I've seen parts of this movie on my history class, on tv, everywhere... and it's not a coincidence it's because Chaplin just shows to the world the reality, like Steinbeck or Fitzgerald did, but using images. The Kid was a film where Chaplin wanted to show the poberty of people on the 'roaring twenties'. It was the 'dark side' of the american dream. With Modern Times Chaplin shows us the new techniques of productivity (fordism and or taylorism) and how lots of people lost their opportunities, like Chaplin does in the movie, because they didn't have resources.
Chaplin is a genius, thats widely known and common among people. Because he knew, at the time, how did the world evolutionate. And portrayed it in a way that may seem very easy, know that we see it with prespective, but that surely was very difficult to do at the time.
Modern Times is clearly a masterpiece and with the limitations of the cinematography of the time shows the reality of the Great D epression and the extintion of dreams of millions of people that the only thing that they asked for was work, even if it made them crazy.