The Kid

The Kid (1921) is about a tramp raising a baby he finds in the street, and it is Chaplin's first feature. A woman leaves her baby in a car; the car is stolen and the child ends up in the street. The tramp finds him, tries to leave him somewhere, fails, and takes him home. Five years pass. They work together: the boy breaks windows with stones and the tramp comes down the street as a glazier. Officials from the orphanage break up the arrangement and come to take the child. That separation is among the best known moments in cinema. The boy reaches out from the back of a lorry while the tramp runs across the rooftops. The story behind it is separate. Chaplin's son Norman died three days after he was born. The loss shook him badly. Ten days after the death he began auditioning child actors at his studio, and in that period he saw four year old Jackie Coogan on a stage in Los Angeles. So the story of an abandoned child and a lonely man was begun ten days after the death of a child. Coogan was six when he played it and became cinema's first child star. Years later, discovering that his family had spent his earnings, he sued; the case produced a Californian law protecting child performers' income, and it still carries his name. A title card at the start calls it a picture with a smile, and perhaps a tear. It is silent. It runs 68 minutes. Good for: Chaplin, silent cinema, and classics. Less good for: the melodrama runs high and the dream sequence sits apart from the story.