Written under the supervision of Mgr. Pavla Veselá, PhD, and submitted on 1 February 2013, this essay was part of my total coursework at the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts. The essay is published with the kind permission of the faculty.

Charlie Chaplin’s Immigrant

The Immigrant, the 1917 Charlie Chaplin movie shot for the Mutual Film Corporation, is one of those shorter pictures made by the legendary comedian and filmmaker in the early years of his career that seem to be slightly cowering in the shadows of his later and much more successful pieces such as The Kid, City Lights, or even The Great Dictator itself. It is an engaging little tale, though, as well as one which provides us with an interesting look not only into the background of the famous man but also into the social conditions of the time in which the film was produced. As Larry Langman writes in his Encyclopedia of American Film Comedy, „with its social implications and autobiographical overtones, it reminded many urban dwellers of the harsh realities they had undergone in search of a new home and a fresh beginning“ (Miller). While Charles Chaplin, an immigrant of sorts himself, does indeed provide his audiences with a more or less realistic look at the real-life difficulties of the newly arrived immigrants, successfully evoking compassion in the viewers, his film is far from a dreary morality. As one critic rightfully assessed in his 1917 magazine article about The Immigrant, the film managed to have „successfully chased the imps of pain with lashes of laughter“ (Miller). This essay is to discuss the genesis and background of this movie, and analyze the motif of immigration in it.

Before we aim our attention at the movie itself, we shall comment on the autobio-graphical elements in the story, and on the parallels and discrepancies between Chaplin and the main character in the short film. Since Charles Spencer Chaplin is so closely associated with American cinema and culture, it may come as a surprise to some that when he was born in 1889 it was not in America but actually in London. His family being poor and his childhood difficult, he began acting in a theatre when he was 14 – a career choice thanks to which he was once noticed by an American movie producer who owned the Keystone Studios in Hollywood, was consequently offered a contract to make movies for that studio, and in the end moved to America in 1913 (Draigh and Marcus). Being thus essentially an immigrant himself, it seems only natural that such life-changing experience would eventually make its way into Chaplin’s work. It certainly seems to have been a deeply personal subject for Chaplin as he was once heard saying that The Immigrant, „touched me more than any film I’ve made“ (Nixon). In spite of the allure of utterly conflating the personalities and experiences of Chaplin the moviemaker and the main character, however, those two are not the same. Even though we do not get any sort of back story for the character in the film, we may easily imagine it to be a much less fortunate one than the director’s.

For one thing, being originally from the British Isles, Charlie already knew the language, an advantage that the majority of immigrants at the time could only dream of. As David Draigh and Gail Sussman Marcus write, „at the beginning of the twentieth century most immigrants to America came from eastern and central Europe – Italy, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Serbia, and Russia“ (Draigh and Marcus). Among these, only few would have just the basic knowledge of English, relying instead on one another and perhaps an occasional interpreter. For instance, those who did not know a word of English and still needed to at least get through the administrative process on Ellis Island in order to get into the country, would be directed to multilingual inspectors (Draigh and Marcus). Those, however, would not help them acclimatize, find housing, or anything of this sort as much as merely have them answer „a series of questions about character, anarchism, insanity, crime, money, relatives, and work“ (Draigh and Marcus), and then send them off on their own immediately. The immigrants would then frequently leave together in their language groups and go living into various newly founded urban immigrant slums such as the Lower East Side in New York, thus creating their own social and cultural life through community organizations, churches, theatres, and publications (Draigh and Marcus).

The language barrier (not only the one between the immigrants and the English-speaking Americans but also the barrier between the differently-speaking immigrants themselves) would be an intriguing feature in the movie. The film would surely look radically different, for instance, if the central pair were from different countries, speaking different languages, and did not therefore understand each other. Luckily for Chaplin, The Immigrant was not a talkie – those were to arrive still about a dozen years later – and so, the majority of all communication being nonverbal, he did not have to pay much attention to this issue.

