Summary
An intertitle informs the audience that the Tramp has been cured of his nervous breakdown but is still without a job, and that he is leaving the hospital to “start life anew.” As he leaves the hospital in his iconic Tramp suit, hat, and cane, the doctor tells him to take it easy and avoid excitement. Over dramatic music, several frames of speeding cars and crowded, bustling streets are shown in rapid succession with incomplete dissolves, causing several to be overlaid on top of a shot of the Tramp standing outside of the hospital. These ‘bustling city’ shots are all skewed diagonally. The Tramp walks past a factory with a large “Closed” sign across the front door, and stops at a street corner unsure of what to do next. A truck passing by accidentally drops a flag from the back of its bed, and the Tramp runs to pick it up, waving at the truck to stop. Just as he begins walking after the truck, still waving the flag at it, a mass of striking union workers turns a corner behind him and seems to follow him, marching at his pace as he waves the flag without noticing them. A large unit of police officers then rushes in to break up the strike, and the crowd scatters, the Tramp included. He is promptly arrested for being the suspected leader of the strike.
An intertitle introduces the Gamin as “a child of the waterfront who refuses to go hungry,” and the next shot opens on a young woman cutting bananas out of a large bunch that sits on a boat in the harbor. She darts her eyes around wildly, grinning as she does so, and throws the bananas to several smaller children who wait on the pier. When a dock worker arrives the children scatter and the Gamin puts the knife in her mouth and runs away, jumping from boat to boat before climbing out onto the pier and staring at the dock worker in the distance who has become stuck on one of the boats. She takes a few bites of her banana and runs off. Another intertitle informs the audience that the Gamin and her younger sisters have no mother, and the next shot shows her returning home to two young girls playing alone in an empty apartment. She gives them each a banana and they run off before another intertitle informs us that their father is unemployed. He enters the seemingly empty apartment (the Gamin and the young girls hide in other rooms), sits down at the kitchen table, and runs his hand through his hair with a concerned expression on his face. The Gamin approaches him from behind and puts her hand over his eyes, and he looks up, happy to see her. She gives him a banana and they embrace, and the two younger girls come and join them. The family sits together at the table eating their bananas.
Another intertitle takes us back to the Tramp, saying that he languishes in jail, held as a communist leader. He is put in a cell with an enormous, mean-looking convict, who stares at him threateningly as he enters. The Tramp cautiously sits down on the bed next to him, trying not to disturb him, and the giant cellmate picks up a kerchief he is embroidering. The Tramp watches him in disbelief. The giant cellmate picks up a needle to thread and turns to catch the light, holding the needle right in front of the Tramp’s face. This startles the Tramp, who stands up from the bed and hugs the wall, only to sit down again a moment later, shaking the bed and jolting the cell-mate as he continues trying to thread the needle. The cellmate tells him to sit on his own bed, gesturing to the bunk above him, which is tied up against the wall. He continues trying to thread his needle as the Tramp climbs up to pull the bed down, which comes crashing down on the cellmate’s head. He jumps up and begins choking the Tramp, but a bell rings out for a meal time, causing him to let go and walk to out of the cell to join the line of prisoners. The Tramp follows, and the prisoners all march to the mess hall. Once there, the Tramp tries to take a piece of bread to go with his gruel but his cellmate, who sits next to him, pulls the loaf from his hands and says that the bread is all for him. The Tramp tries to tap him on the opposite shoulder to distract him so he can take a piece, but the cellmate catches him and pulls the bread away again. As he threatens the Tramp, he does not notice as the Tramp pulls a piece from the loaf right under his nose, eats it, and then hands the loaf back.
