It's hard not to like The Kid, with its old-fashioned yet endearing combination of pathos and humor.
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"The Kid," produced in 1921, was Charles Chaplin's first feature-length motion picture. Although he had been making short silent films for the previous half dozen years and he would appear in a few more short subjects thereafter, he had with "The Kid" firmly established himself as a major player in the movie business.
The picture also reaffirmed Chaplin's status as an auteur, a filmmaker whose total guidance of every element of production established his works' individuality. Once breaking away from Mack Sennett's Keystone Film Company in the mid teens, he wrote, produced, directed, and starred in virtually all of his movies, eventually building his own studio. So, as well as being a fine, funny, and moving film, "The Kid" may also find some appeal today for its purely historical value.
Probably as much or more of the movie's success must be attributed to Chaplin's costar, the kid of the title, five-year-old Jackie Coogan, who would grow up to be Uncle Fester on television's "Addams Family." After his rise to fame in "The Kid," Coogan became a sought-after child star for a few years, and then after falling into decline (and financial ruin), he made a slow but accomplished comeback as a character actor in his adult life. In Chaplin's film young Coogan is totally disarming, cute, and delightful. Chaplin is said to have hired him because of his ability to mimic anything the director told him to do.
In the story Chaplin naturally plays the Tramp, but this time his costar upstages him in every scene. A "woman whose sin was motherhood" abandons her baby with a note reading "Please love and care for this orphan child," and Charlie finds and unwillingly raises the kid for five years. Like it or not, the kid grows on him, and Charlie comes to love him as his own, as does the audience. The child at five years of age is played by young Coogan, who steals the picture.
Charlie teaches the kid to help them make a living as con artists, the child throwing rocks through people's windows and Charlie coming along to repair them. It's a shady enterprise and the only questionable issue in the narrative. Meanwhile, the mother rises to prominence as a stage entertainer, all the while regretting her giving up her child and looking constantly for him. By the end of the film, the welfare authorities catch up to Charlie and the kid and attempt to take the boy away to a county orphan asylum. But they have to fight the Tramp for him first.
As with most of Chaplin's work, just when you think things are going to turn maudlin and mushy, they don't. As Chaplin writes in the movie's forward, this is " A picture with a smile--and perhaps, a tear." True. And, mainly, we get the smiles. Even when Charlie and the kid are forcibly separated, a heartrending ordeal, the movie does not linger on the weepy details but pushes on. Nor are the gags as drawn out as they can be in many other Chaplin films; here, they are well paced and directly to the point, never overstepping their welcome.
There are some lovely, funny bits among the Tramp's and the kid's adventures, my favorites being those involving a policeman and his wife, a comic fight, and a scene in a flophouse. About the only thing that doesn't work very well is a concluding dream sequence. Chaplin, incidentally, looks not only younger and thinner in this film than we are used to seeing him later on, but his hair is fuller and his famous mustache thicker. Interestingly, too, I didn't for a moment miss the absence of dialogue, a sure sign the storytelling is on a high level.
Although the film was shot in 1921, the version we have here is the fiftieth-anniversary reissue, which Chaplin edited down from about sixty minutes to a little over fifty and to which he added an original musical score. The deleted scenes are included among the second disc's extras, and one can see why the director removed them because they don't add a lot to the narrative's focus. The new music is typically Chaplin, quite pleasant and jaunty when it needs to be and otherwise sentimental to a fault.
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[release]11970[/release]