The Kid (1921, Charlie Chaplin) (Patreon)

57/100

Movies about adults bonding with abandoned or otherwise unrelated children generally leave me cold, perhaps because they so aggressively court pathos. (I love Erick Zonca's Julia in large part because it puts the nastiest possible spin on this subgenre.) Consequently, I've always been a bit leery of The Kid, which looks incredibly mawkish from a distance. Chaplin leans pretty strongly in that direction even at his best, so pairing him with a cute orphan seemed like a recipe for what I, at least, might consider his worst. 

As it turns out, I do think this is one of his lesser features...but not for the reason that I'd anticipated. Coogan genuinely has charm, and the absence of dialogue makes it nearly impossible for him to engage in the sort of pseudo-precociousness that can make child actors insufferable. Furthermore, the Tramp gives Swinton’s Julia a run for her money in the bad-surrogate-parent department, first repeatedly attempting to dump the baby in some random stroller and then, years later, enlisting his adopted son in a criminal enterprise. The Kid isn't really very saccharine at all, thankfully. Trouble is, neither is it terribly funny or inventive. None of Chaplin's famous gags come from this movie, which features a whole lot of the Tramp just ducking punches and clonking people on the head; its most physically impressive sequence—the rooftop chase—pales beside almost everything that happens in The Gold Rush, made only a few years later. (Truly amazing that Chaplin could do the Tramp's walk at high speed on a slanted roof, though.) Meanwhile, the only moment that really tugged at my heartstrings was the first oblivious encounter between mother and son, which offers a few seconds of stinging irony. Low-gear comedy + muted melodrama = cinematic tapioca. Pleasant enough, but far from memorable. 

And then I honestly don't know what to make of Chaplin concluding matters with the Tramp's bizarrely tacky afterworld dream. Religious iconography isn't my thing, but I did at least understand why we get a quick shot of Jesus carrying the cross at the beginning of the film. But even though many of the figures we see in Dreamland had appeared previously in real life, and each has an obvious symbolic function, the dream as a whole seems largely disconnected from the Tramp's emotional distress at that moment. It feels like an idea that Chaplin conceived for an entirely different project and then chose to awkwardly shoehorn in here rather than discard. Kinda sucks all the oxygen out of the subsequent hasty reunion, ending the movie on a note of slightly bewildered indifference. City Lights would later prove that Chaplin was capable of achieving something far more powerful.