The Kid was Charlie Chaplin’s first feature film, and it showed that the Tramp could carry a story about love and loss.
The Kid was released in 1921 and was Chaplin’s first feature-length film as director. He played the Tramp, who finds an abandoned baby and raises him as his own son. The child, played by Jackie Coogan, was five years old when the film was made, and the pair’s partnership became famous: they lived by small tricks and odd jobs, and their affection for each other was the heart of the film.
The story took a darker turn when the authorities tried to take the boy away, and his mother, played by Edna Purviance, returned to search for him. Chaplin balanced the comedy of the Tramp’s life with the fear of losing the child, and the film’s dream sequence, in which the neighbourhood became heaven, showed how far he was willing to go visually.
The Kid was a great popular success and it established Chaplin as a feature-film director, not only a maker of short comedies. It also set a pattern for his later work: a small, poor figure who finds dignity in caring for someone else, and a film that could make an audience laugh and cry in the same scene.