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).