An intertitle tells us that detectives have arrived to search for smuggled cocaine in the prison (written as “nose powder”), and a circular mask focuses on a very suspicious looking man seated next to the Tramp. As the detectives enter the mess hall, the suspicious man quickly takes the salt off the table, and pours a white powder from a packet in his sleeve into the salt shaker. The detectives approach him, make him stand up, and begin patting him down. They bring him out of the mess hall to continue searching him. Meanwhile, disappointed with the taste of his gruel, the Tramp reaches across to where the suspicious man had been sitting and picks up the salt shaker. He dumps a ton of salt all over his plate and on his piece of bread, spilling much of it on his hand and sleeve. He then wipes his nose, accidentally snorting much of the cocaine and leaving a good bit of powder on his iconic moustache. His expression reveals that he has realized something is not right, and after a few bites of his meal he straightens up and his eyes widen. He takes a few more bites and stares into the camera wild-eyed, before turning to his cellmate and repeatedly raising his eyebrows at him. He accidentally brings the spoon to his ear, then adjusts and continues eating as his actions grow more quick and chaotic. The cellmate seems somewhat thrown off by his behavior. Just as the cellmate is picking up his loaf of bread, the Tramp steals it from him, takes a bite and places it in front of himself. Though the cellmate is much larger, the Tramp has been emboldened by the cocaine and when the cellmate threatens him he responds by flinging gruel in his face. It seems they are about to fight, but a guard blows his whistle for them to return to their cells and the prisoners all stand up and begin marching. As the Tramp follows at the end of the line, he lags behind and repeatedly spins around in circles, staring wildly around the room.
The guard whistles for the prisoners to enter their cells, but as he goes to turn the wheel to close their cell doors, the Tramp walks in the opposite direction from his cell and out an open door in the prison. The guard does not notice, and the Tramp walks in a circle around a tree in the courtyard before realizing that he has accidentally escaped. He runs back inside to his cell but is unable to get in now that the door has been shut. He runs around a corner looking for a guard, and two prisoners emerge from the other end of the hall, holding three guards and the prison warden at gunpoint. They gesture for a guard to open the Tramp’s cell, which now contains only the giant cellmate, and the cellmate rushes out, pushes the guards and warden inside, and locks the door behind them. The Tramp comes running back around the corner, and the prisoner with the gun holds him at gunpoint while he questions him. Fearless because of the cocaine, the Tramp pushes the man with the gun against the bars of his cell, where the guards reach through and grab him as he tries to shoot at the Tramp repeatedly, who puts up his fists as if in a boxing match. The prisoner throws the gun to the floor and tells the cellmate to pick it up, but as the cellmate tries to do so, the Tramp slams a heavy metal door on the other side of the hallway against his head. The third escaping prisoner tries to fight the Tramp, but the Tramp dodges his punch and hits him in the face. He slams the door onto the cellmate’s head again, knocking him out, and then does the same with the third prisoner. He then picks up the gun and hands it through the bars of his cell to the warden and unlocks the cell. The guards and warden emerge, and each guard collects one of the prisoners as the warden shakes the Tramp’s hand.
An intertitle tells us that there is trouble with the unemployed, and the next shot opens on a large group of workers rallying near the docks. The Gamin and her sisters collect scrap wood nearby on a pier. A gunshot rings out and the crowd of men disperses, leaving one dead man in the center of the street. The Gamin gives the wood to her sisters and tells them to run home, while she runs over to find that it is their father who has been killed. An intertitle tells us that the law has to take charge of the Gamin and her sisters, and the next shot opens on the three girls in crying in their apartment, with a police officer standing with them and trying to comfort them as two detectives fill out paperwork at the kitchen table. One of them looks up and gestures at the policeman, saying “take them away,” and the policeman takes the two younger girls, telling the Gamin that he will return in a moment to get her. While the policeman is gone, the Gamin notices that the two detectives are absorbed in their paperwork, and takes the opportunity to run out the back door and escape custody. When the policeman returns, he asks the detectives where she went, and they say that they thought she was with him. They rush to the back door and look out, but do not see her, and seem resigned as they keep doing their paperwork.
