The Kid (1921)

Originally posted to Facebook on 3/2/2017

The Kid was our first film from 1921, and our third feature starring Charlie Chaplin. But it actually feels more like our first proper Chaplin film, because the first (1914’s Tillie’s Punctured Romance, which some claim is the first surviving feature length comedy) was before Chaplin had really refined his screen persona, and the second (1918’s Shoulder Arms) was only forty-five minutes long, and was more akin to some of his shorts than a full-length movie. The version of The Kid that we saw was actually somewhat edited by Chaplin himself in 1971, apparently to remove a few scenes in which he didn’t appear. The main victim of this editing according to the internet was his regular female costar Edna Purviance. His other co-star -- the title character -- was Jackie Coogan, the archetypal child actor who was cheated out of his earnings by his parents. He also famously starred as Uncle Fester in the 1960s TV version of The Addams Family, and continued appearing in movies up through the 1980s. The clarity of the print was unusually sharp, possibly due to its popularity and various re-releases over the years, and it was the most relaxed of Chaplin’s films that we’ve seen, with fewer acrobatic or closely-timed sequences than usual. Most of the comedy was of a domestic sort, with Chaplin trying to raise Coogan in a less-than-ideal fashion, after finding him abandoned as a baby. The most elaborate bit is a dream sequence in which Chaplin imagines himself in a sort of an urban heaven. I didn’t find the movie enormously amusing, but it was pleasant and charming, and certainly showed Chaplin’s increasingly polished style. Additionally Coogan was not as annoying as you might imagine a young child in this sort of role might be.

Our next film from 1921 is Tol’able David, which stars Richard Barthelmess, whom we saw just last week as the male lead in Way Down East. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT