Sidewalk Stories

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. The black-and-white photography is of some appeal, but Lane's own central performance is so winsome that the plot's (unintentional?) borrowings from Chaplin's maudlin The Kid become irritating in the extreme. Only the last minute is memorable, but it comes far too late to endow the film with anything but novelty value.