Charlie Chaplin (1951)

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cc 238 phone bleating, in slightly off synchronization with the lips, mimics the speakers at the unveiling of the monument. This shrill squeaking is used not only as a comic note in itself, but as a burlesque of the talkies. When Charlie is ordered down, a bustling "galop" number in G minor, played in fast tempo, accompanies his scrambling over the statues. The tramp's wanderings through the city streets are accompanied by a gallant bitter-sweet melody mostly on the cello. The theme is repeated seven times when he is in hopeful moods. The flower girl's principal theme is "La Violetera," and phrases of it are played behind the tramp, when it is pertinent to indicate that his thoughts dwell on her. She had two subsidiary themes, one a pathetique for scenes in her slum room, and the other a violin caprice, for her wistful moments. The music behind the tramp's meeting with the eccentric millionaire is an amusing burlesque of opera. A dramatic theme introduces him and is followed by an overdramatic agitato as he ties the suicide noose. Charlie's dissuasions are musically rendered in burlesqued opera recitative. Another kind of music is kidded in the accompaniment to Charlie's promise that "Tomorrow the birds will sing" — the "April-showers, silver-lining, rainbow-round-my-shoulder" sort of "theme song" that echoed through early talkies, particularly in the Al Jolson films. In later sequences the tramp has only to point upward in mock-heroic fashion; no title is necessary, the music "tells" what he is saying. The nightclub music for the "burning up the town" is a hectic jazz theme with a long sustained high note and marked rhythm. A rumba-like number accompanies the party scene where the tramp swallows the whistle. When the millionaire wakes sober, to find a stranger sharing his bed, there is a snatch of Rimsky-Korsakov's ballet "Scheherazade" — played in duet form — in low register for the perplexed millionaire and high for the tramp. In like