THE KID

I'm a Keaton guy and so I have never got around to watching any of Chaplin's feature length films before now.  This is his first, from 1921, and the first of five films to feature The Tramp.

It takes a while for Chaplin to appear because first we meet an unmarried mother, who is forced to abandon her baby.  Instead of leaving it outside an orphanage, say, she leaves it in the back seat of a car, although admittedly it is outside a mansion.  How is she to know that almost immediately the car will get stolen?  Anyway, as a result, the baby ends up being looked after by The Tramp.

In these early scenes there are a couple of odd moments when the mother is linked to religious imagery.  I can only assume that this is meant to indicate that despite being an unmarried mother she is a good person.

We then flash forward five years, and the baby is now The Kid.  He and Charlie have a good scam going whereby The Kid breaks windows so that Charlie can then turn up and get paid for putting in replacements.  

Very implausibly, the mother is now a rich and successful actress, whilst the father of The Kid, equally implausibly, is now a successful painter.  They meet accidentally and it seems that they might get back together if only they could locate their child.

Later on, in doing some charity work the mother meets The Kid, although of course without realising who he is.  It's a nice scene, even if it turns out to be irrelevant in terms of the story's resolution.

To remind us that this is a comedy we get an amusing sequence kicked off by The Kid getting into a scrap with another street urchin.

Then things get serious when the authorities step in and try to take The Kid away to an orphanage.  Although Charlie manages to thwart this temporarily it's not long before The Kid is reunited with his mother.

Charlie, having spent the night in vain searching for The Kid, falls asleep and has a surreal dream in which all his neighbours are angels.  There's some mildly amusing moments such as Charlie getting wings himself, and then some devils stirring up mischief, before Charlie is woken up.

And then quite abruptly, Charlie is taken to the mother's mansion, to be reunited with The Kid.

The End.

It's a rather ambiguous ending but I guess we are meant to take it that Charlie will live there happily as a kind of godfather to The Kid. Although given that The Tramp is essentially a loner and a misfit I can’t really see this setup working out well.

The standout performance in the film is Jackie Coogan as the titular character, and the relationship between him and The Tramp is an endearing one.

The story is quite weak in places, especially the abrupt ending, and I can't say that there's a lot of comic invention so how many laughs there are depends on whether you find The Tramp inherently funny, which I don't.

So it's an OK film which I am glad to have seen given its reputation, but it's no 'Sherlock Jr' for sure.