The Pilgrim

It's been a month or so since the last time I did a post on a silent movie, and I've got several sitting on my DVR, so I figure I should start watching more of them. Next up is a Charlie Chaplin film that's a bit too short to be called a real feature, but too long to be a real short, at four reels: The Pilgrim.

The title card has a 1923 copyright date on it, which theoretically means the movie is in the public domain, but the print TCM ran was a 1959 re-release, which has a new score written by Chaplin, as we can tell from a song with vocals, "I'm Bound for Texas". And indeed, Chaplin's Tramp is about to be headed to Texas. He's just gotten out of prison, but not legally, as we see him behind a bush wearing long underwear and holding up a striped convict's uniform, wondering what to do next. We also see a shot of a wanted poster with his image, complete with mustache that for some reason he doesn't shave off.

In the next scene, Chaplin is now at a train depot, dressed in a preacher's vestments. He gets a train tickets to parts unknown to him, but we see that it's one of those towns in old westerns that has one church of the Generic Protestant denomination, and has just hired a new preacher. Before that, however, there's enough time to have a comic sequence of a couple that wants to elope and thinks Chaplin is just the right man of the cloth to perform the service, before the bride's father can show up to stop the wedding.

Chaplin shows up in Devil's Gulch, TX, to a town that's awaiting a preacher who is supposed to arrive on the same day Chaplin shows up. So, it's unsurprising that they think he's the preacher they've hired. You'd think it would be awkward when the second preacher shows up, but fortunately for Chaplin he telegrams to inform them that he's going to be a week late, and Chaplin is able to intercept the telegram.

But there's still the little matter of the townsfolk expecting Chaplin to be a preacher, and Chaplin's escaped prisoner not being particularly Christian. Fake it until you make it, I suppose. After the service, Chaplin gets invited to a parishioner's house for Sunday dinner. Also showing up is another prisoner who knows Chaplin. When that guy finds out there's a large sum of cash in the house, he plans to steal it while pinning the blame on Chaplin, who is, after all, a wanted prisoner.

The Pilgrim is a well-enough made movie, and yet for some reason as I was watching it I couldn't help but think about how I personally prefer Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd to Charlie Chaplin. There's not really anything wrong with The Pilgrim, and yet somehow everything seems just slightly less funny than it really could be. Perhaps it's because the movie is 40-some minutes when it would probably be better off as a two-reeler. But fans of Charlie Chaplin will like The Pilgrim if they haven't seen it before.