Summary
Three men have broken into the department store and seem to be planning something when they hear the elevator coming down to the ground floor and they scatter to hide. The Tramp jauntily skates around the floor, punching in his timecard at various points. As he skates back around a corner, he comes between two of the burglars without noticing, and one of them points his gun at the Tramp and shouts at him to stay where he is. The Tramp is so startled that he becomes clumsy on the skates, and uncontrollably glides backward toward the escalator as the burglars continue shouting at him to stay where he is. He falls onto the escalator, which begins carrying him upward, and shrugs at the burglar that there is nothing he can do. The burglar shoots his gun in the air, which startles the Tramp into trying to run down the escalator the wrong way to appease him. He finally makes it down the escalator and the burglar brings him over to the cafe/bar area, faces him against a barrel of rum, and begins walking away. The Tramp falls, however, and the burglar turns around and shoots at the barrel of rum which begins spewing rum into the Tramp’s face as he stands back up again. A parallel cut shows the Gamin sleeping soundly upstairs, and when it cuts back to the Tramp, the barrel is empty and he is incredibly intoxicated. One of the burglars carries a rope and tries to direct the Tramp to turn and walk somewhere. When the Tramp finally drunkenly turns around, he is recognized by the third burglar (who has not been shown clearly yet), who turns out to be Big Bill from the first factory scene. Big Bill excitedly greets the Tramp and introduces him to the other burglars, and then explains that they are not really burglars, but were just hungry. He begins sobbing and the Tramp embraces him to comfort him, but is then startled by the popping of a bottle of champagne, which another burglar has opened. They all drink and the scene fades to darkness.
An intertitle appears that signifies that it is now the next morning, and the next shot shows the Gamin waking up nervously, alone in the bedroom display. She runs out of the bedroom display, and the camera pans to a clock that reads 6:05, which then changes through a dissolve 9:30. The department store is now packed and lively, and we see a very proper woman looking through a pile of printed silks. She finds one she likes and asks the attendant for help, who then tries to pull the silk out of the pile, but it is quite stuck. As she pulls harder, the Tramp’s bottom slowly rises out of the pile, and it turns out that the piece of cloth they are pulling is a part of his shirt. He is quite disoriented and looks as if he has just been woken up as a crowd gathers around him in response to the attendant’s and proper woman’s shocked screams. As he tries to tuck in his shirt, the manager and owner come and yell at him, as well as at each other, and the Tramp is escorted from the building by a police officer. The Gamin sees him emerge from the store with a crowd behind him and goes up to him, worriedly asking what happened, but he pretends not to see her and tries to discreetly wave her away as a police van approaches. He is put in the van and the Gamin runs off.
Another intertitle informs us that ten days have passed, and the next shot opens on the front of the police station as the door opens and the Tramp emerges. He looks around the street but when he sees that no one is there to meet him, he wanders to the corner, unsure of what to do. As the camera pans while he approaches the corner, however, we see the Gamin hiding behind the corner to surprise him. She sneaks up behind him and covers his eyes with her hands, he turns around excitedly, and she jumps into his arms. She tells him that she has a surprise for him: she has found a home for them. They walk down the street arm in arm, and the Tramp walks right into a lamppost because he is so distracted while talking with the Gamin. In the following shot, they approach an old, tiny, wooden, broken down house in a marsh in the outskirts of the city. They excitedly go inside and the Gamin begins showing the Tramp around the room. The Tramp says that it is “paradise” as he enters, but when he closes the front door behind him, a beam above the door swings down and hits him on the head, knocking him over. As the Gamin tries to hammer the beam back in place, the Tramp leans against the table in the middle of the room, which promptly collapses beneath him. The Gamin picks up the table to try to fix it, and the Tramp scoops up the flowers that had been on the table. He reaches for a broom to sweep up the dirt from the broken flower pot, but when he pulls it from its place, it turns out that it had been holding up part of the roof, and half of the roof caves in. The Gamin props it back up with the broom while saying to the Tramp that their little house “is no Buckingham Palace.” He tells her that he loves it anyway while beginning to lean against the wall, which collapses under his weight, sending him tumbling through the side of the house and into the marsh. He frantically swims back toward the house, and the Gamin stretches her foot out for him to grab on as the scene fades.
