The Tramp has to be the most imperishable character in the history of physical comedy. Buster Keaton, his stoic and graceful attitude toward the beleaguered lives of his characters, his immense poise in the midst of disaster, the well-thought-out stunts and set designs—his might have been a greater talent. And Harold Lloyd might have been more entertaining, more daring, and more versatile as a mainstay of the same pantheon of physical comedy. But the Tramp is the most individualized and memorable character of all time—as much as his distinct appearance, his movements and body language are so clear and identifiable that it seems just that he should have inspired an extensive line of merchandise made in his likeness.
Written and directed—like so many of the movies in his oeuvre—by Charles Chaplin, The Immigrant is a short comedy about the travels of that beloved character to the New World and his first experiences in a shabby and dime-a-doughnut restaurant, where he struggles to pay his own way and counteract the hilarious twists and turns of his fortune. As in almost every Chaplin creation, love takes hold of the Tramp and the shebang ends with his trying to whisk her into a marriage-license office, convinced that this is the woman of his dreams.
But plots and storylines when the Tramp is involved can be prosaic, absurd, and silly—the better stuff has to do with the physical comedy and Chaplin’s brilliant choreography, which can somehow manage to pull off its stunts without sound and very often—especially in The Immigrant—even without title cards, so that the complex gestures and human emotions have to express themselves with jostling and in split seconds, like whack-a-moles bobbing in broad daylight. Watching the material of the Tramp has made me more sensitive to human gestures and more attentive to these fleeting dynamics—really, it has enhanced my ability to observe.
As for the vintage moving shot of the Statue of Liberty flitting across the screen as the steamship drifts toward the harbor, waiting to unload its heap of flighty immigrants on American soil: I can say that this is a spectacle made the more inspiring because this same sentiment of the promise of freedom, freedom on the verge of a new and exciting life, makes its way into a movie directed by Louis Malle, Au revoir les enfants, which is one of my all-time favorites and a moving, first-rate experience of authentic cinema. In one scene, in the darkened classroom where these boys have settled down to take momentary refuge from the wartime realities descending on all of them little by little, with The Immigrant projecting onto the wall in this makeshift theater, their rip-roaring laughter and the immense release of tension start to unveil the true value of the Tramp.
He is more than a mere entertainer. With that kind of power to tickle, to inspire, and to please even as an enemy lays siege to a country embattled on every side and throttled by bloodshed and the destruction of all-out war, the tramp provides some much-needed humanity. And just maybe the affirmation that life isn’t so terrible—and that it can be lived with panache in tatters, a smile and a wink, and the touch of a cane.
