The Kid
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA, NR, 68 m/50 m (1971 reissue), 1921
Directed by Charles Chaplin. Stars Charles Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Jackie Coogan, et al.

Charles Chaplin originally conceived The Kid (its working title was The Waif) as a two-reeler, but he came to sense sometime during production that the material was strong enough to justify expanding it into six reels (or just over an hour). Grappling with both creative fatigue and the crushing loss of his three-day-old son, Chaplin saw The Kid as an opportunity to reinvigorate himself artistically and transmute his personal pain into something that would do more than offer his audience a good time—he wanted to stir their hearts. After a taxing, yearlong shoot (it wasn’t uncommon for Chaplin to come up with fifty or more permutations of a scene) and a thorny editing process (further complicated by his divorce from Mildred Harris, whose grasping lawyers wanted to attach the film with the rest of his assets), Chaplin at long last delivered his first feature. (Or, as the once panic-stricken First National Pictures declared, “Six Reels of Love.”) The Kid, a flawless blend of humor and pathos, was one of 1921’s biggest crowd-pullers (only The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse raked in more loot), firmly establishing Chaplin as the world’s preeminent entertainer. But half a century later, Chaplin, who was eager to share his oeuvre with a new generation of moviegoers, re-cut the picture, resulting in a version that was shorter and more efficient. (Most directors who revisit their work in their later years feel obligated to add footage.) He also devised a new score, which may have been partly inspired by a theme from Tchaikovsky’s 6^th Symphony, and added a handful of sound effects. He refrained from providing narration à la his 1942 edit of The Gold Rush, but his voice can be heard in The Kid’s heady orchestral accompaniment; it floods the images and takes them to dizzying emotional heights that a Wurlitzer just can’t seem to reach. 

It is the time of America’s Great Depression. A pretty stray (Edna Purviance, Chaplin’s favorite leading lady) is released from a charity hospital and turned into the world with a new baby boy (played by Baby Hathaway, a girl). Unable to care for the infant, she places him in the back seat of a limousine that sits in front of a swanky crib on the moneyed side of town. The car winds up being stolen by a couple of casehardened crooks, who deposit their pocket-sized cargo amongst the garbage cans in an alley somewhere in skid row. That’s, of course, where Chaplin’s Little Tramp lives. He waddles through the smog-enshrouded streets, blithely twirling his bamboo cane and collecting discarded cigar butts. His trademark bowler hat and baggy pants look even rattier than usual, but even the hardest of times can’t put a dent in this character’s weird resilience. His morning promenade is disrupted, though, when he hears the pitiful wails of the abandoned tot. After trying unsuccessfully to palm him off on a mother who’s out for a stroll with her own baby (as well as a fellow rolling stone with chin-whiskers that make Billy Gibbons look clean-cut by comparison), he discovers a note that has been slipped into the babe’s swaddling clothes. It reads, “Please love and care for this orphan child.” And so we learn the Tramp’s calloused front isn’t impenetrable: He brings the little fellow, whom he has named “John,” back to his crumbling garret, where he builds him a potty by cutting a hole in the seat of a broken down chair and placing a spittoon underneath it. Meanwhile, the unwed mother, having come to regret giving her baby away, returns to the neighborhood where she left him, only to discover that he’s long-gone and that she might never see him again. (The mother’s plight is underscored with heavy religious images such as Christ lugging his cross up Mount Calvary.) 

Five years pass. The Tramp and the Kid (beautiful Jackie Coogan) are thick as thieves—literally. They’ve become masters of the short con: the Kid keeps his surrogate father’s door-to-door glazing business in nickels and dimes by throwing rocks through windows. This leads to a few run-ins with a barrel-chested bluecoat (played by Tom Wilson, who, to Chaplin’s credit, is not presented as being entirely unsympathetic), setting the stage for some riotous slapstick routines. Meanwhile, the Kid’s mother has gone on to become a celebrated vocalist, and she gives back to the community by visiting the slums and handing out little gifts to the cherub-faced urchins. She comes upon the Kid as he’s hanging out on the front stoop of his tenement and gives him a stuffed animal that looks a bit like Nipper from Francis Barraud’s His Master’s Voice. The Kid reminds her of what she gave up way back when, and as she walks slowly and sadly away from the building and towards the camera, the Kid—her long-lost son—can be seen in the background waving good-bye to her. 

