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"What porridge had John Keats," wondered Browning, here Charles Chaplin imagines Dickens' breakfast of slum flapjacks. Heavy is the burden of the woman "whose sin was motherhood" (Edna Purviance), seduced and abandoned by the artist and forced to abandon her child, a dissolving insert of Christ with cross is reflected later in a halo effect. The Tramp finds the bundled infant in a back alley and briefly contemplates a sewer drain, at home he fastens a rubber nipple to a suspended coffee pot and discovers the joys of parenthood. The Kid (Jackie Coogan) is a marvelous tiny scrabbler, hurling rocks at windows to boost their glass-repair business and clocking another tyke in the face as the tenement courtyard turns into a boxing ring. (Watched by a suspicious flatfoot, Papa desperately pushes away the eager human puppy.) "A picture with a smile—and perhaps, a tear," Chaplin's declaration of philosophy in his lovely first feature. A world of bricked street corners and falling debris, the debt to Griffith is pointed up in callous orphanage authorities out of Intolerance. The trauma of separation is heightened with intercutting, the pleading child in the back of the moving truck and the desperate vagrant scuttling across rooftops are reunited in a Cassatt close-up. The torn bed cover that becomes a poncho, the lamp post bent by a barrel-chested bully's wallop, the flophouse where pickpockets work in their sleep. (The boy is whisked away under a sign reading "management not responsible for valuables stolen.") The surrealist strain culminates in the Miltonic "Dreamland," a shabby neighborhood done up in feathered angel wings and harps while horned imps whisper temptation, the Tramp crumpled like Icarus announces the return to reality. City Lights revises the final miracle, the Dardennes in L'Enfant mount a jagged rendering. With Carl Miller, Charles Reisner, and Lita Grey. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |