This portrait of a building site is precisely defined, starting with its title: it depicts pay day, and its rituals for the labourers on site. But its real focus is on the lengths to which they will go to drink away every last dollar.

Pay Day was Chaplin’s final two-reeler and is the satirical epitome of two phenomena: work and leisure. With self-evident symmetry, each phenomenon takes up half of the film and receives equal analysis. At work the foreman is in charge, but at home the one calling the shots is his Amazonian wife, Phyllis Allen, who turns his home life into the worst of all possible worlds. Work is by turns a merry-go-round of violence, tomfoolery, scams and other forms of social ‘cohesion’. Power relations are just as unbalanced during the lunchbreak as they are when it’s time to collect the wages.

The passage from work to freedom is marked by a simple cut, with a dollar symbol functioning as intertitle – a most cynical explanation. And then the only place to go is the sole oasis in a desert of tedium: the local watering hole.

All the gags are brilliant. For example, in order to avoid his wife’s anger, Chaplin climbs into the bath fully clothed in the hope of getting some sleep but, when his wife enters the room, he starts soaping himself as if it is the most ordinary thing in the world. The site labourers engage in a variety of capers but always end up getting into scrapes – exactly as in their workplace. The journey home is a veritable assault on the last tram, already overloaded with drunks; Chaplin grabs onto the trousers of one unfortunate companion and naturally they rip…

As the film ends it is the next morning and Chaplin must face the Amazon who awaits him at home. The closeup of the final sequence has all the comic effect of an early 20th-century English farce. However, the big difference from such farces, or indeed the Keystone comedies, is that now the gags come from a wide variety of directions and thus acquire mysterious depth. The same can be said of the presence and essence of Chaplin himself – thanks to which the film, despite all the chaos that animates it, constitutes a powerful depiction of loneliness.

Peter von Bagh, Chaplin, Edizioni Cineteca di Bologna, Bologna 2021