"
The Immigrant" (also called"
Broke"),
1917,
U.S.A, is a silent comedy short film starring
Charlie Chaplin.
The "Tramp" is an immigrant coming to the
United States. It also stars
Edna Purviance and
Eric Campbell. The movie was written and directed by
Chaplin.
According to
Kevin Brownlow and
David Gill's documentary series
Unknown Chaplin,
the first scenes to be written and filmed take place in what became the movie's second half, in which the penniless
Tramp finds a coin and goes for a meal in a restaurant, not realising that the coin has fallen out of his pocket. It was not until later that Chaplin decided the reason the Tramp was penniless was that he had just arrived on a boat from
Europe, and used this notion as the basis for the first half.
The scene in which Chaplin's character kicks an immigration officer was cited later as evidence of his anti-Americanism when he was forced to leave the United States in
1952. In
1998, The Immigrant was selected for preservation in the
United States National Film Registry by the
Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Episode 1 of the
1983 documentary series Unknown Chaplin reveals that Chaplin developed the storyline for The Immigrant as filming progressed. Initially, the movie began as a comedy set in an artists cafe, with Purviance as a brightly dressed patron. This plot was abandoned almost immediately, before Chaplin's character was introduced, the documentary states, and Chaplin began again, with a story, still set in a cafe, about a man who has never been in a restaurant before displaying terrible table manners before meeting a lovely girl (Purviance) and shaping up. Initially,
Henry Bergman played the bully-ish head waiter, but Chaplin eventually replaced him with Eric Campbell. According to Unknown Chaplin, Chaplin developed the idea of the tramp and Purviance's character being immigrants when he realized he needed more plot to justify the restaurant scenes. After filming the film's opening sequences of the arrival in
America, he reshot parts of the restaurant scene to be consistent with the new plot (bringing
Bergman back in a new role as an artist who resolves the subplot of
Charlie being unable to pay for dinner), and added the epilogue in which the Tramp and Purviance are married.
Chaplin is excellent, doing trademark hat flicks etc while Purviance is much better here than other mutual shorts simply because she has a good role. THE IMMIGRANT is pure magic from start to finish and it ranks of one of Chaplin's best films.
Directed by
Charles Chaplin (uncredited)
Writing credits
Vincent Bryan uncredited
Charles Chaplin uncredited
Maverick Terrell uncredited
Charles Chaplin
... Immigrant
Edna Purviance ... Immigrant
Eric Campbell ...
The Head Waiter
Albert Austin ... A
Diner
Henry Bergman ...
The Artist
Produced by
Henry P. Caulfield .... producer (uncredited)
Charles Chaplin .... producer (uncredited)
John Jasper ...
. producer (uncredited)
Cinematography by
William C. Foster (uncredited)
Roland Totheroh (uncredited)
Film Editing by
Charles Chaplin (uncredited)
Production Lone Star Company
17 June 1917 (
USA)
Resources: wikipedia.org, imdb.org
New soundtrack and dubbing: CinemaHistoryChannel
Music:
Kevin Mac Leod (www.incompetch.com) licensed under
Creative Commons licence http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/ .
Attribution 3.0 Unported (
CC BY 3.0). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
3.0;
- published: 03 Apr 2014
- views: 383401