In the case of his next film, The Immigrant, the surviving out-takes enable us to follow in even greater detail the progression in Chaplin’s ideas. This comic masterpiece, whose qualities of irony and satire and pity survive intact into the next century, took a bare two months to make from start to finish. The Cure had been released on Chaplin’s twenty-eighth birthday and he began his new film immediately in an effort to catch up on his production schedule. He had probably already begun production when he told an interviewer: “I have also long been ambitious to produce a serio-comedy, the action of which is set in the Parisian Quartier Latin. This theme offers unbounded scope for the sentimental touch which somehow always creeps into my stories. But the trouble is to prevent that touch from smothering the comedy end. There’s so much pathos back of the lives of all true bohemians that it is hard to lose sight of it even for a moment and the real spirit of that community is far too human and deeply respected by the world at large for me to even think of burlesquing it”. The Immigrant clearly started out to be this film (…) In a few takes around number 763 Chaplin invented a scene which was outrageous in its irony, and to this day remains astounding. As the sequence appears in the finished film, we see a distant view of the Statue of Liberty. A title announces “Arrival in the Land of Liberty”. On the deck of the boat the huddled masses stand – and the immigration authorities suddenly arrive to throw a rope around them, as if they were so many cattle».

David Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art, Collins, London, 1985.