A brief sequence later that night shows the Tramp and the Gamin as they sleep alone in separate parts of the small cottage. The Tramp sleeps in a small hay-filled storage unit attached to the outside of the house, and the Gamin sleeps inside on the floor of the living room. The next morning, the Tramp emerges from his pen in his swimsuit and stretches before walking down a nearby pier to the the nearest stretch of marshy water. He dives in head first, only to discover that the water is only a foot or two deep, and emerges rubbing his head and limping. He goes back into his small room. Inside the cottage, the Gamin prepares breakfast and pours tea into two tin cans. The Tramp emerges from his room again, this time wearing his suit, and hangs his swim outfit in the sun to dry before wiping his feet and going inside the cottage. He greets the Gamin with a bow and looks up at the beam above the door expectantly as he slams the door behind him, and it, as expected, swings down and clunks him on the head again, sending him stumbling. They sit down to breakfast and his chair legs fall through the wide spaces between the floorboards. The Gamin moves the table to a new spot and the Tramp lifts his chair out and settles down again in the new location. As he struggles to eat the breakfast of stale, thickly-sliced bread, he opens the newspaper to find a headline announcing that the Jetson Mills factories are reopening and jumps out of his chair. He puts on his hat and takes his cane off the wall, and the Gamin hands him a sandwich to bring as he runs out the door. She stands in front of the doorway as he runs toward the factory, waving at him excitedly.
At the factory gates, the Tramp pushes through a massive crowd of workers and barely makes it into the factory as the last new worker before they close the gates again. An intertitle explains that he is the assistant to the new mechanic, who is tasked with getting the long-idle machines to work again. The Tramp is immediately shown to be incompetent, as he struggles to lift the mechanic’s toolbox and is almost knocked over as he puts it down on the ground. As the mechanic inspects the inside of a press, the Tramp leans against a lever to rest, which causes the press to start closing. The mechanic pulls his head out in time, but his oil can gets crushed, and when the press lifts up again he pulls it out and angrily scolds the Tramp. The Tramp takes the crushed oil can, which now resembles the shape of a shovel, and he makes a shoveling motion with it to try to show the mechanic that it can still be used in a different way. The mechanic dismisses this idea, and the Tramp puts the oil can away and retrieves a back-up oil can from the tool box. The mechanic checks his pocket watch, puts it back in his coat pocket, and hands his coat to the Tramp so that his arms will be free to tinker with the press. The Tramp puts the oil can and the mechanic’s jacket back down on the press, but the press begins to close again because of the mechanic’s tinkering. The Tramp pulls the oil can out of the press at the last minute, rescuing it from being crushed, but failing to rescue the mechanic’s jacket (and pocket watch), which are completely flattened. The mechanic is outraged, saying that his family heirloom (the watch) has been ruined, and scolds the Tramp before the two move on to a larger machine nearby, whose function is unclear.
They climb up onto a platform on top of the large machine and the Tramp struggles to put the toolbox down, only to be forced to move it again when the mechanic says it is in his way. The mechanic starts the machine but the toolbox, which has been partially resting on one of the machine’s gears, is carried into the machine and broken into pieces, and the metal tools are spat back out at the Tramp and the mechanic. The Tramp catches two wrenches and uses them to beat back the other tools that are flung at him, and when the barrage stops he tries to hand them to the mechanic, who threatens to hit him, so he drops them again back into the machine. The mechanic looks into the machine for the rest of the tools and presses the lever to start it up again, but a moving part pushes him into the gears from behind and another one lifts the Tramp into the air. The Tramp eventually is able to stop the machine, and the mechanic’s head and shoulders emerge from a hole in the side of the machine, with the rest of his body still stuck in the machine. He yells for the Tramp to get him out of there and instructs him to pull a lever, but when the Tramp does so, the mechanic is pulled backward only for his head to emerge from a different, smaller hole in another part of the machine. The Tramp tries to pull him out by his head but only succeeds in pulling his hat off. He dusts the hat off, then dusts off the mechanic’s head, and places the hat back on his head. The factory bell then rings for lunch break, however, and the power is shut off during the break, disabling the machine in its current position, with the mechanic still stuck.
