Chaplin, foreign star (Ana Guevara)

The immigrant with the biggest impact in the history of modern cinema was Charles Chaplin. There’s something very important in his work, his attachment on the defense of the most disadvantaged. Although he had a huge success in the industry, he never forgot his past, his poor childhood back in East End in London, memories that will be part of his work years later, with The Gold Rush and The Immigrant.

Charles Chaplin Sr. was an alcoholic and he didn’t really spent time with his kids, although they lived with him and Louise, his lover, for a short amount of time, while his mother was internee in an asylum because of her serious psychiatric problems. Died of cirrhosis in 1901 and his son, Charles, was only twelve years old. According to a census in 1901, Chaplin was living in a dorm room among other kids, as he was being part of a group of young dancers.

His mum died of a a disease in the larynx, and her children were put in the Lambeth asylum in the south of London and then in the Hanwell School for Orphans and Poor Children since June of 1896 to January of 1898.

Chaplin arrived to the United States in 1913 with Fred Karno’s help, trying to find a better life. He was signed by Mack Sennett and Adam Kessel for Keystone.  He was getting $10,000 per week in 1915. Because of his independence, he changed the company he was working for several times. At Essanay he started gaining his love and concern for the poor and his sort of anger towards the institutions that didn’t support individuality, symbol of the rising and powerful country. “As simple as it may seem, Chaplin writes, there are two elements in human nature that will stay forever, the first one is the pleasure of the public to see the wealth and luxury’s ridicule and failure; the other is the tendency of the public to experience the same emotions as the actor on stage and screen. One of the most rapidly appreciated truths is that the people generally have fun watching rich failing, getting into trouble, falling, et cetera. This comes from the nine-tenths of mankind that are poor and envy the wealth of the others.”

It would be difficult to cite references to immigrants who appear in the films of his time training. So we will focus on two key works that summarize this section, The Immigrant (1917) and The Gold Rush (1925).

The first one, The Immigrant, was a thirty-minute short film written, directed and produced by Chaplin in the creative period he considered the happiest of his career. It premiered on June 17, 1917 and it’s one of his most elaborated productions. Its argument responds to patterns of comic cinema of the moment back then, but there are a couple of scenes that are a bit revealing: migrants, whose poverty is perceived by their appearance, crammed into the boat, the scene of the arrival in America seeing the Statue of Liberty, scene seen by European immigrants on their arrival in America at the coldness and hostility of those who had come before. That land of freedom contrasts with the poverty and misery in which they arrived. One of the best scenes is the one with migration officers that bind all newcomers to pass any controls, as if they were cattle. The contrast between freedom and the police curtailing the movement of newcomers, the brutal repression suffered by the restaurant’s customer, places the film in the orbit of a controversial character who doesn’t doubt in quitting, ironically, the deficiencies and cruelty of a system that persecuted and repressed the weakest.

The Golden Rush is a story about a guy that moves around so that he can find in Alaska his Golden dream. With the promise of getting rich easily, there were many who men that emigrated in search of fortune to the frozen lands of Alaska, about ten thousand men in 1896 and 1910, whose adventures, most of the time, ended badly.

Chaplin thought about making a farce of a true story as one of the episodes because one of the episodes in wich the movie is based, is in the adventure of eighty-nine men who participated in the expedition Donner, strayed and ended up getting lost. There were forty-two dead, and those who survived did so by eating the flesh of the dead. The argument is simple. The protagonist, after starring in the most extravagant adventures, was surprised by a blizzard and is forced to take refuge in a hut where a bandit lives. There will mistakenly arrive another gold digger. The bad guy leaves them, so they will have to overcome any type of situation life gives them. Now, in The Immigrant, there are a lot of emblematic scenes, complicity with the displaced, with all who shouldered a backpack sole possession cast out of a miserable and hopeless situation. For example, the scene where his partner confuses him with a giant chicken or the scene where they eat their own boots to survive. The Gold Rush is also one of the greatest films of the history of cinema.

Chaplin, despite everything, was an amazing emigrant, but after all, he wasn’t in the country that saw him grew. His success and his point of view, shown in his films, created enemies, especially in the administration sector. Basically, the country had been turned against him. His divorce from Lita Grey, the details of his married life and his sympathy for the disadvantaged, initiated the campaign against "foreign Jew". His strong individualism and commitment is shown in later films, where the problem of the displaced became apparent.

Although he arrived to the United States with almost nothing in his bags, being a por and immigrant man, he reached his goals and actually won quite many awards, among them, three Oscars.