The Kid (1921)
The Tramp reluctantly takes in an abandoned baby and raises the boy as his own, the two scraping by on a window-repair racket, until the child falls ill and the authorities and the mother who gave him up close in.
Chaplin’s first feature as a director, The Kid fused slapstick with open sentiment and made six-year-old Jackie Coogan the movies’ first great child star; it was added to the National Film Registry in 2011.
Background
The Kid was Chaplin’s first full-length film as a director, and it was made while he was going through a divorce and trying to keep his film safe from creditors; the story goes that he took the negative to Salt Lake City to finish editing it. Jackie Coogan, aged six at the time, plays the boy. The film’s opening title describes it as a picture “with a smile, and perhaps a tear”.
What to watch for
It was a huge success, and it made Coogan a star. He later became known for the “Coogan Act”, the California law protecting the earnings of child actors, after a dispute with his own mother, and in the 1960s he played Uncle Fester in The Addams Family. Look for the window-breaking scheme, the fight with the neighbourhood bully and the dream sequence in which the slum turns into heaven. The mixture of comedy and sentiment influenced many later films. It joined the National Film Registry in 2011.
