Chaplin Project: The Kid

Charlie Chaplin’s first feature film arrives in L’Aquila.
The very first image in The Kid is the gate of a hospital for the poor. Did the man with the small black mustache, the thin cane, the bowler hat and the oversized shoes choose, in his debut feature, to revisit his own biography with a touch of melancholy? His parents’ marriage broke down soon after his birth. His father was an alcoholic, his mother suffered from mental illness. The family was supported by his elder half-brother, an illegitimate child. Workhouses and orphanages were as much a part of his childhood as the adventures through London’s impoverished neighborhoods. All of this resurfaces in The Kid, where the attic in which the foundling clutches his pillow while drinking milk from a coffeepot recalls the setting studies in Charles Dickens’s novels.
Although Chaplin could not read music, he composed the scores for films such as City Lights and Modern Times. To do so, he worked with arrangers who transcribed full orchestral scores following his directions. The Kid—a poignant blend of slapstick comedy and social drama—was released in 1921. Only fifty years later, at the age of 82, would Chaplin write the music for this early masterpiece, introducing it with the famous line: “A film with a smile, and—perhaps—a tear.” The score, which opens with long, richly arranged string melodies and, at the little tramp’s first appearance, shifts back to the popular entertainment music of the Tingeltangel theaters of Chaplin’s youth, was re-orchestrated in 2016 by Timothy Brock for live performance.
The silent film The Kid will be screened on the big screen, accompanied by the live performance of Chaplin’s original score by the Haydn Orchestra.