The Tramp leaves to get his lunch, returns with the sandwich, and sits down on a stool next to the mechanic’s head. The mechanic yells for the Tramp to get him out of there, but when the Tramp shows him that the power has been cut, he tells the Tramp to get him his lunch. The Tramp returns with the mechanic’s lunchbox and sits next to him so he can feed him. He tries to feed him some celery and then a hard boiled egg but the mechanic is unable to swallow anything because of his position. The Tramp tries to feed him some coffee, but is unable to pour it into his mouth without letting it spill, so he takes a funnel from an oil can and tries to use that, but it makes the coffee taste like oil. The Tramp finds a whole roast chicken in the lunchbox, and uses the cavity through the middle of the chicken as a funnel for the coffee which works, before feeding the mechanic a few bites of one of the chicken legs. He then tries to feed the mechanic a piece of pie, but the custard collapses out of the crust and onto the mechanic’s face. The Tramp wipes the mechanic’s face with a handkerchief and begins cleaning out his nose and ears when the factory bell rings, signaling the end of lunch and the return of power to the machines. The Tramp starts the machine again and the mechanic is carried back into the machine and out onto a belt that begins carrying him up until the air to another set of machines. The Tramp stops the belt and another worker comes over and asks to speak with his boss. The Tramp reverses the belt, bringing the mechanic back toward the machine again, and stops it just before the mechanic is sucked back into the gears. The mechanic climbs down to the factory floor and the other worker tells him to pack up because the workers are going on strike again. The Tramp is forced to leave the factory with the rest of the workers, and he is harassed by a police officer while leaving the factory. He walks away still looking at the officer, and accidentally steps on a plank of wood with a brick on the other end, sending the brick flying through the air and into another police officer trying to control the crowd of striking workers. Three officers immediately grab the Tramp, beat him with their clubs, and throw him into the back of a police van to take him to prison.
Analysis
The scene with the robbers is first established with characteristic dramatic irony, as the Tramp fails to realize something that audience already knows will put him in danger. Again, he becomes suddenly clumsy when he realizes the danger, which is meant to convey his shock and fear, draw out his incompetence as a night guard, and elicit slapstick laughs from the audience. The sequence that ensues, in which the Tramp ends up on an escalator and must run down it the wrong way in his roller skates, is a play on the Tramp’s haplessness and mixed luck—though it usually gets him into trouble, it seems as though his incompetence might save him this time. However, the spell is soon broken when the burglar fires his gun into the air, raising the stakes and causing the Tramp to rush down the elevator the wrong way. When the Tramp is forced to accidentally drink the contents of the barrel of rum, the cutting back and forth between him and the sleeping Gamin foreshadows that he will end up too intoxicated to wake her up. Of course, Big Bill’s recognition of the Tramp and their embrace while a champagne bottle pops open make it clear that the Tramp will end up celebrating with them all night and shirking his duties. Additionally, the moment between Big Bill and the Tramp again shows the kind and caring side of the Tramp, as well as an unexpected moment of weakness in Big Bill, whose massive sobbing form is likely a reminder of the way that class oppression can bring anyone to their knees.
The dissolve of the clock in the bedroom display after the Gamin has left indicates the passage a great deal of time (more than 3 hours) between her leaving the department store and when the Tramp is found. It also implies by omission that the Tramp is still in the department store somewhere at the opening of the next scene. When he is finally pulled from the pile of silks in the store, the appearance of the wealthy shoppers creates a sharp contrast with his appearance, drawing out both his lower class position and the poor state he is in from the night of drinking. When he is kicked out, he shoes away the Gamin to protect her, again fitting into a somewhat protective characterization (though this does not mean that the dynamic is simply that he is protective of her—at several other points she demonstrates protectiveness over him as well). After this protective moment between them, the next scene then shows us another important moment for the development of their relationship—the Tramp is released from prison and the Gamin is there waiting for him. Though he has been gone for 10 days (which is 10 times longer than they have known each other), she still comes to meet him at the jail on the day he is released, and playfully hides for a moment to let him think that she did not come, but then jumps out to surprise him. This solidifies their relationship by building trust between them, and they walk arm in arm to go see the Gamin’s surprise home for them.
The new house scene falls into another typical set up for the slapstick genre, in which a character’s environment revolts against him in some way, repeatedly abusing him no matter what he does. Often, new problems arise in response to actions directed at trying to fix the previous problem, leading to a seemingly never-ending cycle of abuse in which the character is unable to do anything, and will continue to be frustrated in some new way no matter what he does. This kind of cycle is a form of dramatic irony, as the pattern becomes clear to the audience early on, but the character fails to realize that he is trapped in such a cycle, and each new abuse still comes as a surprise to him. There is also a second layer of dramatic irony in the way that the Gamin presents the house to the Tramp, which Chaplin draws out with his pained, forced smile while saying that the house looks like paradise—she does not realize how terrible the house really is, thinking that it has some problems but is otherwise quite nice, when in fact it is completely falling apart and probably dangerous to live in. Additionally, when she says that the house is “no Buckingham Palace,” it is an example of understatement, while the Tramp’s earlier statement that the house is “paradise” is certainly an example of overstatement.
