The Kid is Charlie Chaplin’s first feature-length film. After nearly a decade of assorted twenty and thirty minute frivolities, it clocks in at a mighty sixty-eight minutes! That double what A Dog’s Life boasted, and it allows Chaplin to hunker down with essentially the same concept – the Tramp and his small charge living in poverty (here Chaplin trades up, from dog to child) – only developed with greater detail than ever. A Dog’s Life was rather the perfect length for a Tramp comedy, really, yet The Kid effectively doubles its time by doing twice the genres: comedy and drama. This is perhaps Chaplin’s hugest contribution to the world of filmed comedy – the dramedy. That’s most appropriate for the man synonymous with pathos, and it’s perhaps only by my own compulsion to read these things primarily as comedies that I don’t often think of Chaplin as a dramatist.
It is inarguably The Kid’s aim to accomplish this unlikely union of the serious and the silly, as that is its admission right there at the top. Silent film titles allow the storyteller to directly address the audience far more effectively than talkies. This is a little too on the nose, but for the first time out it’s necessary to alert audiences what sort of tonal experience they’re in for.
The predicament: A Woman (Edna Purviance) has an unwanted newborn baby boy, and tries to abandon it with a wealthy family, and hope for the best. Through a series of semi-comic blunders, the baby instead winds up in the charge of the Tramp, who at least lives indoors now. Five years pass, the child grows into young Jackie Coogan (also TV’s Uncle Fester!), happily conning window-owners with the Tramp. Then outside forces, from crooks to well-meaning bureaucrats, conspire to separate this unofficial father-son ragtag team.
The move to relative dramatics is essential; at feature length, the style of comedy of even Chaplin’s more dour shorts would seem flippant. Other silent comedians graduating to features would sometimes add on other genres – the 1920s are host to a surprisingly large number of comic action-thrillers, from Safety Last! to The General. Or they would use drama to up the stakes in what would otherwise be featherweight comic shenanigans. Chaplin, rather, seems to embrace drama more wholeheartedly than the others.
The thing is, this is silent era drama, a most melodramatic beast indeed. Drama is tricky, as it’s sort of a-generic – comedy seeks laughs, action thrills, horror frights. Drama simply seeks emotion of some sort, in a more broad sense. Comedy works in silence, because there is a regularized output (jokes) which aren’t hurt by the necessarily stylized acting silence demands. The other genre genres work similarly – witness Nosferatu’s eeriness, or the thrills of an old Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckler. Silent dramas work when trading in spectacle – Intolerance – but they’re the hardest antiquated film form to take seriously today.
The Kid, lacking in spectacle by its domestic setting, opts for the melodramatic histrionics of silent drama, for want of a different tact. This form of drama traffics in being overwrought – Assuming an immediate connection with the characters on screen, the story will start indiscriminately ladling out tragedies and diseases and oh so many other unpleasantries, resulting in tear showers the likes of which A Dog’s Life so effectively mocked. It’s sort of that way with the introductory sequence with the baby-abandoning Woman. An early title asserts “Her only sin was motherhood.” (Funny, spell check wants me to change “sin” to “son.”) Sorry to differ, but her undiscussed sin is abandoning a newborn child in the ghetto. And yet, we’re supposed to immediately feel pity for the Woman. There’s not enough context to really understand her motivation, besides poverty, so one only assumes child abandonment was a regular enough part of the 1921 audience’s existence (Great Depression and all) for them to relate.
Once the youth winds up with the Tramp, the natural emissary of comedy, things improve mightily. The Tramp is a figure of fun – this fact is so ingrained in viewers’ knowledge by now that he needs even no introduction prior to discovering the tot amidst the ash and soot. His first non-cannibalistic impulse is the same as ours would be upon finding an alley baby – he tries to get rid of it. Ye gods, the instinct is spreading!
Actually, this yields a most amusing routine, with the baby acting as an unwanted prop the Tramp fails to squander off on assorted Depression Era urban archetypes. The kick comes from how serious the situation is. Adding a baby gives the Tramp’s antics weight, edging things ever so slightly into dark comedy. Hey, that’s a pretty good example of how the drama improves the comedy, at the least! And there’s always that reassurance that nothing dire will happen to the child, that indeed the Tramp shall concede and unofficially adopt it – now christened John. (That the Tramp never seems to consider an orphanage seems curious – not knowing the social realities of the time – but the fact is we must saddle him with a child for this movie to play out, so on with the show.)
Once John has aged into his five-year-old self, The Kid’s meat is upon us. “Father” and “son” roam the city in a variation on the usual Tramp antics, a sort of unofficial comedy duo – it helps immensely that Coogan was already quite familiar with vaudeville by this stage. Many scenes feel, on the face of it, not unlike what a Tramp short would offer up: taking unfair advantage of homeowners to make a buck, or antagonizing the local derby-clad tough (a disproportioned period type I can only associate with cartoon bulldogs). The comedy is winning enough, I suppose, in that gentle Chaplinesque sort of way – never aggressive, more eager for a smile than a guffaw. Dramatic seriousness has waned notably, doing a disservice to the comedy…for now.
