The Kid (1921)

The longer review

The Kid opens with an intertitle promising a picture with a smile and perhaps a tear, and it delivers both without much subtlety. A young mother, played by Edna Purviance, leaves her baby in a rich man's car. The car is stolen, the baby is dumped in an alley, and the Tramp finds him. After several attempts to hand the child to someone else, he gives up and raises him.

Five years later, the two run a business. The kid throws rocks through windows, and the Tramp happens by a minute later with a pane of glass on his back, ready to fix them. It's the best sequence in the film: fast, worked out to the second, and funny because both of them are so professional about it. Jackie Coogan, who was about five during filming, doesn't act like a child performer. He mimics Chaplin's timing and holds his own in scenes with him.

The sentiment is heavy. When the authorities come to take the boy away, Chaplin goes for the tears directly, with a chase across the rooftops and a reunion in the back of a truck. It works, and the reason it works is that the film has earned it with an hour of everyday affection, meals cooked on a tin stove and a bed made of rags.

The weak part is a long dream sequence in which the Tramp's slum becomes a heaven with feathered angels. It's odd and it stops the momentum. Still, for Chaplin's first feature as director, the control of tone is remarkable, and it runs only a little over an hour.

Before you watch

The 1921 release is in the public domain in the United States. Chaplin re-edited the film and added his own score in 1971, and that later version, which is the one most commonly sold, is still under copyright. Free public-domain copies will usually be the original cut.