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Bottom, Charlie and Big Jim are famished. At one point, Charlie fights with a dog for his bone and eventually ends up boiling his shoe and sharing it as a “gourmet” dinner with Big Jim. At another point Jim begins to hallucinate as a result of starvation and actually contemplates engaging in cannibalism (after deliriously misperceiving Charlie as a chicken). All of those hunger gags were Chaplin’s comic take on the ghastly spectacle of witnessing his mother’s being driven mad, as he thought, by hunger and malnutrition. (See Chaplin A Life, Chapter VII for details). |
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