The Kid (1921)

Film: The Kid

Director: Charlie Chaplin

Country: UK

Released: January 1921

Runtime: 53 minutes

Genre: Comedy

Studio: Charles Chaplin Productions

Influenced: Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Billy Wilder, Fellini, Penny Marshall

The Kid is Chaplin's first feature-length film and arguably the most personal and heartfelt of all his movies. For me, it's cinema perfection – balancing comedy, sentimentality and drama like no other Chaplin movie. Taking the star role in the film is The Tramp (or "little fellow" as Chaplin called him), who with his outsized shoes & trousers, pencil moustache, tiny jacket and twirling cane, had become a well-loved character with audiences after appearing in various short silent films since 1914.

Also taking star billing in the film is Jackie Coogan as The Kid, Chaplin's only true co-star throughout his career, a vaudeville actor and mimic aged just 6 when this film was released in early 1921. Important context to watching The Kid is that it was made out of acute emotional turmoil for Chaplin, following estrangement from his wife Mildred and the death of his son (The Little Mouse) at just 3 days old in 1919. Ten days after the tragic event, Chaplin would start production for this movie.

As well as depicting the relationship between father & (surrogate) son, the film is also a way for Chaplin to redeem the memory of his mother and the hardship she went through when Charlie was taken away from her by social services aged 7 and put in a home. That trauma is relived in The Kid when the authorities come to take the boy away from The Tramp, with the aim of putting him in an orphanage. At the end of the movie, the Dreamland sequence and the sight of The Kid being reunited with his mother is enough to melt the hardest of hearts. It's the perfect counterbalance to earlier, memorable comic moments such as the slapstick of the window repairs and the iconic pancake scene. 

The Kid apparently took 9 months to make, with Chaplin dogged in his perfectionism like never before in his career, shooting more than 50 times the reel length of the actual film and editing it in secret to avoid any legal claims on its proceeds from his estranged wife. In the version of the film in my much-loved Curzon Charlie Chaplin Collection, there is a new score that was recorded for the film that makes it even more enjoyable to watch. At the time, The Kid was an instant triumph everywhere, and its legacy extends beyond its cinematic greatness, helping to usher in the Coogan Act, which created protections for child stars so that no-one else would have their finances mismanaged like Jackie. 

It's also the perfect evocation of Victorian London, from South London's most famous son. As Chaplin put it in his autobiography: "I had known London as a struggling young nondescript from Lambeth; now as a man celebrated and rich I would be seeing London as though for the first time."