Sidewalk Stories

Charles Lane’s 1989 indie Sidewalk Stories doesn’t just hark back to The Kid; it formally revives the Chaplin classic in the street theater of Dinkins-era Greenwich Village.

Lane approaches New York’s unbalanced, inhumane economy the same way he approaches filmmaking: by putting a new frame around familiar sights, and forcing the audience to reconsider them.

Basic as a home movie -- and twice as touching -- Charles Lane's Sidewalk Stories is a black-and-white silent comedy that pays tribute both to Charles Chaplin's The Kid (1921) and to the urban homeless. [06 Apr 1990, p.4]

SIDEWALK STORIES has more heart than art, but its heart is large, and Lane proves himself an ambitious, impassioned filmmaker.

Lane does know how to photograph his own interesting, large-eyed face to potent effect. He's an appealing talent, and Sidewalk Stories is a likable film. Beyond novelty value, it also finds modern ways of making contact with the very real feel for poverty that was so much a part of the early Chaplin films. [21 Sep 1989, p.60]

An ambitious but sadly misguided attempt to make a contemporary silent comedy which opts for simplistic plotting, sentimentality and mime as it tells of a homeless, black New York street artist's attempts to trace the mother of a baby girl whose father's murder he has witnessed.

Chaplin's pathos was (at its best) touched with irony. Lane's isn't. [19 Jan 1990, p.68]