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At the end of the film, when Charlie has been cruelly awakened from his blissful dream by his old enemy the Policeman, to find that the Kid has been received into the sheltering arms of his mother, there is a moment of unbearable poignancy when Charlie realizes that those arms are willing to take him in also. His incredulity, bewilderment, dawning belief, and radiance, catch at the heartstrings, for Charlie has such unappeasable needs.
With The Pilgrim Chaplin finished the series of films he was due to make for the First National Company. This film proves definitely that Charlie now is adult. The simplicities of childhood where much is hidden that cannot be expressed; the hesitations and confusions of adolescence, have yielded place to the full emergence of a personality as subtle and complex as Chaplin's own.
Creator and creation, Chaplin and Charlie, are so closely linked as to be almost indivisible. In both, early promise has been vitally fulfilled, development of personality and artistry has reached great peaks. Chaplin is ripe now for his major films, and Charlie is no longer the youngest clown, but the greatest clown of all.
After The Pilgrim, which was released in 1922, Chaplin was at last free to consider his future work with the United Artists Company, which he had formed three years before with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffiths.
His work for United Artists, from A Woman Of Paris, released in 1923, to Monsieur Verdoux (1947), his last film to date, shows the irresistible evolution of his genius in its highest form. All that Chaplin had ever done in cinema, from the first curio Making A Living, of 1914, through all the years of apprenticeship and experiment, was given in these great films what would seem to be its final and fullest form.
Chaplin had progressively increased the range of his work, and the time taken over it, so that in the period 1923-1947, he produced seven major films, which fall into two groups.
With one significant exception, Charlie the tramp is the hero of them all, a maturer Charlie, more human, more eloquent, less sublime. In the earlier group, he is tortured through his own humanity, exposed to greed, loneliness, malice, poverty; with man and nature both against him, finding shelter nowhere, nowhere any peace or any hope. The hopelessness of Charlie breaks through his former optimism until, in City Lights (1931), the last of this group, it cuts the future from beneath his feet, as the blind flower girl whose sight has been restored through Charlie's efforts, sees her benefactor, and laughs at the comic sight he makes.
The last three films, Modern Times (1936), The Great Dictator