Secondly, Chaplin came into the country on his own volition but that was often not the case with other immigrants. The truth of the matter is that many of them left their home countries simply because they had to in order to save their lives or have at least some chance at a better future. They could have many different reasons for this, of course, but most commonly they did it either because of an inauspicious political situation in their homeland (such would later be the case, for instance, of our own country under the previous regime), religious persecution (as it was with the Russian or Polish Jews), disease (let us mention the Italians, for example, who fled in great numbers to America from the turn-of-the-century epidemic of cholera in their homeland), or because of severe poverty and hunger (as would be the case of Ireland during and after the Great Famine of 1845) (Draigh and Marcus). For all of these people, America was the country of opportunities. They could have emigrated and go anywhere else, but for one reason or another, perhaps imagining that they would have the highest chance of succeeding in life there, they did not.

Which brings us to the third point, the third way in which Charlie Chaplin differs from other immigrants he attempts to portray in his movie. When Chaplin decided to sail to America he did that already knowing that he had a job there, and a very handsomely paid one at that. At the time a skilled worker was able to make between $9 and $15 per week in America (and an unskilled immigrant laborer even less than that, of course), Chaplin’s salary of $150 a week enabled him to live a life of reasonable luxury (Draigh and Marcus). The whole second half of The Immigrant actually revolves around the theme of poverty of the immigrants. While the main character finds himself penniless and hungry in the street, though, something like that would have never happened to Chaplin. The situation is brought about quite naturally in the movie as a result of the character’s previous actions, but it also must have been a situation all too familiar in America at the time. Even prior to Chaplin’s film, the extreme poverty of the immigrants had already been shed some light on by Upton Sinclair, for instance, in his novel The Jungle. Chaplin not only shows this poverty in the film, he does so with compassion and „an element of pathos unheard-of in slapstick films“ (Thomson and Bordwell, 76-7). He is able to do that predominantly thanks to the main character of the Little Tramp.

The Little Tramp was Chaplin’s richest character, one that he first used in his second film made for the Keystone Studios as well as one that he used in nearly every subsequent movie ever since. „Born after the spiritual devastation of the First World War“ (Cochran), the character was according to Chaplin’s own words a composite of many an Englishman with their „black mustaches, tight-fitting clothes, and bamboo canes“ (Miller). The character was not always a tramp per say. In many of Chaplin’s films he was employed as a waiter, store clerk, stagehand, fireman, and the like (Erickson). What is more important, according to Encyclopedia Britannica he can be described as a quintessential misfit, „shunned by polite society, unlucky in love, jack-of-all-trades but master of none“ (Erickson). Chaplin reached an immediate success with this character due to the fact that people identified with the bumbling trickster who was at the same time not only entertaining but also innately human. He had to work but more often than not was completely broke. Sometimes he felt sad, other times in love. Having created an utterly relatable character, Chaplin thus „made people laugh at situations that were sometimes painful – situations that his audience had experienced themselves“ (Draigh and Marcus). In The Immigrant, then, the experience at hand is that of a poor immigrant coming to the Promised Land to find a new life.

It is rather interesting that in order to create this character, Autumn Miller writes, Chaplin had to redefine what was already in the cinematic store as the figure of the tramp began in film as a villain, stealing money, kidnapping babies, threatening beautiful ladies, and being all in all a genuine threat to the society (Miller). Chaplin essentially took this character and turned it on its head, making it into an underdog, overlooked by the same society, who is nonetheless able to point out its faults without ever being persecuted – a trait for which he is always applauded by the audiences. The tramp is then usually juxtaposed to the characters of law enforcement officers who represent society’s inability to see the tramp for the good person he really is. We can see that in The Immigrant as well if we remember the scene in which the policeman on the ship sees the main character sneaking a wad of money into the young woman’s pocket, and misinterprets it as an act of stealing on his part. As Miller writes, „In Chaplin, the tramp is the savior of society’s values, and the cops are the threat to that benevolence“ (Miller).

