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Perhaps it’s because I saw this one after watching his lionized classics like City Lights, Modern Times, The Gold Rush, and The Great Dictator that I found The Kid to be more of a beautiful introductory for what was to come than a film that packs the same amount of weight and heft that the others contain. Maybe it’s also because it didn’t make me feel as joyous as I was expecting from a Chaplin film. The Kid is brilliant, but also very dark.
At only a little over an hour, The Kid tells its story with a tremendous amount of economy and heartbreaking imagery. It’s a simple story, really, but one full of melodrama – a young woman leaves her baby on a doorstep and is promptly found by the Tramp, who tries to pawn it offer and briefly considers leaving it to die, who takes it in and raises it as his son. The Tramp and the foundling are next seen five years later when the kid’s biological mother, now a famous actress, comes to the slums to do charity work with the street children and dreamily wishes she hadn’t abandoned her child. It’s obvious where the final scene will take us with this story, but that doesn’t matter.
For the most part, Chaplin sticks to this narrative and only presents us with a few truly memorable scenes. Namely, the sequence in which the child is taken away from the Tramp after it’s discovered that he is not the biological parent of the child. The Tramp’s mad dash over rooftops and through the slums to reach the truck taking the child away is exhilarating, but the reunion is the stuff that causes audiences to openly weep. The sheer joy that both the Tramp and the child have in being reunited is infectious, and one would have to be made out of steel to not feel the slightest bit moved by the whole thing. Before the film went into production, Chaplin lost his infant son, and that sense of loss and melancholia covers the whole film. So his naturalistic, almost animalistic recreation to being reunited with his son is coming from a very deep place.
A more curious sequence is the one that follows: after the rich woman realizes that the Tramp’s adoptive son is actually hers, she goes out and finds him, takes him away from the Tramp, and goes off to lead her happily-ever-after with the kid. The Tramp, devastated, goes out searching once more for the child. He rests after his grueling journey, and then we’re treated to a sequence showcasing his dreamworld. In his dream the Tramp and the kid are angels, blissfully together. Naturally, there are demonic interlopers who remove the child from the Tramp. It’s a strange little pantomime which sees the forces of the ghetto constantly trying to break the bound between father-and-son. It serves no real narrative purpose, but it’s symbolically pretty interesting ground to swim around in.
The Kid may not be his finest work, but it’s a lovely debut and showcases many of the idiosyncrasies which would appear again and again in his work. As a melodrama about a father-and-son relationship, it’s one of the few movies which justifiably will make you laugh until you cry, and then just cry. It’s without a doubt the best film I’ve seen about a loving father and son relationship, even if the bonds aren’t by blood.