(It somewhat bothers me that the Tramp is so unashamedly crooked or dishonest in his own dealings. Perhaps it’s a condition of his impoverished existence, or a way for audiences to feel that he’s getting one better on the supposed suppressor forces in their lives, but it makes the Tramp – for me – a little less likable. Contrast him to the perfectly middleclass Harold Lloyd, also hugely popular in his day, though Lloyd’s Everymen have the advantage of financial comfort.)
There is some drama left, drama now pertaining to the Tramp himself. Playing his standard comic bits with John builds their relationship subtly, creating much more specific, rich bonds than a full-fledged period drama could. It’s the “honey on the wormwood” to draw audiences in for the inevitable heartstring tugging. Many of the best works of humor – I’m thinking partly of “Don Quixote” – sneak deeper emotions up on you, by investing the lead characters with purely humorous traits at first, until the reader (viewer, whomever) cares for them anyway. I don’t begrudge this approach, it can be remarkably effective. (One reason television comedies, with the advantage of time, can be so effecting.) The Tramp, as a recurring character, accomplishes largely the same response.
There is no doubt that John and the Tramp love each other very much. With enough setup, that allows for some genuine threats to enter their existence, right around the time something like A Dog’s Life would be wrapping up. Interesting, how every time increase inspires in Chaplin an entirely new style of comedy. Mind you, that’s with over half an hour devoted entirely to the Tramp and John. Despite the presence of Purviance, there is no attempt at a romantic subplot, or anything that would distract from the central fatherly relationship.
So a few plot complications later, and the authorities catch wind of the tenuousness of John’s existence. It’s not the poverty that’s an issue (pointed commentary…unintentionally?), but the mere fact that the Tramp seems to simply have the boy, for no justifiably good reason. Their dire threat: To shanghai John off to the orphanage, and find a well-to-do family for him. All well and good, except it undermines the emotional bond John has formed.
John is taken away…and the Tramp gives chase. What follows is another example of comedy working best when there’s some seriousness underlying it: The Tramp, desperate to get his child back, outpaces the orphanage’s paddy wagon across the rooftops, police chasing, until he leaps into the speeding vehicle, fights off the interlopers, and escapes. In a different film it would read as an action sequence, but in context it is tragicomic. And the duo’s reunion, after even so short a separation, is all the more rewarding for the emotions involved.
It’s inevitable that John cannot remain the Tramp’s forever, as their subsequent itinerant existence between flophouses isn’t sustainable. Thanks be again to the gods of coincidental melodramatic plotting, John is destined to be reunited with his original mother – the one so abandonment-happy at the outset. She has, in the meantime, endured a largely unseen drama of her own (one imagines a more generic picture of the era chronicling this), having in five years risen from the gutter and somehow become a singing sensation superstar. It’s oh so convenient, that John is destined to go live in a shiny gilded mansion, that promise of ostentatious riches this era’s films always tempt viewers with. It seems…willfully perverse to excuse initial abandonment with subsequent wealth. Odd too that John won’t be happy without the Tramp unless he’s obscenely rich. This matter of money seems really disingenuous, in the context of things.
The Tramp, meanwhile, doesn’t know what’s happened to John for various ostensibly comic reasons. Then Chaplin allows himself one truly unexpected detour, as the Tramp dreams on a stoop in his loneliness…and pictures his slum as Heaven, everyone in the most by-the-books angel outfits possible – even the Tramp, derby and baggy pants still forever there along with his wings and harp. The image alone must be what sustains comedy in this section – presumably – or otherwise it’s a parody of some long-dead form of entertainment, or something. As a dramatization of the Tramp’s emotional state, it reveals little. I’m not sure what to make of it, except Chaplin needed a definitive climax for his low key, bittersweet dramedy, and happened upon a sub-hallucinatory passion play for whatever reason.
Then, like the ending of Monsters Inc., our hero, denied a lifetime with his child, at least gets one final heartwarming reunion. All is well. It’s a strong way to end the movie, reinforcing the Chaplin/Coogan team up.
Thematically, this was no doubt a hugely personal film for Chaplin, in the wake of his own impoverished London childhood. Such experiences, and Chaplin’s rise to international stardom, perhaps excuse some of the Algerian (that is, Horatio Alger, not Algeria) money-gazing which often resolves his stories. More immediately, Chaplin’s firstborn infant had died just before The Kid was made, and his inner turmoil is certainly present on film. This accounts for the unusually vulnerable state of the Tramp, the matter of a master clown infusing greater humanity into his central creation without ever sacrificing what makes him funny.
The Kid was the result of a two-year downtime for Chaplin, who hadn’t put out a film since 1919. This shows incredible faith on the part of First National Pictures, confident that Chaplin’s cachet would persist into the twenties. They were right – in spades! The Kid was the second highest grosser of 1921 (one can only guess what a high gross looked like in those days), behind only The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Chaplin produced a few more short films for First National – The Idle Class, Pay Day, The Pilgrim – over the next two years. He was growing less prolific, certainly in contrast to the heady ‘10s. But Chaplin’s artistic heyday was just beginning, as even more freedom would soon be his.
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