The first film Chaplin made under his 1917 First National contract – which, crucially, gave him ownership of his own negatives – runs a structural conceit through its three reels: the Tramp and a stray mutt named Scraps occupy the same social position, both of them scrounging at the edges of a city with no place for either. The comedy is still rooted in physical precision, but the film’s dynamics are organised around class conflict rather than anarchic chaos. Edna Purviance plays a dance-hall singer whose own precariousness extends the parallel, and her scenes with Chaplin already anticipate the emotional register Chaplin would develop further in The Kid. For decades, audiences have known the film primarily through the version Chaplin assembled for The Chaplin Revue in 1959, reconstructed from outtakes and alternate-angle footage after the original camera negative deteriorated. That version substituted Chaplin’s revised editorial choices and a newly composed orchestral score for the 1918 release cut. MoMA’s reconstruction, drawn from surviving prints derived from the original negative, restores Chaplin’s firstchoice takes and the original intertitles, returning the film, as nearly as possible, to what audiences saw in April 1918.

Dave Kehr