The nighttime scene shows the Tramp and the Gamin sleeping separately, with the Gamin inside the house and the Tramp in a small storage space on the side of the house. This scene is interesting because it draws into question whether the Gamin and Tramp are intended to be in a romantic relationship or whether they are in a platonic relationship. Though two lovers or even married couples would never be shown sleeping in the same bed in films at this time (and indeed none were depicted sharing a bed in mainstream film or TV until many decades later), the decision to put the Tramp outside of the house is odd. Because of this detail, and other factors including the Gamin’s age, some critics have speculated that the relationship is meant to be understood as platonic, and that the Tramp might play the role of the father that the Gamin lost earlier in the film. This seems unlikely, however, given the way that the Gamin excitedly waves goodbye to him at the end of the scene, which mirrors the way that the wife waved off her husband as he went to work outside of the suburban house earlier in the film.
In the morning at the new house, we of course also see more environmental slapstick, when the Tramp dives into the water and bumps his head, is hit by the beam above the door again, and his chair legs fall through the floor. The first of these, when he dives into the water, follows a similar construction to the earlier scene in the house—he expects the water to be deeper and dives in, only to find out the hard way that it is quite shallow. This could be considered an instance of dramatic irony, because he understood his environment to be different than it actually was, and the audience may have expected this twist because of earlier, similar events in the film. It could also, however, be considered an instance of situational irony if we assume that the audience, like the Tramp, did not expect the water to suddenly be shallow. On the other hand, when the beam falls on him again, it is set up with a tongue-in-cheek construction that opposes the earlier slapstick moments in the house: the Tramp fully expects the beam to fall, and stares at it before it does. This can be seen as a response to the hopelessness of fighting against his environment, which only leads to more abuse by the house, and a desire to break the cycle by accepting the things he knows will go wrong. It could also be that his actions refer to the dramatic irony of the earlier scene in the house—he has realized that the house will only do things to him that he does not expect, so he hopes that by staring in expectation at the beam, it will not fall on him. Alternatively, it may be that he has responded to his environment with the conclusion that the house is sentient in some way, and is out to get him, and he stares at the beam as a sort of challenge, or that he genuinely thinks the beam has been fixed and is staring at it in expectation of proof that the issue has been resolved. Whatever the case, the set-up of the action leads the audience to also be unsure of the outcome, which builds tension. The punch-line, when the beam falls and hits him in the head again, is then especially effective because it comes as a surprise to the audience, while they chastise themselves at the same time for not realizing that, of course, it was going to fall. This could be, depending on a given audience member’s understanding of the situation, simultaneously: an instance of dramatic irony, because the Tramp seemed not to think that the beam would fall while the audience expected it; an instance of situational irony, because the audience may have felt, like the Tramp, that the beam would not fall this time and so it comes as an unexpected twist; or not ironic at all because both the audience and the Tramp expected the beam to fall, and indeed it did.
In the factory again we see a return to the scene construction in which a bumbling, hapless Tramp repeatedly causes problems in the factory, through incompetence or clumsiness, creating humorous moments of slapstick. This is similar to the earlier factory scene, in that, while some of the mistakes are his fault, some are not, and he is still blamed for all of them by the mechanic. The most significant, and longest lasting, of these mishaps is when the mechanic gets stuck in the machine, not unlike how the Tramp got stuck in the machine at the start of the film. This could be read as simply a strategy for setting up a situation in which the Tramp unintentionally abuses the mechanic while feeding him (including a pie in the face). However, the scene's similarity to the earlier moment when the Tramp gets trapped in the machine indicates that it is intended as another metaphor for the way in which the factory is consuming workers, as the machines displace them and they are treated by superiors as cogs within the factory. Additionally, that the Tramp is not caught in the machine this time may be an indication that he has begun to escape this system by acting more individualistically (in part because of meeting the Gamin).
The Tramp’s immediate incompetence in the factory suggests that he will cause some major issue and get himself fired or in worse trouble. However, despite several bad mistakes, including ruining equipment, ruining the mechanic’s prized watch, and nearly injuring the mechanic several times, he ends up not getting fired at all, but is instead forced out of the factory on a strike. This is an example of situational irony, because the audience has come to expect that if the Tramp loses his job it will be because of his incompetence here, and it ends up being something completely different. It also, oddly, seems to stand as a criticism of labor organization or unionization, because the poor Tramp will be forced out of work again because of the union. However, this is soon superseded by the animosity and aggression of the police sent to manage the strike, which redirects the criticism toward the government’s anti-labor policies and enforcement.
