The reviews are uniformly positive across eight decades, and the praise gathers around the same things: Chaplin’s pantomime, the factory sequences with the conveyor belt and the feeding machine, and the way the film puts a face on the Depression. Several critics single out the department store roller-skating and the waiter’s dance-floor climax. The notices from 1936 treat it as a welcome return of the Tramp after five years away; the later ones read it as his farewell.
The reservations are mild and cluster around structure and sentiment. The New York Times finds the construction loose, with industrial satire and older antics not quite joined; The New Yorker thinks the scenes with the gamine and her family land less surely than the comedy; Eye for Film calls the romance underdeveloped and ranks the film below City Lights. Time Out observes that Chaplin’s political naivety now looks as striking as his pantomime. Nobody dislikes it; the spread runs only from warm to adoring.