Modern Times

From the same set of film-still slides as mentioned here previously (1, 2, 3), comes the one above, featuring the unmistakable silhouette of Charlie Chaplin. It’s from the closing moments of Modern Times (1936), where Chaplin, in his final appearance as ‘The Tramp’, walks away with Ellen (played by Paulette Goddard) “down the road towards an uncertain but hopeful future”.

I did not know, until reading the wikipedia article about the movie earlier today, that Chaplin himself composed the music for it (drawing inspiration from Puccini’s Tosca), with the instrumental theme heard over last scene later the basis for the song ‘Smile’, as popularised by Nat ‘King’ Cole in 1954.