The Kid (1921)

Little adorable Jackie Coogan stars as "The Kid," an orphan whose mother (Edna Purviance) is cruelly turned out of an unwed mother's home, to walk, zombie-like, down the street, cradling her unwanted infant, and finally abandoning it in the back of a car. Thus was pity and compassion demonstrated by the Powers That Be in those august, halcyon days.

Two gun-toting hoodlums steal the car and soon discover they've absconded with more than just a souped-up hot vehicle. They abandon the little bawling tyke on a construction site, wherein enters Charlie the "Little Tramp," who, despite his odd, shabby appearance, lights his cigarette with real panache. While staring at the audience mind you, in a very interesting little shot.

He discovers the baby, panics, and tries to fob it off on first a mother pushing a pram, and then what appears to be a fellow vagrant. A policeman intervenes when Charlie attempts to ditch the kid, and finally, the heart of the Little Tramp is touched, and it becomes "His" very own.

Five years later, Jackie Coogan, the baby all grown up, is hurtling rocks at windows to smash them, so that daddy Charlie can come along, with a pane of glass attached to his back, and sell the unsuspecting mark a new one. Gets him into a bit of trouble, but, Charlie never does have things easy, as any casual viewer can surmise. He lives in a tenement room with the Kid, and they scrape by somehow.

The kid gets into a tussle with the son of a local bully, and by extension, so does Charlie. By this time, the Kid's mother has become a big star, and she's decided to make amends for the baby she lost. As the "child protection agencies" swoop down to take the Kid and probably move him to some damn orphanage where he'll be starved and abused like a 1921 version of Oliver Twist, Charlie and he escape, making their way to a homeless shelter, while the Kid's mother returns to Charlie's apartment and finds the note she crawled, five years before, when she left the baby in the car. Now, she realizes the awful truth, the Kid is HER kid.

Charlie falls asleep in the crook of the door leading up to his place and dreams of a world that is Heaven, with actors on fishing lines wearing robes and angels' wings (even the courtyard bully). And then, sin creeps into the world, in the form of devil-costumed hooligans. It's all great, sad, tearful, and fun.

The Kid is one of the most endearing films of all time, one of the greatest of the silents, and for its short length, it takes the viewer on a journey of pathos and the beauty that lurks inside even the most seemingly outward-appearing ignoble, vagabond soul. Charlie Chaplin smiled in the face of All of Our Despair, beginning life in a British workhouse in Victorian times. There, he knew poverty and want, hunger, cruelty, and desperation. Like someone once said of Orwell, Chaplin hated "Cant and lying and cruelty in life and literature." And in cinema, too, which gave him a way to expose the weaknesses, injustices, and common human foibles we are all guilty of, even the loftiest dreamer.

For us, he will forever remain the Little Tramp, an iconic character that transcends the movie screen, the costumed actor beneath the greasepaint, and has ascended to a place where he occupies the human subconscious--a spirit-being both benevolent and sad, exhausted, hapless, and yearning with the dreams that animate the little men of the world, those outsiders kicked around by fate and circumstance, who continue onward, despite it all.

And his soul seems so great. and in this film, he shares that love. With the Kid.

Excelsior!