Le Kid

A very poor woman (Edna Purviance) can't take care of her baby and therefore she puts him in the back of a car, hoping someone will take good care of him. By a coincidence the kid ends up in the arms of a tramp, played by Charlie Chaplin of course, and he finds a note that asks if someone will take care of the orphan child. The tramp takes the job and the story continues five years later.

We see how the tramp and the kid (now played by Jackie Coogan) live and love each other, how they have little sneaky plans to earn money, how they belong to each other. In the meanwhile the woman has become rich and when she does a little charity for the poor she meets the kid not knowing it is hers.

This is a great feature film with Chaplin as the tramp. He composed the music himself as well and it fits the story perfectly. The kid is very good and he does a great job in scenes where kids can easily overreact. There is one great sequence where the tramp is in dreamland and every single person is an angel. This could have been a great movie on its own. As the film says in the first seconds, 'The Kid' is good for a laugh and perhaps a tear.

It takes your breath away over 100 years later so imagine how it must have felt walking out of a picture house in 1921! Quite rightly considered a work of genius by a genius, you must have a heart of stone if the story depicted fails to move you but when you consider the way it's presented, the music, the choreography, the longevity - then it really does become something a bit special indeed.

Charlie Chaplin's study of a tramp teaming up with a street kid (the cute little Jackie Coogan) has a fine line to tread between humour and pathos, and true to what you would expect of his best work, does it superbly. The tramp always manages to wring the hearts of his viewers and adding a little boy to the mix was the finishing touch. Look out too for little Lita Grey in the angel sequence, who would become Chaplin's 2nd wife four years after this film was made.

Charlie Chaplin was perhaps the most innovative auteur of the silent era and certainly the most famous. His character, the Tramp, is now a cultural icon and will forever be a symbol of poverty and travesty that was American society in the early 20th century, but something all of us can overcome.

In one of his first roles with this character, he played opposite a very young Jackie Coogan, who would go on to play Uncle Fester in the cult TV series The Addams Family. Taking himself and this very talented young boy, Chaplin made a masterwork; one that he truly could call his own as he wrote, directed, starred in and composed the score for this film.

Here, Chaplin feeds to one of the most basic of all human desires: to care for a child and be needed and loved by one another. The Tramp finds an abandoned baby in an alley and in order to not be caught by a policeman he takes the child in as his own. He hasn't got much but he does have love, which is more than can be said for the child's mother.

Flash forward five years, and now the mother wants her son back. Circumstances arise and soon the Tramp is fighting for the right to keep his little companion. Even so, the story is thin but I believe Chaplin was going for something more deep and meaningful. This also gave him a chance to work on some different visual styles and comedic gimmicks, things not used much at the time in the movies. Using these little tricks and ideas, Chaplin creates a real persona not just for himself but also the supporting cast and involving us in the story.

However, at the heart of the story are the emotions about fighting for the right to be a parent/guardian; someone the kid can look up to and sleep beside and confide in. It tugs at your heart all while making you laugh, sometimes in the same scene. This shows the work of a true genius; someone who knew what he wanted to create and the style in which he wanted to portray it.

Chaplin plays the Tramp, who stumbles upon an abandoned baby, which he reluctantly raises. Five years later, he and the boy (Jackie Coogan) live a hard-scrabble life, but they have each other. When the child welfare department decides to take the boy, the Tramp takes him on the run, but some things are not meant to be. Also featuring Edna Purviance, Carl Miller, Lita Grey, and Jackie Coogan Sr.

Chaplin's patented mix of slapstick humor, honest humanity, and shameless sentimentality are put on fine display here. The running time is slight (the version I watched was 53 minutes), but it seems just about right. The story is simple, the characters are basic and no more than necessary to tell the tale. Jackie Coogan was easily one of the best child actors in the history of film, extremely adorable without being precious, and immensely talented. Chaplin would continue to grow artistically, but this is the bridge from his early, Mack Sennett-era silliness and his later, multi-dimensional masterworks.