The Immigrant (Mutual, Lone Star, 1917)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, August 31) my husband Charles (who had his birthday yesterday) and I went to the “Not-So-Silent Movie Night” at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park to hear organist Clark Wilson play a brief opening concert and then provide live musical accompaniments to two classics of silent-film comedy: Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant (1917) and Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. (1924). For some strange reason, instead of using his opening concert (a tradition in the Organ Pavilion to entertain the crowd before the sun sets enough to make outdoor projection of a film more practicable) to play music from the 1920’s or earlier when silent films were current, Wilson chose to make his opening piece a medley of pop-rock songs from the 1970’s. He opened with Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” (I missed that one, partly because I was expecting a 1920’s song and was racking my memories of actual 1920’s music and coming up short, but Charles recognized it) and then did The Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin,” The Carpenters’ “Sing” (I briefly wondered whether he was playing the 1930 song “Sing,” but he wasn’t), David Gates’s “If,” Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets,” and a reprise of The Carpenters’ “Sing” to close. Once the night was dark enough to start the films, Wilson announced that he'd be using familiar songs in his accompaniments, but he annoyed me (again) by using songs that hadn’t yet existed when these films were made. At least for the big love theme between Chaplin and his leading lady, Edna Purviance, in The Immigrant he used Victor Herbert’s and Rida Johnson Young’s “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life” from Herbert’s operetta Naughty Marietta, which was premiered in 1910, seven years before the film was made. But for Sherlock, Jr. in particular he used songs that considerably post-dated the film, including George and Ira Gershwin’s “Nice Work if You Can Get It” from the 1937 Fred Astaire film A Damsel in Distress and Jule Styne’s and Leo Robin’s “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” from the 1949 stage musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

As for the two films, The Immigrant was the eleventh and next-to-last film Chaplin made in a series of 12 for Mutual Films, headed by John R. Freuler. Chaplin had made his screen debut for Mack Sennett’s Keystone studio in 1914 but after his one-year contract was up he’d jumped to Essanay and then after that contract was completed he moved once again to Mutual. With each move he earned 10 times what his previous studio had paid him, such was the explosive character of his success. When he finished his Mutual contract with The Adventurer Chaplin jumped ship once again to the newly formed First National combine, a studio founded by independent theatre owners who were worried that the ever-larger theatre chains being formed by Paramount and Loew’s (the parent company of what became MGM) would shut them out of showing any product featuring major stars. First National scored two of the biggest names of the time, Chaplin and Mary Pickford, though in 1919 Chaplin, Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks (then Pickford’s fiancé and later her husband), and D. W. Griffith joined forces to start United Artists. Chaplin’s films for Keystone, Essanay, and Mutual got re-sold to other distributors, but starting with his First National output Chaplin owned his films outright and made sure they couldn’t be shown without his permission and royalties. The Immigrant actually started with the scene that makes up the second half of the two-reel film: Chaplin and his regular leading lady Edna Purviance play starving people who attempt to crash a restaurant and grab food. Chaplin thinks he has the money to pay his bill via a silver dollar, or at least something he thinks is a silver dollar, which he found on the street outside the restaurant. When he sees Purviance in financial distress, he orders her the same bean soup he’s having, only he realizes his coin fell out of a hole in his pants pocket. He sees the waiters, led by the fearsome Eric Campbell (a “heavy” Chaplin lured away from, of all places, the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, the London-based outfit that produced the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas), beat up a customer. Asking for an explanation, he’s told, “He was 10 cents short on his bill.” Chaplin eventually finds the coin, only Campbell is suspicious of it and ultimately bends it, thereby proving it’s fake. Fortunately, the two are bailed out of their predictament by an oddball artist (Henry Bergman) who decides he wants to hire them as models. Chaplin asks for a $2 advance on their pay, and uses it to pay for a marriage license for himself and Purviance.

According to The Unknown Chaplin, a 1983 documentary produced by Kevin Brownlow and the late David Gill for British TV that had access to Chaplin’s outtakes, Chaplin started with the second half of the film but then had to come up with a first half to explain who his and Purviance’s characters were and why they cared about each other. What he came up with was pretty audacious even for him: he decided they would be immigrants from Europe to the United States, sailing across the Atlantic and basically being treated like dogs or cattle. Chaplin built both exterior and interior sets of the ship transporting them and mounted them on rocking platforms to simulate the motion of a ship moving through storms on the high seas. Thus he was able to produce stunning sequences, including one in which the motion of the ship causes the metal bowl containing the slop the immigrants are being fed on their voyage to slide across the table from one side to the other, so each person grabs a spoonful while the bowl is on their side before it slides to the person across the table from them. One sequence in which a frustrated Chaplin kicks a U.S. immigration official in the behind was cited 35 years later by U.S. authorities who, at the height of the anti-Communist, anti-socialist, and anti-liberal “Red Scare,” had decided to throw Chaplin out of the country. They did this while Chaplin was abroad on vacation, and he was understandably angry that they had expelled him without his being in the country and able to mount a defense. Fortunately for Chaplin, his wife, Oona O’Neill Chaplin, was a U.S. citizen and, not being covered by the expulsion order against him, was able to come to the country long enough to extract his money and settle with him in Vevey, Switzerland, where he lived the remaining 25 years of his life. He returned to the U.S. only to accept an honorary Academy Award in 1972. The Immigrant and Chaplin’s last Mutual, The Adventurer, are his best films for the company and show how relatively sophisticated Chaplin’s comedy had got, though Chaplin’s films would become even better over time, especially once he started making features like The Kid (1920), The Gold Rush (1925), the underrated The Circus (1928), City Lights (1931), and the film I consider his masterpiece, the openly Leftist Modern Times (1936).

