The Kid is an unerring film of the Chaplin oeuvre from 1921, when the freshness of his appeal was still to meet its apex in masterworks such as City Lights, and his genius as a silent comedian of the cinema, as capable of evoking pathos as hearty laughter, had yet to overtake humankind. Though the runtime of the film barely exceeds sixty minutes, a density of feeling and action in so brief a time is a rarity that Chaplin undertakes, delivering to his audience this spectacle of the streets.
From a charity hospital a woman exits, carrying an infant that is to become a foundling; this is confirmed by the revelation of her sin, which is that of “motherhood”; and the sympathies of Chaplin are revealed thereafter, with the intercutting of a crucifix borne by Christ upon a mountain. This infant she deposits into a vehicle, and then dawdles to a park where she sits on a bench in her newfound desolation. This vehicle in whose backseat the infant has begun to pule is stolen by two brigands, and shortly after hearing these merciless cries they move the infant to a congeries of refuse, where he remains until the tramp can happen upon him on his “morning promenade”. The Tramp swaggers between buildings, avoiding torrents of the refuse discarded from windows. After being hit, he stops beside the infant.
There begins the first of his encounters with the law, embodied by a diffuse contingent of policemen coercing him into obedience or flight–the former of which prevails as he picks up the infant, more out of curiosity than solicitude, and having tried to discard it, discovers a policeman towering over him. After another attempt to foist the infant on a mother who thrashes him, he relents, deciding to take up this destiny of fatherhood. In the next scene, after giving the foundling the name of John, the tramp is seen tickling the swaddled infant, feeding him by the suspension of a teapot, and cutting a hole in a chair beneath which is the bedpan. So it is—a makeshift toilet for the trainee.
Jackie Coogan, playing the foundling some five years on, excels in his rascally performance as the Tramp’s sidekick, modulating between the mischief and intimacy that his relationship with the Tramp entails. The Tramp’s vocation, in which he repairs windows broken by the mischief of Coogan, is divided into two thrilling sequences: in both they evade the policemen, stalking the streets with a grandiose idleness, and later return to their garret for a meal of amorphous meat taken from a steaming pot. The non-diegetic music, both sorrowful and jocund, is pleasing in the medium shots of the garret, which is measureless because of the charming efficiency of their diurnal routines. Their interactions contain an ease and familiarity that make their relationship believable, cheeky, and even touching; as in the best of the Chaplin films, the counterpoise of comedy and pathos is as idiosyncratic as art, and as tickling as slapstick.
The tumult of the story continues to the end when, after a separation following the reunion of mother and son, the Tramp and the kid are united in this intertwining of their lives. However brief the film, the delicacy of a dessert awaits the viewer who experiences this succession of events, banal in themselves, as uninteresting as any summary, but invigorated by the precise acting and the ebullient characters. These are bursting, drowsing, hitting, and flying into the dance of life and living, in the midst of dire squalor. No poverty could be more enriching.
