canton, China. It was around this time that the two were reportedly married in secret, though neither ever publicly confirmed it, and no marriage certificate was ever produced.
Chaplin with child actor Jackie Coogan in The Kid (1921), one of his early iconic roles.
Hanoi offered a brief pause from the machinery and noise that Chaplin had spent years putting on screen. Modern Times had imagined a man escaping the factory; in Hanoi, Chaplin found himself in a city that had yet to fully enter the industrial world the film depicted. The irony ran deeper than simple contrast. Chaplin's wealth came from the Hollywood system, itself built on industrialization and mass production, the same machinery he mocked and critiqued onscreen. He had become incredibly wealthy playing a figure left behind by society and modernity, and it was that wealth which now afforded him this peace, in a city only beginning to experience the changes he had turned into comedy. The very system he was going against had paid his way to escape it.
According to Thạch Lam, when asked about Hanoi, Chaplin said “Hanoi is peaceful, very peaceful.”
