inside / outside
by Douglas Messerli
Charles Chaplin, Vincent Bryan, and
Maverick Terrell (screenplay), Charles Chaplin (director) The Immigrant / 1917
The tramp figure meets Edna Purviance (often
Chaplin’s leading lady), this time as a lovely young girl accompanying her
sickly mother. She discovers that their entire savings has been lost, a
gambling pickpocket having robbed them; but Chaplin, also gambling wins most of
the money back and restores it to her, but in so doing, is, himself, accused of
the theft. She saves him from arrest.
Most of the “fun,” if you can describe
it as that, of the first part of this bipartite story, is about the simple
swaying motion of the boat. People, living in abject conditions, are comically
swung across the decks, bowls of gruel spin across the communal eating tables,
and everything and everyone appears in eternal motion, like the passengers
themselves, neither here nor there. Chaplin captures the very personal emotions
of the travelers through his swinging camera and rotating objects: there is
quite literally no stability anymore in their lives.
When they finally see the great symbol of their acceptance, The Statue
of Liberty, they are suddenly cordoned off by a rope, as if a wall has suddenly separated them from all of their hopes. Today no one cannot see this moment without
thinking of the constant governmental threats of further bans and plans for
immigrant control.
The second “act” of this “comedy” occurs in a cheap Lower East Side
restaurant where the tramp figure accidently reencounters his would-be lover,
Purviance. He has just found a coin, and is out to enjoy a sumptuous meal of
beans, delighted to be able to treat her to the same. However, we have just
observed that the coin has fallen through the hole in his pocket, and, like the
happy young diners of Hello, Dolly!,
he is about to be met with hostility and embarrassment when it comes time to
pay the bill.
We watch, in anticipation, as others are
humiliated and even beaten (again by the bully figure of Eric Campbell) for
their inability to pay, as the Tramp gradually discovers the coin is missing.
When he finally finds what he believes to be his coin, that has actually fallen
from another man’s pocket, the whole tension of the film shifts to the heavy
shoes of the waiter and the tramp, as they step over and try to reel in the
piece of silver which might oust or save the two diners from any position in
the society into which they have now entered. It is truly a matter of
inside/outside, which now becomes the central metaphor of the movie; might
they, at least, enjoy a simple dinner or will they be tossed into the wilds of
the street?
Chaplin, always the believer of the ideal, ends the film on the
positive, literally picking up his would-be fiancée and taking her into a small
marriage bureau to tie the knot. This immigrant dream ends most happily, even
if we cannot even imagine how the two might survive in their new world.
Los Angeles, March 13, 2017
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2017).
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