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…
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Joe Franklin writes in Classics of the Silent Screen that “along with Griffith, Stroheim, Keaton and Fairbanks, Chaplin remains one of the half-dozen immortals of the American screen,” delimiting a pantheon that has since grown while retaining its primary figures, of whom Chaplin is one of the greatest.[1] By 1936 Chaplin had established an oeuvre that universalized the tramp, the duck-footed vagrant with floppy shoes and a cane, so that as he approached the creation of Modern Times his reputation as a movie icon could never have been in doubt. But his reputation, however unassailable, confronted during these years an existential dilemma posed by the tidal powers of cinema itself:…
