Pay Day

Chaplin's last two-reeler for First National, and one of his most perfectly built shorts. A bricklayer (Chaplin) works a construction site with a precision that turns labor into ballet (the lunch-pail gag, the elevator, the bricks that arrive exactly when they shouldn't), then takes his pay home to a wife (Phyllis Allen) who is waiting with a rolling pin. The night out, the trombone, the rain, the long walk home: it is The Immigrant's cruelty compressed into a payday. Released 2 April 1922. Chaplin photographed it himself in spirit if not in credit; the construction-site geometry is the work of a man who thought in shots the way a mason thinks in courses.