At the Movies: Charlie Chaplain in The Immigrant (1917)

Zachary Barnes for the Wall Street Journal (America 250: The nation on the big screen) considers movies that reflect on the United States on its 250th birthday. He writes about

"`The Immigrant.'  A typically ingenious comedy, it also tells as deeply American a tale as any—that of the world’s tired and poor arriving on the nation’s shores. Chaplin is a master sentimentalist, but not averse to occasional sharpness: The moment the film’s boatload of immigrants sees the Statue of Liberty is followed by an official roping them off like cattle. Once Chaplin’s character disembarks, though, a bit of pluck and a stranger’s generosity pull him out of a possible pit, and a new American life is born. Himself an immigrant from England, Chaplin was eventually chased out of the U.S. during the Red Scare, but `The Immigrant' poetically distills the country that was, for a while, his home."