Charlie Chaplin had been making films in the U.S. for over five years by the time he decided to make his first feature-length film. The result was The Kid, released in 1921 and one of his most enduring works.
The Kid is one of those silent classics where even if you have never seen the entire movie - which runs barely an hour in the familiar 1971 cut Chaplin made - you have seen stills or clips. It feels impossible for anyone to have lived without seeing the image of Chaplin’s Tramp sitting in a doorframe with Jackie Coogan as The Kid. How could anyone avoid seeing the scene of Coogan in the back of a paddy-wagon, crying out for The Tramp? These images were created over 95 years ago, but they are still important to film as an art form and language.
The story of The Kid is incredibly simple. It starts out with The Woman (Edna Purviance) leaving a charity hospital and having to give up her child. After two car thieves drop the baby in an alley, The Tramp finds him and ultimately decides to raise him as his own. As The Child (Coogan) grows up, the two become a team and develop the unbreakable bond as father and son. Meanwhile, The Woman has also become a wealthy celebrity and now devotes her free time to charity. She misses her own child and hopes to reunite with him somehow.
Although Chaplin had been taking his audience in this direction in shorts prior to the film, The Kid is really where Chaplin’s inventive mix of drama and comedy came together. In one moment, we find gags where Chaplin and Coogan play tricks on a police officer. Seconds later, Chaplin moves us to tears by splitting The Tramp from The Kid. Amazingly, this all works because Chaplin has his drama as well thought out as his comedy. Coogan and Chaplin have such great chemistry that we buy into distress the characters feel when they are torn apart. The ease with which Chaplin moved from comedy to drama would be a mainstay for the rest of his career, but it's hard to see how that would have happened if it didn't work in The Kid.
The Kid is finally available on Blu-ray in the U.S. thanks to the Criterion Collection, which has been working with the Chaplin estate to make his films available again. While some might have hoped for The Kid to be part of a larger package with other Chaplin shorts, Criterion has opted to give the film a stand-alone release. In fact, the bonus features don’t even include any of Chaplin’s best-known shorts. Instead, there’s a collection of newly-produced features, including a fascinating mini-biography on Coogan and his often tragic life. (Coogan is actually responsible for the laws in California that govern how child stars are used in Hollywood to this day.)
The Kid is a fascinating film not only for its mix of comedy and drama, but for Chaplin’s decision to forgo romance while still focusing on love in the story. It’s about the love felt between a father and son, even if they are not biologically linked. Seeing as how this is a universal concept that hasn’t gone anywhere, The Kid remains a fresh and fun movie all these years later.
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