Adaptations of vintage film music by Chaplin and others were a vital part of the new score, with Chaplin's own "Theme From Limelight," "Salt Lake City Episode" (from the movie City Lights), and famous "Smile" all intermingled with the score, "Smile" serving as one of Barry's themes and performed by Downey Jr. as a supplemental pop song. Also informing the score as a secondary theme quite effectively is "The Honeysuckle and the Bee" by William Penn and Albert H. Fitz. While "Smile" represents the melancholy of Chaplin's life, the Penn and Fitz idea represents, to some degree, his love life. As for Barry's original contributions, few surprises awaited his avid collectors. In the 1990's, Barry's music was becoming far more confined to a narrow scope of application, with his slow, rolling, lushly romantic style finding fewer and fewer applications on the screen. This style had culminated in so much positive public recognition in Out of Africa and Dances With Wolves that he won Oscars for those efforts, and in so doing he had created a situation in which anything similar for films thereafter would be considered by detractors to be stagnant re-hash. To some extent, his work for Chaplin is highly derivative, though this project represented one of the last, if not the final film for which this style of pensively dramatic music could be considered a perfect match. This sense of epic tragedy has never been captured quite as well as Barry had accomplished in the last two decades of his career, and his quiet piano and string score for Chaplin is both predictably deliberate and melodramatic. The delicate piano and string main theme for Chaplin yields to several secondary ideas throughout the film, most moving at an extremely slow tempo and exhibiting the same chord progressions and ascending bass string and cello counterpoint technique that was heard in Raise the Titanic, High Road to China, and Out of Africa. Brass whole notes in supporting roles and occasional woodwinds taking the lead from strings are familiar refrains from the composer. Pleasant to the last, each of Barry's themes is simple in construction, painstakingly emphasized in every note, and adhere to his technique of repeating phrases twice within theme to make sure you don't miss the elegance of the progressions.

For veterans of film music, these quietly meandering themes will be exactly as expected, so the far more interesting parts of Chaplin will be Barry's more upbeat, out-of-character cues for dancing, chasing, and the excitement of Chaplin's initial visits to America ("Charlie Goes to the U.S.") and debut fanfares ("Premiere Fanfare"). The most upbeat cues are set to light snare rhythms and pulsating brass, eventually dancing with woodblocks in parts that emulated Rachel Portman's more playful moments. The two "Roll Dance" cues show a glimpse of the old big band and Monte Walsh days for Barry, with the second one offering a snazzy brass rhythm over honky tonk piano. The charm in these two cues is infectiously undeniable. Barry's chasing techniques are less tied to the era, starting with a stately presence in "Workhouse Chase" that dates all the way back to Thunderball. A spritely variant of this material generates more positive ambience in "The Wedding Chase," its playful motif carrying over to "Funny With a Hose." On the flip side of this hopeful music is a sour, less palatable motif carrying the suspenseful "Joan Out of Control" and "Joan Barry Trouble." By these late passages, the "Smile" melody really begins to take hold in the score, to some degree displacing Barry's own theme for the character. Barry shows ample skill in adapting Chaplin's musical compositions into his score, and the generous usage of the "Smile" melody fits almost seamlessly with his original ideas. On the other hand, there is a definite reason why the Downey Jr. club vocal version of "Smile" wasn't heard in the film; to do so would probably have killed Attenborough from humiliation. As with most of Barry's albums, the recording and mixing of Chaplin is exquisite, the layering of strings and delicate piano easily distinguishable in crystal clear quality. Where the simplicity of the constructs can sometimes tax one's patience, the fantastic ambient sound of the mix is always a salvation. Nevertheless. The La-La Land Records label remastered the score again for a 2023 release, adding another 17 minutes of music that reveals several of the weightier later cues of darkness. This additional material is poignant and supplies a better balance to the narrative, meriting exploration by any Barry enthusiast. The product includes bonus recreations of tracks that had combined several cues on the original album, too. One of the last truly effective scores from Barry, Chaplin remains an easy and pleasurable listening experience for any of his collectors on either album.  ****   @Amazon.com: CD or Download