Sherlock, Jr. (Joseph M. Schenck Productions, Metro Pictures Corporation, 1924)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Immigrant the Spreckels Organ Society showed one of the most amazing films ever made: Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. (1924), one of Keaton’s two best movies (The General is the other) and an audacious film about dreams and their power. The opening is an inspired framing sequence in which Keaton plays a small-town movie projectionist who’s showing a crime melodrama called Hearts and Pearls, produced by “Veronal Pictures.” (Veronal was one of the first sleeping pills marketed in the U.S. and Keaton obviously chose the name for its appropriateness in a film whose second half is the hero’s dream.) The impoverished Keaton is wooing a small-town girl (Kathryn McGuire), only he has a rival, an unscrupulous “sheik” (the success of Rudolph Valentino’s 1921 film The Sheik had established “sheik” as a slang term for any unscrupulous young man who pretends to be rich in order to attract a woman) played by Ward Crane. Crane’s character steals a pocket watch belonging to McGuire’s father (played by Keaton’s real-life father Joe; Keaton’s real name was Joseph Frank Keaton VII and his dad was Joseph Frank Keaton VI) and pawns it to buy McGuire a $3 box of chocolates. Keaton is short $1 for the purchase price of the big fancy box, and though he seems to have made up for it when he finds an extra $1 in the trash he’s swept up at the movie theatre where he works, he gets a sob story from a young woman who pleads with him to return the dollar she lost. Then Keaton gets the same sob story from another woman who says she lost $1 in the theatre’s trash. After that Keaton encounters a man who seems to saying that he, too, lost $1 – only when Keaton offers him his last dollar, the man indignantly turns it down and combs through the trash for his lost wallet, which contains a formidable bankroll. Keaton goes back to the candy store, buys a cheaper $1 box, and alters the price on it to $4. He gives the box to McGuire, only he's upstaged when the sheik enters with the $3 box and slips the pawn ticket into Keaton’s jacket pocket. Dad catches Keaton with the pawn ticket, assumes he stole the watch, and bars him from the house again.

A disconsolate Keaton ends up in a chase scene in which he tails Crane’s character and passes by a train that’s being filled with water from a spout. Keaton designed a dangerous gag sequence that involved him being pushed to the ground full-force by the water from the tower, and that night he had splitting headaches but returned to work the next day. Eleven years later, Keaton was undergoing a routine medical examination when the doctor X-rayed him and asked, “When did you break your neck?” Keaton said, “I never broke my neck.” “Oh, yes, you did,” the doctor said, and showed him the X-rays to prove it. Then Keaton flashed back to the Sherlock, Jr. shoot and realized that that must have been when, where, and how he broke his neck. Ultimately Keaton’s character retreats to his job as a projectionist, and he literally falls asleep during the movie and dreams his way into the film. There’s a marvelous shot in which a dream-image Keaton emerges from the sleeping real one and grabs a dream-image porkpie hat from the rack in the projection room and puts it on. Once Keaton enters the film, first there’s a series of sequences in which the backgrounds of the film Keaton has walked into abruptly change before he can keep up with them. Then it turns out that the plot of Hearts and Pearls is strikingly similar to the real-life incidents Keaton experienced in the framing scenes: a gang of thieves headed by Ward Crane’s character is after a valuable pearl necklace belonging to a well-to-do woman. The crooks get wind that the legendary private detective “Sherlock, Jr.” is on the case against them, so they set up some dastardly traps against him, including an explosive pool ball (number 13, natch) with which they intend to blow him up during a game; a poisoned drink they intend to serve him; and a ceremonial axe with which they intend to decapitate him.

Sherlock, Jr. manages to evade all these traps, and he and his assistant Gillette (Ford West), a name that’s a double pun on the name of the shaving products company and also on William Gillette, the first actor to play Sherlock Holmes on stage, chase the crooks. In one audacious scene, Keaton as Sherlock, Jr. dives through an open window in which a round women’s dress container has been placed. He goes through the container and emerges in drag wearing the dress that was in there in the first place. Later there’s an even more amazing scene in which Sherlock, Jr. is cornered against a wall. Gillette is standing there with an open briefcase and gestures for Sherlock, Jr. to jump through it ¬– and he does even though the wall was apparently solid. I remember watching the 2010 film Inception (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2010/12/inception-legendarywarner-bros-2010.html), directed and written by Christopher Nolan, and marveling at how much more convincingly Buster Keaton had made a dream film in 1924 with only the most primitive effects technology (though he had a special-effects genius, Fred Gabourie, who for some reason was credited only as art director but worked out many of the still amazing shots in this film) than Christopher Nolan had in 2010 with all the state-of-the-art CGI at his disposal. And one of my favorite stories about Sherlock, Jr. came from an interview Keaton biographer Rudi Blesh did with him in the last year of his life. Blesh said, “How did you come to make a surrealistic film like Sherlock, Jr.?” Keaton, who unlike Charlie Chaplin disdained any heavy-duty intellectual readings of either his work or his life, regarded that as an insult and said, “I did not mean it to be surrealistic! I just wanted it to look like a dream!” Another oddball aspect of Sherlock, Jr. I hadn’t noticed before is in the posters outside the theatre where Keaton’s character works: one big one is for Rex Ingram’s Scaramouche (1922), a real-life blockbuster the director who’d discovered Rudolph Valentino and made him a star in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse repeated the process with Mexican actor Ramon Novarro. But the one that particularly struck me was for Mud and Sand (1922), a spoof of Valentino’s Blood and Sand (also 1922) with Stan Laurel as “Rhubarb Vaseline.” It’s an unwitting tribute paid by one of the screen’s greatest comic geniuses to another!