The Kid (1921)

★ 8.1 1h 8m 2,348 votes IMDb

A tramp cares for a boy after he's abandoned as a newborn by his mother. Later the mother has a change of heart and aches to be reunited with her son.

The Kid

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Cast

Charlie Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin as A Tramp Died 1977 · Walworth, London, England, UK Charles “Charlie” Chaplin (April 16, 1889 – December 25, 1977) was an English comic actor, film director and composer best-known for his work during the silent film era. He used mime, slapstick and ot...
Jackie Coogan
Jackie Coogan as The Kid Died 1984 · Los Angeles, California, USA John Leslie Coogan (October 26, 1914 – March 1, 1984), known professionally as Jackie Coogan, was an American actor who began his movie career as a child actor in silent films. Many years later, he be...
Carl Miller
Carl Miller as The Man Died 1979 · Wichita County, Texas, USA Carl Miller (August 9, 1894 – January 20, 1979) was an American film actor. He appeared in 48 films from 1917 to 1942, and he remains perhaps best known for his roles in two Charlie Chaplin films: The...
Edna Purviance
Edna Purviance as The Woman Died 1958 · Paradise Valley, Nevada, USA ​From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Edna Purviance (October 21, 1895 – January 11, 1958) was an American actress during the silent movie era. She was the leading lady in many Charlie Chaplin movie...
Albert Austin
Albert Austin as Car Thief / Man in Shelter (uncredited) Died 1953 · Birmingham, England, UK Albert Austin (13 December 1881 or 1885 – 17 August 1953) was an actor, film star, director and script writer, noted mainly for his work in Charlie Chaplin films. He was the brother of actor William A...
Beulah Bains
Beulah Bains as Bride (uncredited) Died 1930 · Fort Bend County, Texas, USA Beulah Bains was born in 1905 in Fort Bend County, Texas, USA. She was an actress, known for The Charm School (1921). She died on 16 August 1930 in Banning, California, USA..

Audience Reviews

Andres Gomez 8/10 Feb 25, 2016
Cute and funny. It is difficult to say anything new from this movie or Charles Chaplin. He just delivers a complete story with a lot of different elements. Remarkable is also the performance of Jackie Coogan.
barrymost 6/10 Jul 28, 2021
If you enjoy this review, please check out my blog, Old Hat Cinema, at https://oldhatcinema.medium.com/ for more reviews and other cool content.

Two Little Tramps

The most amazing thing about Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid is that it was released in January of 1921. That makes this film 100 years old! A century has gone by since it was made, released, and first viewed, and yet it’s still available to be appreciated anew today. The DVD print that I watched was in very good shape, the picture was great, and I felt that I was watching an important piece of cinema history.

However, The Kid is by no means one of my favorite Chaplin films. In fact, two out of my top three aren’t even silent films, but prime examples of Chaplin’s later work: Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Limelight (1952). And my third favorite, the 1936 masterpiece Modern Times, is only two-thirds silent!

The plot of the film is quite simple: our beloved Little Tramp finds another little tramp, and and raises the foundling as his own. Years pass, and together, they rise above their life of poverty through the power of love and comedy.

“Professionally funny” is a phrase that I thought a fitting description of Chaplin. He was an artistic genius, and he knew what he was doing and how to engage an audience. In fact, this was his first feature-length film, and he took a whopping five-and-a-half months to shoot it, which was an incredible amount of time for a film production in 1921. Chaplin, of course, not only starred, but wrote, directed, produced, and scored the film!

Jackie Coogan was fantastic as “the Kid”, displaying a wide range of emotion and deftly tugging at the viewer’s heartstrings. His father, Jack Coogan, Sr., coached his son during filming and was paid $125 a week by Chaplin, and also played several small parts within the movie.
Chaplin and Coogan in The Kid (1921)

It is said that Chaplin and Coogan were as close off-screen as on, and every Sunday during the first few weeks of filming, Chaplin would take the boy to the amusement park or other fun activities. This relationship was seen as either an attempt on Chaplin’s part to reclaim his own unhappy childhood, or possibly he was just thinking about his own son whom he had lost, having died three days after birth.

The Kid features a truly bizarre dream sequence in which the Tramp falls asleep on his doorstep and dreams of everyone — including himself — as an angel or demon.

He envisions himself as an angel, with white, feathery wings spread out behind him, and a harp in his hand. Others, including a neighborhood bully, appear as demons, depicted traditionally in dark (presumably red) attire and horns atop their heads. Even a little dog, suspended on wires, comes floating by in a little angel costume!

It’s one of the strangest and most inexplicable dream sequences I’ve seen in a film, and yet it is oddly captivating.

The technical aspects in this film — both in the dream sequence and in the rest of the movie — are marvelous when one considers that it was made a hundred years ago, when the movie medium itself was less than thirty years old.

Whether or not it is one of Chaplin’s greatest works is up to the individual viewer, but you cannot deny that it is a landmark movie, and holds an important place in the history of American cinema. It deserves a look, maybe even more than one. As the opening title card reads, it’s “a picture with a smile — and perhaps, a tear.”
CinemaSerf 8/10 Jul 14, 2024
An impoverished woman (Edna Purviance) feels compelled to abandon her child in the hope that he might find a better life - so she leaves him (with a short note) in the back of a car. The two men who find the little bundle don't want anything to do with him, so plonk him down behind some rubbish where de is discovered by the tramp (Charlie Chaplin). Now he's not that keen on children either, but the presence of an attentive policeman means can't just leave his new package in the pram of a woman nearby. Skip on five years and the two have become quite a formidable double act - the lad (Jackie Coogan) chucks stones at windows and his father-figure does the mending! Meantime, the mother finds success treading the boards and the boy's real father, likewise, succeeds - but that relationship is toast and she gradually starts to pine for and then search for her lost child. When the authorities cotton on to the lucrative acts of vandalism of the two, they attempt to seize the kid and put him in an orphanage - and that's when things all start to come to an head. There's a delightful bond that develops here between Chaplin and the enthusiastic young Coogan with Chaplin's direction showcasing both their skills and the extent of the poverty amidst which they lived and which drove people to make horrendous decisions to part with their children. The ending is exactly as it should be, so don't go expecting much jeopardy on that front - and the scenes with the angelic wings towards the end mix determination and comedy effectively, too. It makes you smile and pulls at the heart strings and is truly a classic piece of cinema.

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