Charlie Chaplin is a name that will live on through the history of the film industry as both a comic actor and a symbol of early filmmaking. With a career spanning more than 75 years, Chaplin became established as a worldwide cinematic idol renowned for his onscreen persona, The Tramp. The 1910s saw Chaplin become one of the most globally successful people in 1914/1915, starring in over 60 short productions and shortly gained enough influence to write and direct films of his own to critical acclaim. In 1919, Chaplin co-founded the distribution company, United Artists, alongside D. W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks. This action gave Chaplin complete creative control over his films with his first feature-length film having recently celebrated its one-hundredth birthday, The Kid (1921).
Though it stands at around fifty minutes, which was trimmed by Chaplin himself fifty years after its original release with a new musical score, The Kid is a simple but very charming and sentimental tale. A woman (Edna Purviance) leaves her baby in the backseat of a car belonging to a high-class family, thinking she won’t be able to take care of him. The baby, however, winds up by chance in an alleyway where The Tramp is wandering through and decides to take care of him, naming him John (Jack Coogan). Fast-forward five years later and the two are an intrepid duo as John breaks windows while The Tramp fixes them, eat lots of pancakes and always look out for each other as demonstrated many times throughout. The mother, meanwhile, is now a success, not knowing her child is out there – and closer than she may think.
This sounds like a simple story, but it’s one of Chaplin’s most efficiently designed films; each scene is necessary to the plot, funny for its own sake or both and Chaplin’s re-edit makes it so we’re mostly with Jack and The Tramp. Their scenes are everything Chaplin wants them to be: playful, absurd, and at times, bittersweet. Chaplin and Jack display their talents as both funny characters and dramatic actors. Jack is especially cute as a miniature Chaplin, right down to his baggy pants. His movements, expressions, and timings all spot-on, so much so that it almost looks impossible for a child to be acting with such apparent awareness. Chaplin gives one of his most sensitive performances, one so convincing that it doesn’t take away from his persona as the loveable funny tramp. From this point onward, he would become less of a slapstick comedian and more of a serious actor, at the same time, adding more plot, pathos, and truly great comedy routines. Also, Purviance is very effective in the dramatic side of the picture, as the grieving mother who is still looking for her son.
One of the many things that made Chaplin a standout figure in the early film industry was his understanding of how close slapstick is to pathos already. So why not combine the two? That’s what he did in some of his early short films and that’s what he does in this feature comedy. One of my favourite scenes involves the Tramp in fear of a bully. It’s reminiscent of his short Easy Street (1917), which is made especially clear when the bully bends a lamppost with one punch. There are many other great moments of humorous pantomime and farce in this film. Yet, The Kid is much more than that, which makes it such a breakthrough; the slapstick fills the plot, and there is more of a developed plot here than in Chaplin’s previous work. This put the Tramp in the role of the sympathetic, pitiful hero, who also serves as the comic relief.
The Kid is also impressive in that it strikes an ideal balance between maintaining sympathy for its characters while never overdoing the pathos, something Chaplin occasionally latched did, even with some of the greatest movies. Here, the balance makes the moments of emotion all the more effective and memorable. The parent-child relationship has often proved itself to be sentimental entertainment and The Kid is no exception. The sequence where the workers come to take the kid away from the Tramp is arguably the most emotional moment in the film. It’s scenes like these where the audience can tear up as the kid is taken away, intercut with Chaplin’s dash across the rooftops to save him, that we see the genius of comedy and tragedy combined and working off each other almost seamlessly. Furthermore, the musical score added to the 1971 re-release, gives the emotional moments most of their energy.
For its age, The Kid holds up well, even among more modern classics, thanks to the convincing performances of both Chaplin and Coogan. There’s no doubt Coogan became an overnight star with this film, later going on to play Uncle Fester in the cult TV series, The Addams Family. Chaplin would later direct and write several other features, but The Kid will ultimately be one of his best examples of filmmaking, cited by many critics and filmgoers as the earliest example of a feature film classic. Let’s hope it remains as popular well into the twenty-first century.
Jacobs Reel Reviews 