General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Pilgrim

The Pilgrim is a 1923 American silent comedy written, directed by, and starring Charles Chaplin, in which his Tramp character escapes from prison, steals a clergyman's clothes, and is mistaken for the new pastor of a small Texas town. It was the eighth and final film Chaplin delivered under his First National contract and his last film of less than normal feature length, running four reels.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	New York premiere 25 February 1923 at the Strand Theatre; distributed by Associated First National Pictures³
Format	Four reels, 4,300 feet, silent black-and-white 35 mm at 1.33:1; copyright LP18607 claimed 24 January 1923⁴
Runtime	Reported as 46 minutes by the AFI Catalog and 47 minutes by Criterion and JustWatch; Rotten Tomatoes lists 59 minutes⁴^•⁵^•⁶
Original title	At Large, changed to The Pilgrim before release⁴
Contract status	Final release under Chaplin's eight-film First National contract¹
Last collaboration	The last film in which Edna Purviance was Chaplin's leading lady²
Later reissue	Re-edited with a new Chaplin score and the song "Bound for Texas" for The Chaplin Revue (1959)²

Spoilers

Plot

Charlie, an escaped convict, steals the clothes of a bathing clergyman to replace his prison uniform. Arriving by train at a remote rural railway station, he is mistaken for the new pastor the community has been awaiting. He tries to live up to the role, and when called on to deliver his first sermon he performs an elaborate pantomime of the David and Goliath story that delights the congregation.¹^•⁷

The ruse becomes harder to maintain when a former prison cellmate, Howard Huntington (Charles Reisner), arrives in town and tries to rob the kindly landlady and her daughter of the mortgage payment. The convict foils the robbery, but his true identity is exposed in the process. A sheriff rides him out of town and allows him to escape across the Mexican border; the closing scene shows him straddling the border line itself, wanted in the United States but beyond the sheriff's reach.⁸^•⁹

Cast and production

The cast includes Charles Chaplin as the Pilgrim (also known as Lefty Lombard), Edna Purviance as Miss Brown, Kitty Bradbury as her mother, Mack Swain as the tall deacon, Loyal Underwood as the short deacon, Charles Reisner as the crook, Tom Murray as Sheriff Bryan, Sydney Chaplin in multiple roles, and the child actor Dean Riesner (billed as Dinky Dean) as the boy who torments the preacher. Marion Davies appears uncredited among the congregation.¹^•¹⁰

Chaplin produced the film through his own company, wrote the scenario, and edited it. Roland H. Totheroh was the cinematographer, Charles D. Hall the art director, and Charles Reisner the associate director. Filming ran from 1 April to 15 July 1922.¹^•³ MoMA notes that the film was shot quickly to fulfill the First National contract, and that Chaplin intended it as a comical homage to the Westerns of William S. Hart.¹¹

The First National contract dispute

The Pilgrim was much longer than the two-reelers the First National contract had anticipated, as The Kid had been before it, and relations between Chaplin and the distributor were strained over the profits of The Kid. Chaplin wanted to deliver The Pilgrim as a four-reel feature on a 70-30 basis, the same terms as The Kid, to terminate the contract. As a fallback he assembled a two-reeler, The Professor, out of rejected scenes from the First National series, which a daily production report dated 28 October to 4 November 1922 records as finished in cutting and titling.¹²

Telegrams between Chaplin, his brother Sydney, and his lawyer Nathan Burkan from November 1922 to January 1923 show the negotiating position: if First National refused suitable terms, the two-reel Professor would be delivered as picture number eight in full termination of the contract, and The Pilgrim would go to United Artists. First National agreed to accept The Pilgrim, so The Professor was abandoned.¹²^•¹³

Reception and censorship

The film's satire of religion drew organized hostility. The Evangelical Ministers Association of Atlanta demanded its withdrawal as an insult to the Gospel, and Klan newspapers, including the Searchlight, ran editorials against it; the Ku Klux Klan claimed credit for driving it off screens in several states. Censors also cut it heavily, with the Pennsylvania board removing so much material that little was left worth screening, and almost a quarter of the film was cut in Mason City, Iowa.¹³^•¹⁴

Contemporary trade opinion was mixed. The Film Daily judged it not up to the Chaplin standard and warned exhibitors to be careful of churchgoing audiences, while a Motion Picture News review reprinted in New Zealand found the Chaplin of The Pilgrim to be the Chaplin of old, with low and high comedy well balanced.¹⁵^•¹⁶ Later critics have treated it as a transitional work between the short comedies and the full-length features of Chaplin's mature career; the film historian Jeffrey Vance called it one of Chaplin's richest and most neglected films.⁶^•⁴

Later history

In 1959 Chaplin reissued The Pilgrim, slightly re-edited, together with A Dog's Life and Shoulder Arms in his omnibus film The Chaplin Revue, composing scores for all three and writing the song "Bound for Texas" for this one.² A 4K digital restoration by the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna at the L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, using material supplied by Roy Export SAS as part of the Chaplin Project, had its North American premiere at MoMA in 2024.¹¹ A 35 mm positive print survives, and the film is in the public domain in the United States.¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Early and silent cinema › Silent feature films › Released 1914 to 1926

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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