The Immigrant

Preview
Categories
Social Options

Category: Short
All Genres: Short, Comedy, Drama, Romance
Release Year: 1917
Country: USA
Runtime: 20
Rating: 7.6 (0)
Languages: English
Director: Charles Chaplin
Sound: Silent
Taglines:

They called her a scar-faced she-devil.

Whatever I am... men made me!

Writing by: Vincent Bryan - uncredited
Charles Chaplin - uncredited
Maverick Terrell - uncredited

Produced by: Henry P. Caulfield - producer (uncredited)
Charles Chaplin - producer (uncredited)
John Jasper - producer (uncredited)

Cast: Charles Chaplin - Immigrant
Edna Purviance - Immigrant
Eric Campbell - The head waiter
Albert Austin - A diner
Henry Bergman - The artist
Kitty Bradbury - Mother (uncredited)
Frank J. Coleman - Ships officer / Restaurant owner (uncredited)
William Gillespie - Cafe violinist (uncredited)
Tom Harrington - Marriage registrar (uncredited)
James T. Kelley - Shabby man in restaurant (uncredited)
John Rand - Tipsy diner who cannot pay (uncredited)

Music: Les Baxter
Official Website: Visit Website

Plot Outline: Charlie is an immigrant who endures a challenging voyage and gets into trouble as soon as he arrives in America.
Plot: Charlie is on his way to the USA. He wins in a card game, puts the money in Ednas bag (she and her sick mother have been robbed of everything). When he retrieves a little for himself he is accused of being a thief. Edna clears his name. Later, broke, Charlie finds a coin and goes into a restaurant. There he finds Edna, whose mother has died, and asks her to join him. When he reaches for the coin to pay for their meals it is missing (it has fallen through a hole in his pocket).

Crazy Credits: We know about 1 Crazy Credits. One of them reads:
The end credits contain an assortment of bloopers and different takes of certain scenes.

Goofs: We know about 2 goofs. Here comes one of them:
Continuity: An axe disappears off a wall between shots during the craps game. Chaplin originally shot a gag using the axe (photos of this sequence exist) but cut it from the final film, which created a continuity error.

Trivia: There are 2 entries in the trivia list - like these:
According to Kevin Brownlows and David Gills documentary series Unknown Chaplin (1983) (TV), the first scenes to be written and filmed take place in what became the movies 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 Charles 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. Edna 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 Charles Chaplins character kicks an immigration officer was cited later as "evidence" of his anti-Americanism when he was forced to leave the United States during the McCarthy "Red Scare" period in the 1950s.