The Immigrant (1917)

Directed by

Charlie Chaplin

Genre

silent film, romantic comedy, social comedy film

Country

United States

Runtime

24 min

Rated

NR

Rating

7.3 of 10 from 319 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

Charlie Chaplin's Tramp plays an immigrant traveling to America on a ship. He gets accused of theft and falls for a woman during the voyage, then tries to win a meal with a lost coin.

lightheartedsentimentalwhimsicalcomicalbittersweetchaoticcharmingunderdog

What happens

The Immigrant is a 1917 American silent romantic comedy short written and directed by Charlie Chaplin. The film stars Chaplin's Tramp character as an immigrant coming to the United States who is accused of theft on the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean and falls in love with a beautiful young woman along the way. It also stars Edna Purviance and Eric Campbell. 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 realizing that the coin has fallen out of his pocket. It was not until later that Chaplin's Tramp was penniless because he had just arrived on a boat from Europe and used this notion as the basis for the first half. Purviance reportedly was required to eat so many plates of beans during the many takes to complete the restaurant sequence (in character as another immigrant who falls in love with Charlie) that she became physically ill. 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." (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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