Nothing is more important in the Chaplin films than employment, which precedes love and the possibility of domestic tranquility, and here Chaplin reveals his most marked advance from the music hall stereotypes from which his tramp derives. Unlike the figures of English vaudeville, Chaplin places his Everyman within the economic structure of a faltering social order….
The tramp may be a farm laborer…an inmate…; an escaped convict…; an ‘immigrant’…; a war recruit…; a janitor in a bank…; a ‘shanghaied sailor’…; a day laborer…; a farmer…; a waiter…; a street musician…; or, in Modern Times (1936), a factory worker, a construction worker, a night watchman, a mechanic’s apprentice and a waiter. These are the venues to which his poverty carries him. He remains, always, a fortuitous step away from homelessness and starvation. Eating is paramount in the Chaplin film because the tramp never has enough to eat. Yet there is no idealization of labor, in keeping with an aesthetic of socialist realism. When the men have a choice of ‘sewer work’ of working in a brewery in A Dog’s Life (1918), every one of them chooses the brewery….
In the affluent society, to which Chaplin points in mise en scènes filled with shiny new automobiles and fashionably dressed people, the tramp remains on the outside, his cane and derby pleading for the respectability he will not be granted, despite his inherent chivalry and good nature….Chaplin suggests that upward mobility is a phantasm given the present social configuration.
Social inequality is the premise of all the tramp films, with the tramp on the wrong side of the class divide. Yet the tramp retains his capacity for kindness….Images of suffering suffuse Chaplin’s films, although visual gags invariably preclude the maudlin….
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