The Kid (1921)

Cute and funny. It is difficult to say anything new from this movie or Charles Chaplin. He just delivers a complete story with a lot of different elements. Remarkable is also the performance of Jackie Coogan.

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Two Little Tramps

The most amazing thing about Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid is that it was released in January of 1921. That makes this film 100 years old! A century has gone by since it was made, released, and first viewed, and yet it’s still available to be appreciated anew today. The DVD print that I watched was in very good shape, the picture was great, and I felt that I was watching an important piece of cinema history.

However, The Kid is by no means one of my favorite Chaplin films. In fact, two out of my top three aren’t even silent films, but prime examples of Chaplin’s later work: Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Limelight (1952). And my third favorite, the 1936 masterpiece Modern Times, is only two-thirds silent!

The plot of the film is quite simple: our beloved Little Tramp finds another little tramp, and and raises the foundling as his own. Years pass, and together, they rise above their life of poverty through the power of love and comedy.

“Professionally funny” is a phrase that I thought a fitting description of Chaplin. He was an artistic genius, and he knew what he was doing and how to engage an audience. In fact, this was his first feature-length film, and he took a whopping five-and-a-half months to shoot it, which was an incredible amount of time for a film production in 1921. Chaplin, of course, not only starred, but wrote, directed, produced, and scored the film!

Jackie Coogan was fantastic as “the Kid”, displaying a wide range of emotion and deftly tugging at the viewer’s heartstrings. His father, Jack Coogan, Sr., coached his son during filming and was paid $125 a week by Chaplin, and also played several small parts within the movie.
Chaplin and Coogan in The Kid (1921)

It is said that Chaplin and Coogan were as close off-screen as on, and every Sunday during the first few weeks of filming, Chaplin would take the boy to the amusement park or other fun activities. This relationship was seen as either an attempt on Chaplin’s part to reclaim his own unhappy childhood, or possibly he was just thinking about his own son whom he had lost, having died three days after birth.

The Kid features a truly bizarre dream sequence in which the Tramp falls asleep on his doorstep and dreams of everyone — including himself — as an angel or demon.

He envisions himself as an angel, with white, feathery wings spread out behind him, and a harp in his hand. Others, including a neighborhood bully, appear as demons, depicted traditionally in dark (presumably red) attire and horns atop their heads. Even a little dog, suspended on wires, comes floating by in a little angel costume!

It’s one of the strangest and most inexplicable dream sequences I’ve seen in a film, and yet it is oddly captivating.

The technical aspects in this film — both in the dream sequence and in the rest of the movie — are marvelous when one considers that it was made a hundred years ago, when the movie medium itself was less than thirty years old.

Whether or not it is one of Chaplin’s greatest works is up to the individual viewer, but you cannot deny that it is a landmark movie, and holds an important place in the history of American cinema. It deserves a look, maybe even more than one. As the opening title card reads, it’s “a picture with a smile — and perhaps, a tear.”

An impoverished woman (Edna Purviance) feels compelled to abandon her child in the hope that he might find a better life - so she leaves him (with a short note) in the back of a car. The two men who find the little bundle don't want anything to do with him, so plonk him down behind some rubbish where de is discovered by the tramp (Charlie Chaplin). Now he's not that keen on children either, but the presence of an attentive policeman means can't just leave his new package in the pram of a woman nearby. Skip on five years and the two have become quite a formidable double act - the lad (Jackie Coogan) chucks stones at windows and his father-figure does the mending! Meantime, the mother finds success treading the boards and the boy's real father, likewise, succeeds - but that relationship is toast and she gradually starts to pine for and then search for her lost child. When the authorities cotton on to the lucrative acts of vandalism of the two, they attempt to seize the kid and put him in an orphanage - and that's when things all start to come to an head. There's a delightful bond that develops here between Chaplin and the enthusiastic young Coogan with Chaplin's direction showcasing both their skills and the extent of the poverty amidst which they lived and which drove people to make horrendous decisions to part with their children. The ending is exactly as it should be, so don't go expecting much jeopardy on that front - and the scenes with the angelic wings towards the end mix determination and comedy effectively, too. It makes you smile and pulls at the heart strings and is truly a classic piece of cinema.