|
Register Now!
|
|
Register now for vtap for the fastest and easiest way to watch web video on your mobile device!
|
|
The Immigrant (also called Broke) is a 1917 short comedy film starring the Charlie Chaplin Tramp character as an immigrant coming to the United States who is accused of theft on the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, and befriends a young woman along the way. It also stars Edna Purviance and Eric Campbell.
The movie was written and directed by Chaplin.
According to Kevin Brownlow and David Gill's documentary series Unknown Chaplin, the first scenes to be written and filmed take place in what became the movie's second half, in which the penniless Tramp finds a coin and goes for a meal in a restaurant, not realising that the coin has fallen out of his pocket. It was not until later that 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. 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 Chaplin's character kicks an immigration officer was cited later as evidence of his anti-Americanism when he was forced to leave the United States in 1952. In 1998, The Immigrant was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Charlie is on his way to the USA. He wins in a card game, puts the money in Edna's 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). Written by Ed Stephan
Told in nine chapters, 'Immigrant' follows two parallel stories about Bosnian immigrants in Canada, in the aftermath of the Bosnian war. The first looks at a relationship between Bojan, a young filmmaker, and his Canadian girlfriend Emily. One of Bojan's film projects takes them to Sarajevo, his birthplace. Emily hopes the trip will bring them closer together, but the difficult journey manages to achieve the opposite. The second story is about Enko, a lonely widower, whose relentless memories of his previous life in Bosnia make it difficult to commit to the demands of his new life in Canada. Written by Anonymous