Back in the prison, the Tramp has been rewarded for stopping the prison break with his own private cell and many material comforts. We find him reading the newspaper at leisure, which talks of bread lines, strikes, and unruly mobs, in a nicely decorated cell. In the warden’s office, a radio announces that a pardon was granted for the prisoner that thwarted the jailbreak (the Tramp) and the warden calls to a guard to bring number 7 to his office. A guard approaches the Tramp’s cell, where the door is ajar and the Tramp sits engaged in relaxed conversation with another guard. He is brought to the warden’s office, told to sit on a bench, and served a cup of tea. A man enters through another door and informs the warden that the minister and his wife have arrived for their weekly visit, and the warden greets them as they enter. The wife sits on the bench next to the Tramp, and the Tramp shakes hands with the minister before the minister goes into the prison with the warden to pay his visit. The minister’s wife stares coldly at the Tramp, her dog between them, as they both take their tea on the bench, which makes the Tramp nervous and unsure of what to do. She turns and stares ahead, and her stomach begins gurgling loudly, causing her to straighten up and the dog to sit up and bark at her. She scolds the dog, and the Tramp drinks his tea pretending not to notice. He then turns the radio on to drown out the sounds, but the first thing that comes on is an add for medicine to help with gastritis, so he abruptly turns it back off. He turns away from the minister’s wife, reading the newspaper as she takes a small pill, but when she sprays seltzer water into a cup to drink, the loud noise startles him and he jumps and turns around. She stares at him for a moment and then drinks her seltzer water as if nothing happened. The minister and the warden return to the office and the minister and his wife leave. The warden then turns to the Tramp and tells him that he is free to go, and the Tramp looks shocked and upset. He asks if he can please just stay a little longer, and the warden laughs and dismisses the request. He gives the Tramp a letter of recommendation, saying that it will help him find work, and the Tramp looks at the letter and then around the room with a nervous expression.
Analysis
The Doctor’s warning that the Tramp should avoid excitement is immediately juxtaposed with the ‘bustling city’ sequence, suggesting that it is impossible for someone to take it easy in a modern, industrialized city. This is especially true of someone like the Tramp, who is not well-off and needs desperately to search for work in order to survive. This sequence is also interesting for its cinematography, as it takes on an expressive, almost surreal, style in order to convey to the audience the Tramp’s internal emotional response to city life. The shots used here also reflect the earlier “theater of the spectacle” period in film, which used trains and cars approaching the camera (as well as explosions and heavy editing) to create a heightened sense of spectacular movement or to elicit fear in the audience. The cars and trolleys rush toward and past the camera in each shot, but at the time this film was made, the spectacle needed to be heightened with disorienting angles and rapid dissolves to be maximally disorienting for audiences that had grown more accustomed to such images.
The Tramp’s arrest as a communist provides another instance of how the modern world is inhospitable toward an honest, working ‘everyman’ like the Tramp. In this scene, it starts becoming more clear that the Tramp’s hardships are not simply the consequence of his own foolishness or incompetence, but rather the result of injustices that befall him because the structure of his society is pitted against him. The construction of this event is somewhat typical for Chaplin’s hapless character: the scene draws its humor from the dramatic irony produced by the Tramp’s failure to realize some action happening nearby (in this case, directly behind him). It also shows, however, that the Tramp can get into trouble simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, even though he was trying to be productive and find work, and then was trying to help someone. It also may stand as a political statement against policies of strikebreaking and the fervent anti-communist sentiment that was prevalent in Britain and many other western countries at the time: someone can be arrested and thrown in prison simply for waving a flag.
Similar to the way the Tramp represents a character type, the Gamin is also introduced as a nameless archetype. A Gamin (usually spelled gamine for the feminine form) is a character type defined as a slim, elegant young woman (often with somewhat childlike features), who is playful, mischievous, and often sexually appealing. It comes originally from a french word that means an urchin or a playful, naughty child, but started to be used as this modern character type in the silent film era (and was later used to describe heroines of the type played by Audrey Hepburn, during the era of the Hollywood studio system). Paula Goddard's character fits pretty neatly into the type: when we first meet her, her expressions are manic, she is sprightly and mischievous, and she craftily outmaneuvers her pursuer. She is beautiful, young, and energetic. She is also characterized as caring and kind, only stealing the bananas to feed her family and other poor children, which makes her not only an appealing and curious character, but also a sympathetic character to the audience. This sympathy is magnified in the family scene in her small apartment, when we are informed that her mother has died and we see the sad expression on her father’s face, as he worries about how he can support the family. The tableau structured at the end of the scene, in which they all embrace and seem happy despite their circumstances, goes a long way for the Gamin’s characterization: she brings the family together, she maintains a positive attitude under difficult circumstances, and she is loyal and affectionate toward those that she cares about.
