Score, parts and film print (35mm, DVD PAL, DigiBeta PAL & BETA SP NTSC) for hire

Chaplin Festival, Royal Festival Hall, London, 28 November 2003 London Philharmonic Orchestra/Carl Davis (Film print and music available from Faber Music) ‘… I turned up at the South Bank, along with my 10-year-old son Edward, determined to hate the evening and firmly hoping that Ed would maintain a great family tradition. But it didn't work out like that. My son was entranced. And within a couple of minutes, I noticed strange symptoms in myself. What were the strange rumblings in my chest, and the snorts coming out of my nose? Reader, I was laughing at the movie star I had always seen as unfunniness personified. In The Cure (1917), Chaplin plays an alcoholic at a health spa, and inadvertently ends up getting everyone else as drunk as lords. As a former inmate of the Priory, I could relate to that. It also helped that the print was superb and that Davis's accompaniment fitted the on-screen action like a glove. But what I could deny to myself no longer was that Chaplin was indeed the comic genius so many crack him up to be. The delicacy of his movements, the way he delays his sight gags and offers ingenious variations on them, the sheer disconcerting presence of the man – at once charming, innocent, sexually ambiguous and faintly sinister – held me in complete thrall. The masochistic scenes with the cruel masseur, and with that great bearded, beetle-browed heavy Eric Campbell, whom at one stage Chaplin outrageously flirts with, touch the sublime. The movie offers 23 minutes of pure pleasure and endlessly prolific invention. A strange, thoroughly disconcerting genius Chaplin may have been, but a genius none the less. Like all great artists, he created his own distinctive world and persuades us to see our own afresh.’ Daily Telegraph (Charles Spencer), 2 December 2003