By Stuart Mitchner

The SOB is a ballet dancer, the best ballet dancer that ever lived. And if I get a good chance I’ll kill him with my bare hands.

—W.C. Fields on Charlie Chaplin

The talkies brought forth one great comedian, the late, majestically lethargic W.C. Fields who could not possibly have worked as well in silence…

—James Agee, from “Comedy’s Greatest Era”

I’d agree with Agee if I hadn’t just seen Fields at his flinching, cringing, fumbling, pugnacious, masterfully disoriented best in the 1926 silent The Old Army Game, which also offered actual visual details (cars, stores, streets, small town America) to compare to the period recreation in Paramount’s recent series 1923. Given Chaplin’s immense popularity in those days, it was interesting to watch his 1923 silent feature The Pilgrim alongside Taylor Sheridan’s brilliant prequel to Yellowstone at a time when theaters all over the country, including one in Billings, Montana, would have been screening the latest Chaplin. And since The Pilgrim opened in New York in late February 1923, I’m taking the liberty of installing it in a Times Square movie house on the day that 1923’s embattled heroine Alexandra Dutton arrived in America.

Ellis Island Ordeal

What tempts me to imagine The Pilgrim into the third episode of 1923’s second season (“Wrap Thee in Terror”), is the witty, charming, and altogether delightful woman portrayed by Julia Schlaepfer. Admirers of Paramount’s Golden Age star Carole Lombard will see a 21st-century throwback in Alexandra, which makes it even harder to watch her being brutally debased by three Ellis Island immigration doctors. Poked in the stomach, made to strip naked, treated as a pregnant adventuress, she braves the humiliation, and, in one of the great moments of the show, shames the last and harshest of the doctors by quoting the lines on the Statue of Liberty (“give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses”) and reading a passage from Walt Whitman as further proof of her literacy.

As Schlaepfer tells TV Guide, the scene was particularly important for her because her great grandfather had gone through Ellis Island in 1925 “with no money and had a difficult time.” She finds “an extra level of heart” in “knowing that an experience like this is where I came from.” Referring to her Whitman moment, Schlaepfer says “It felt really good. We filmed the violation/assault scene right before …. So to then feel like she has this moment of redemption, it just felt like the right way to shake off the day. I think everyone on set felt her redemption, and this return back to the Alex we all know and love. The spunky, sparky, feisty woman that she is.”

Chaplin would have appreciated Alex’s triumph, having dealt with the rigors of an Ellis Island arrival in 1917’s The Immigrant. As Steven Weissman puts it in Chaplin: A Life (Arcade 2008): “Determined to preserve his dignity through noncomformity,” the Tramp “slyly back-kicks” an immigration official “in his authoritarian behind.” Adding that there was “nothing bitter” in the film’s “social satire,” Weissman calls it Chaplin’s “comic valentine to the American Dream.”

There’s a certain contemporary resonance in the fact that when Chaplin was forced to leave America in 1952, the kicking of the immigration officer was cited as evidence of his “anti-Americanism.” Four decades later, The Immigrant was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Alex Finds Chaplin

In my reimagining of Alex’s movements after the Ellis Island ordeal, I thought she could use an hour of comic relief in a Broadway movie house showing The Pilgrim, whose plot coincidentally accords with her situation, since the Tramp has escaped from prison and is taking a train west disguised as a parson. Admittedly, there’s no room in 1923’s hazardous multi-level plotline for this break in the action, Alex’s immediate mission being to find her way to the right railway station and the right train, using a large map of the U.S. to point out Montana to the ticket agent. Having lived through her own frenzied elopement with big game hunter Spencer Dutton, a shipboard marriage, and the African Queen-like epic of her escape from her intended mate, the Count of Sussex, Alex would no doubt be amused by the eloping couple that wants the “parson” to marry them and ends up chasing Chaplin down the railway station platform while being pursued by the girl’s outraged father in a scene right out of Mack Sennett.

Alex Laughing

Knowing the unrelenting adversity awaiting Alex in her westward journey, not least an episode of her sexual abuse on the train that almost lands the victim in prison, it’s consoling to imagine her relaxing into laughter, as when the Tramp forgets he’s a member of the clergy and is about to ride the rails hobo style even though he has a ticket in his hand. Since Alex laughs a lot during her whirlwind relationship with Spencer, it’s easy to imagine the sound of her laughter — infectious, seductive, sophisticated, sometimes charmingly uninhibited — as Charlie’s parson arrives in Devil’s Gulch, Texas, in time to deliver a pantomimed sermon on David and Goliath for the parishioners.

Straddling the Border

I imagine Alex coming out of the theatre smiling thoughtfully as she absorbs the picture’s last scene wherein after being captured, the Tramp is released at the Mexican border by an understanding sheriff. After bidding his savior goodbye with a wave, and blowing him a kiss, Charlie extends his arms as if to embrace his new country (“Mexico — a new life! Peace at last!”), when a gunfight breaks out and someone’s shot dead, sending him back to the U.S. side of the border, which he straddles on his way into the Chaplinesque sunset, one foot in America, the other in Mexico.

“The Gold Rush”

I was surprised to find that the film critic André Bazin named The Pilgrim among “the ten greatest movies of all time” in the 1952 Sight and Sound poll. Having just seen it twice in two days, and enjoying it through Alexandra’s eyes, I reminded myself that the train taking Chaplin’s parson to Texas was actually taking him to California and the making of The Gold Rush, his cinematic breakthrough, which came in second to The Bicycle Thief in Sight and Sound’s greatest film list. I found The Pilgrim worth seeing if only for its intimations of the great scenes to come, as when Chaplin serves up a bowler hat disguised as a plum pudding that presages the feast of the boot shared by the Tramp and Mack Swain’s Big Jim.

With all the centenary excitement around The Great Gatsby, I’d forgotten that 100 years ago June 26, 1925, The Gold Rush had its World Premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. While I hope to devote a June column to the film, I can’t help thinking of the dream sequence that follows on the comic momentum of the miner’s shack teetering on the abyss, with a ravenous Big Jim hallucinating the Tramp as a giant chicken; and Chaplin dining on his boot as if it were a great delicacy. As the Tramp prepares a New Year’s Eve dinner for some dancehall girls, Chaplin the director is creating a fantasy that at first actually seems to be happening when the “Little Fellow” seemingly becomes the smiling all-powerful master of the scene, the girls having the time of their lives, wearing the favors he made for them, toasting him, adoring him, calling for a speech. Instead, he gives them (and the audience) the “Oceana Roll,” a piece of magic performed by candlelight with two forks and two rolls, evidence that the man W.C. Fields called the “best ballet dancer that ever lived” is also a master choreographer.

Fields and Chaplin

After imagining 1923’s Alexandra into The Pilgrim, I briefly fantasized a movie starring Fields and Chaplin that would match Fields’s majestic lethargy with Chaplin’s balletic perversity. In fact, both men did share a Christmas double feature of sorts, Fields dying on December 25, 1946, Chaplin on December 25, 1977.