That the Tramp is so clearly out of place among the other prisoners is a further indication of his complete lack of criminality. We are reminded of his innocence and gentle character by the contrast with his cellmate's physical size and brutish movements, but just as this comparison is being drawn out, the film inverts our expectations by having the cellmate pick up his embroidery. The Tramp's expressive response to this action draws out the situational irony of this behavior, as he alternatively makes faces about the cellmate and flinches in response to his occasional glances. Next, when the Tramp accidentally slams the bed down on his cellmate's head, it foreshadows the way in which he foils the escapees (including his cellmate) a few scenes later, by slamming a door into their heads and knocking them out. Additionally, the prison and escape sequence here begins to point to one more quality of the Tramp (in this film as well as others in which he appears): though he is often inconceivably unlucky, he also often experiences strokes of incredible good luck. After the bad luck of being mistaken for a communist and thrown in jail, he also has the bad luck of a bully for a cellmate, and the bad luck of accidentally consuming a very large quantity of cocaine during mealtime. However, this is then balanced out by the incredible luck of accidentally escaping, avoiding being shot several times by the escapees, foiling them, and being rewarded by the prison sheriff.
The death of the Gamin's father is another reminder of the plight of the poor, innocent, and powerless in the world of the film. Though we know little about him, he is shown briefly as a kind man struggling to support his family, and the audience is already primed to identify or sympathize with such characters by the vilification of the powerful companies and presidents in previous scenes. This scene also draws out the bad luck of the Gamin, which parallels that of the Tramp: she and her family are the victims of terrible tragedies that have befallen them mostly because of the structure of society and their position in it. Similarly, when her father dies, the Gamin becomes more of a solitary character, struggling to survive the city on her own, just like the Tramp, and it is these two similar paths that we see eventually meet through the film's use of parallel editing. Additionally, the cold callousness of the child welfare officers that take charge of the Gamin and her sisters reveals again how the poorest and most helpless in this society are treated by those with power, and sets us up for a very sympathetic view of her decision to run away.
As the Tramp relaxes in his cell, which has now been modified to be more comfortable and luxurious, the newspaper headline he reads sets up an obvious comparison between his new life in prison and life for those of his status outside the prison walls. Though it seems for a moment as though he is finally being rewarded for being a good citizen, it soon becomes clear that he will be sent back out into the world, which is at this point a much more hostile environment than his prison cell. Though this plotline is set up as another bit of humorous bad luck for the Tramp, it also has an underlying political statement, and delivers a criticism of the Tramp’s society’s inability to take care of its citizens. At the time (and in various societies throughout history, including today in many places), many poor citizens were homeless and unable to feed themselves, and were often much better off in prison, where they could count on a roof over their heads and regular meals. One may also argue that the combination of Chaplin’s exaggeration of the comforts felt by the Tramp in the prison, and his own fault in not being able to secure a job after leaving despite a glowing recommendation, is actually a criticism of the concept of welfare and of workers who cannot hold onto a job. However, this reading seems unlikely given the villainization of corporations, industry, and the police, as well as sensitivity to the plight of the worker earlier in the film, not to mention Chaplin’s progressive political leanings.
Meanwhile, the scene with the minister’s wife, placed in the middle of this sequence, may feel somewhat out of place and fails to contribute to the plot, but it does help to characterize the Tramp: he tries his best to politely ignore the grumbling of her stomach (the implication perhaps being that most of the more crude prisoners would not be as polite in the same situation). Additionally, her stern and humorless behavior contrasts with the Tramp’s lightheartedness even in difficult situations, and contributes to the construction of higher status people as out of touch and cold.