Furthermore, the Little Tramp perfectly fits in the environment of immigrant America as he is as a character not exceedingly different from a prototypical immigrant. Not only is he a low-class vagrant and an outsider who struggles to keep up with the machinations of the world around him, but he also manages to blend into the city streets without words (Cochran). He is likewise around the same age as the statistics show that most immigrants „were young, between 15 and 40, two thirds were men, and most were Catholics or Jews“ (Draigh and Marcus). Chaplin therefore did not need to make any alterations to the character at all. The only thing which was essential for the picture to work was for him to know the way of the world, to know people and have a certain sense of common humanity. As he wrote once, „When all is said and done, at the bottom of almost all success is a knowledge of human nature“ (Miller). The film may function as a testament, then, to Chaplin’s triumph in this area.

If we move to the movie itself, we may note that for a full-length feature film it is a bit short. We have to realize, though, that in 1917, when The Immigrant was made, the film as such was only some two decades old and up to that point most pictures were only about a minute long (Draigh and Marcus). As Draigh and Marcus point out, „Not until 1913 did movies start to get longer, and to tell more complicated stories“ (Draigh and Marcus). In spite of its somewhat limited length, then, the movie still manages to tell a whole story and be compassionate and socially relevant at the same time. Moreover, having some knowledge about the genesis of the movie we may consider ourselves ever so lucky to even have the movie in this shape and form in the first place.

As the first of the three-part series called Unknown Chaplin brilliantly shows, making a movie at the beginning of the previous century could not be more different from the way films are made nowadays. Today, every movie needs to have a tight script, approved by the censors, who need to know every word and situation in order to ascertain whether they may be harmful to the public, and by the studios themselves, who take part in the process of self-censorship (because insulting and thus alienating audiences would cost them money), and who also need to know – for budgetary reasons – how many scenes there will be in the film and what will be their nature (whether they will be conversational and shot in some interior or whether they will be shot outside and filled with computer-generated images). In 1917, Chaplin need not have troubled himself with all these inquiries and, as the documentary shows, he usually started off with simply building a set (Unknown Chaplin). In the case of The Immigrant, he actually began shooting the second half of the movie first. In the initial stage of making the picture, Chaplin did not even think of the theme of immigration and intended to shoot a comedy set in a restaurant. Therefore, as true and accurate as those statements are that this particular movie was deeply personal to Chaplin because he was an immigrant himself, we also have to bear in mind that he obviously did not consider it so pressing an issue that he would want to put it in the film right away. The basic idea for the original movie was a story of the Little Tramp going in for lunch, disgusting his neighbor at the table with his eating habits, seeing a woman he likes sitting at the opposite table, and then realizing he has no funds with which to pay for the food. Over the course of shooting this scene Chaplin replaced the female waiter with a male actor, and then even this actor with another one when he found the first man not to be intimidating enough. He also realized that for a two-reel film, he would not be able to shoot enough material in the restaurant alone, and that it might be more interesting if the tramp and the woman knew each other. Chaplin therefore began to think about where those two might have already met, and he arrived at the perfect solution – they were both immigrants and knew one another from the boat. Half of the scene then needed to be reshot again and the crew subsequently moved onto a newly-rented boat to shoot the chronologically first half of the movie. Going back to the issue of the length of the movie, it is actually rather surprising that Chaplin managed to cut such a short movie from all the material he had (as well as one whose story holds together). As the documentary shows, the restaurant scene alone required nearly four hundred takes, and the boat scenes surely took hundreds more.

One of the aspects for which the movie is applauded by critics is its realism with regard to the hardships of the newly arriving immigrants. This is particularly visible in the first half of the movie when the action still takes place on board of the ship. With the only exception of the fact that while in the movie the immigrants travel on the deck, in reality they were huddled below it, jammed in like sardines, the film depicts the voyage as realistically and with as great an emphasis on the gritty details of the journey as possible (Draigh and Marcus). The horrible living conditions, the overcrowding and the ensuing lack of privacy, the omnipresent sea sickness and other diseases, the poverty and hunger, the filth, the death (even though nothing is stated directly in the film, it is apparent that between the first meeting of the tramp and the woman on the ship and their later reunion in the restaurant, the woman’s mother has died – a fact which was immediately understood by the contemporary audiences thanks to her black-bordered handkerchief, „the black border [being] a familiar symbol of mourning in 1917) (Draigh and Marcus).  Draigh and Marcus provide us with a very good description of the conditions on the ship during the journey overseas:

