The Kid

The Kid
Directed by Charlie Chaplin

TW: Parental abandonment

Comedy is a hard thing to do. Over time I've become more and more reserved in my comedic senses and don't typically enjoy the genre. My favorite comedy movie is probably The Big Lebowski, which I enjoy primarily due to the very well-written dialogue-based comedy which builds over the course of the film. As far as other comedy goes, I enjoy It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Community and Tim and Eric but beyond these I tend to find a lot of comedy pretty hackneyed and reliant on a shared sense of humor. If the sense of humor isn't shared between writer and audience, the comedy can fall flat.

It's nice, then, that The Kid has held up so well over time. It's actually a pretty impressive movie in its own right, with lots of wonderful choreography and impressive shots, but I want to highlight that the movie is one of the few I've found funny in years. Chaplin and Coogan play well off of one another and so many of the scenes are brilliantly choreographed. In my opinion, slapstick is like a dance, and to do slapstick well requires a lot of precision in making things look like accidents.

The plot of the movie is okay for what it is. An unnamed woman gives birth to a child, and due to complications with the father, decides to abandon the child in the back seat of an expensive car, leaving a note asking whoever finds the child to take care of it. The car is stolen and the thieves, upon discovering the child, leave him on the street where he is found by Chaplin's 'tramp'. The tramp takes the child in and becomes a father to the child, who eventually becomes a player in the tramp's con-artist game.

The woman, now distraught over her child and wealthy, takes to charity work among the poor, where she comes across her child (now named 'John'), but the two do not recognize one another. When John becomes sick one day, the woman offers to call a doctor. The doctor, upon finding out that the child is not the tramp's biological son, calls an "orphan asylum" to take the child away. Hijinks ensue and the tramp and John are left wandering the streets, avoiding the authorities. Eventually, the child is given over to the police (kidnapped, actually) and the woman arrives to take him back.

The Tramp, now tired after having searched for John all night following his kidnapping, falls asleep on his doorstep and has a pretty bizarre dream sequence where various characters in the movie are now angels. The Tramp becomes an angel too and all seems good until three devils sneak into the gated neighborhood where the angels are living. Things go downhill from here until The Tramp is shot and wakes up to find that he's being hoisted up by a police officer. The officer takes him to see the woman and the child, who welcome him inside the woman's mansion gladly.

So I don't really want to talk about the plot to this one. I have some pretty conflicted feelings about how the child's custody is handled throughout the film. Maybe I'm being too harsh here, but it seems to me that the woman is thoroughly in the wrong for having abandoned her child. Not necessarily for the decision to not take care of a child herself (plenty of circumstances arise that make child raising by a particular parent a bad decision for all parties) but in her method of trying to find an adoptive parent by literally leaving the child in the backseat of a car with a note. I understand she was trying to put the child to a well-off family, but it's still reckless endangerment.

But like I said, I'm more interested in talking about the comedy; or the dramedy more accurately. I'm amazed at how much this film conveys through visuals alone. One of the things I think people oftentimes forget about silent films is that not all dialogue needs to be given an intertitle. So much of the dialogue can be inferred or left to the imagination of the viewer and, far from something being lost, I think a lot is added to a film as a result.

I'm actually really pleased that I found this film. I remember watching Modern Times back in undergraduate, and I thought it was okay. Now, having seen this, I'm really looking forward to checking out the Harold Lloyd and Chaplin films that are also on my list.