There are many parallels one can draw from The Kid to Chaplin’s own life, and this gives the film an extra layer of poignancy. Coogan represents what Chaplin’s firstborn son might have blossomed into had the poor thing not died so soon after birth, and the affection Chaplin felt for Coogan is obvious every time the Tramp gives the Kid a big hug and kiss. (This is one of the most endearing love stories to ever grace the silver screen.) The Tramp is very protective of the Kid; he’s the only thing in his life that has any real value. When the Kid gets in a scrape with the corner tough (Raymond Lee, who put me very much in the mind of one of the members of the Lollipop Guild from The Wizard of Oz), the Tramp tries frantically to break it up until he sees that his mini-me is whipping the bully’s skinny behind. He’s then inspired to take on the role of the Kid’s trainer and turn the street into an impromptu fight ring. But all the fun ‘n’ games come to a stop when the bully’s older brother, an impossibly pumped-up Bowery bum (played by actor/writer/director Charles Reisner, who worked as an assistant director on many Chaplin films, including The Gold Rush), shows up and puts a beating on the Tramp. (He also knocks out a cop and breaks a light pole in half.) Sometime during the mêlée, the Kid’s mother happens by and motivates the muscleman to do Jesus proud by putting down his fists and turning the other cheek. The Tramp uses his Goliath’s newfound pacifism as an opportunity to kick him in the ass (one of the Tramp’s patented moves) and crack him over the noggin repeatedly with a brick. 

The Kid’s first intertitle promises us “a picture with a smile and perhaps a tear.” Chaplin was being modest; it’s a picture with a thousand smiles and a thousand and one tears. When the Kid falls ill, the Tramp is forced to summon a physician, even though he knows it might put him in Dutch with the powers that be. Indeed, when the buttoned-up country doctor (Jules Hanft) learns that the Tramp isn’t the Kid’s legal guardian, he contacts the authorities. A few days later, the Kid (who has been brought back to good health by the doting Tramp) is forcibly removed from the loft by a welfare officer (tireless character actor Frank Campeau) and tossed into the back of a truck that’s bound for an orphan asylum. His face wet with grief and terror, the Kid pleads with the officer, only to be brutally slapped down. He then looks to the heavens and beseeches God to not let him be taken away from his foster daddy. When the Tramp, who is being restrained in his apartment by a policeman, hears his boy’s frightened cries, he calls upon every reserve of strength to break free of the cold meat hooks that bind him and escape through a hatch in the ceiling. With the baton-wielding copper in tight pursuit, the Tramp leaps from rooftop to rooftop, trying desperately to keep up with the truck as it motors along the street below. When he finally catches up to the truck, he jumps into the back and tosses out the welfare officer. The driver slams on the brakes, but just as he’s about to pick up where the officer left off, he gets a good look at the Tramp’s crazy eyes and flees. The Tramp and the Kid share a tearful, triumphant embrace; their blissful reunion is the film’s emotional climax. As a single father of a two-year-old boy, I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff, and The Kid makes me weep every time I watch it. (As do similarly themed films like The Bicycle Thief and The Pursuit of Happyness.) 

As the Kid, Jackie Coogan gives what may be the strongest (and most natural) supporting performance in any Chaplin film. Dressed in saggy hand-me-downs that accentuate his tender years, he’s an adorable ragamuffin. But there’s nothing cloying or ingratiating about him (which is often the case with child performers); he is virtually unaffected and has a heartbreakingly sweet, pure aura. His range is impressive: he moves from fluffy slapstick to intense drama with a grace that only Chaplin himself can rival. These two virtuoso mimes share a great rapport; it’s intimate but also genially competitive. Chaplin was Coogan’s key mentor, but Coogan received further coaching on the set of The Kid by his own father, Jack Coogan, Sr., who makes an uncredited appearance as a pickpocket. In hindsight, it wasn’t appropriate casting: Jackie Coogan’s mother and stepfather mismanaged (read: heartlessly squandered) most of the money he made from The Kid, My Boy, Oliver Twist, and other pictures. His subsequent lawsuit against them led to the creation of the Coogan Act, which to this day protects a child actor’s paycheck by placing it in a trust fund and out of the hands of acquisitive parents. Though his career floundered after he returned from fighting in WWII, Coogan would eventually enjoy a comeback in his early-fifties when he was cast as Uncle Fester in “The Addams Family.” 

When Chaplin reedited The Kid in 1971, most of the footage he cut out had to do with the mother as she dealt with the pain of having deserted her baby. Chaplin probably found those scenes repetitive, to which I would concur if their exclusion didn’t lessen the impact of seeing the mother reunited with her son at the end of the movie. The focus in the ‘71 version stays mostly on the Tramp and the Kid, which is probably where it belongs, though there are still moments (such as the Tramp flirting with a winged temptress—twelve-year-old Lita Grey, the director’s future ex-wife #2 and inspiration for Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita—in a rather bizarre dream sequence) that feel a bit incongruous. Still, I have a soft spot for those diversionary bits of business, and dispensing with even one frame would be akin to plucking a faintly wilted petal from an otherwise perfect rose. Despite its imperfections (or maybe because of them), The Kid is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. 

February 14, 2009

“The Kid” Review. © Copyright 2009 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved. 

Charlie and Jackie on the set of The Kid.