For two to three weeks, immigrants were packed into bunks only a few feet high and six feet long. There was constant noise, bad food, and a terrible smell. Many passengers got seasick and there was almost no fresh air. When the new Americans reached the United States, they were physically and emotionally exhausted. (Draigh and Marcus)

The shift in the movie setting was an artistic choice as Chaplin not only found the deck to be a much more entertaining environment (let us remember the many gags with overboard vomitting, the tramp fishing, or the immigrants rolling on the deck from left to right as the ship is rocking on the waves) but he also intended from the very beginning of working on this part of the film to include in it the scene in which the immigrants peer at the Statue of Liberty as they approach the Ellis Island (Draigh and Marcus).

Another layer of the picture which is often highlighted is its keen sense of social satire which is perhaps best seen in the aforementioned arrival of the immigrants to the shores of their new homeland, accompanied by the intertitle „The arrival in the Land of Liberty“ (The Immigrant). As their gazes land on the Statue of Liberty in the distance, the immigrants are depicted as being shoved aside by a rude officer and herded back against a wall like cattle with a thick rope. This scene gives us an important social commentary, a statement about the level of respect with which immigrants were treated upon their arrival. Draigh and Marcus further emphasize the cattle simile by writing that „real-life immigrants were numbered and lettered with tags before they got off the ship, and they were herded like cattle through a series of checkpoints on Ellis Island“ (Draigh and Marcus). Moreover, being satirical in its nature the film perceives such inhuman conduct with dissent and calls for amendments. In the context of Chaplin’s work, this was one of his first satirical social comments, a feature which would later become prominent in his films (Posner).

The end of The Immigrant, then, could not be more poignant and, in a way, more American than it is. For one, this movie appears to be one of the rare exceptions in Chaplin’s oeuvre in which the tramp actually ends up with the desired lady (Posner). Also, if we recall the circumstances under which the two head into the marriage bureau – the money they recently acquired from the artist, the prospect of more financial means to come from that source, and therefore also the brighter future that is being opened before them – we may note that all of these features are very similar to those generally associated with the American Dream. The pretty wife, the money, the happy future – the immigrant eventually seems to get it all. At that point, it does not even matter that he was not born in America. Living his version of the American Dream, he becomes American as well.

Bibliography:

Cochran, Jason. „Charlie Chaplin Was the Immigrant America Refused.“ Jason Cochran 1 February 2013. 1 February 2013 <http://jason-cochran.com/blog/charlie-chaplin-was-the-immigrant-america-refused/>

Draigh, David and Gail Sussman Marcus. „The Immigrant.“ American museum of the Moving Image. Accessed on the following web site: <http://www.pageout.net/user/www/p/r/ professorrogoff/Discover%20%20NY%20Files/TheImmigrantSM.pdf>

Erickson, Harold E. „Charlie Chaplin.“ Encyclopedia Britannica 31 January 2013. 31 January 2013 <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/106116/Charlie-Chaplin>

Miller, Autumn. „An Analysis of the Comedic Contributions of Charlie Chaplin.“ Yahoo Voices 31 January 2013. 31 January 2013 <http://voices.yahoo.com/an-analysis-comedic-contributions-charlie-3286232.html?cat=2>

Nixon, Rob. „The Immigrant.“ Turner Classic Movies 31 January 2013. 31 January 2013 <http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article.html?isPreview=&id=345125|345143&name=The-Immigrant>

Posner, Phil. „The Immigrant.“ Chaplin Articles 24 September 2012. 1 February 2013 <http://www.philposner.com/imm2.htm>

The Immigrant. Dir. Charlie Chaplin. Prod. John Jasper, Charlie Chaplin and Henry P. Caulfield. Perf. Charlie Chaplin and Edna Purviance. Lone Star Corporation, 1917. Accessed on <http://archive.org/details/CC_1917_06_17_TheImmigrant>

Thompson, Kristin and David Bordwell. Film History: An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994.

Unknown Chaplin. Dir. and prod. Kevin Brownlow and David Gill. Narrat. James Mason. James Television, 1983.