silver nitrate notes

Chaplin's The Kid and the First Feature

15 jul 2009

Charlie Chaplin's The Kid (1921) was his first feature-length film. He had been making two-reel shorts at Mutual and First National for six years. The Kid ran sixty-eight minutes and required him to sustain a single story across what, by his standards, was an unusually long running time. The cinematographer was Roland Totheroh, whom we have met later on City Lights, The Gold Rush, and Modern Times.

The plot is familiar. The Tramp finds an abandoned child in an alley. He raises the boy for five years. Authorities arrive to take the child to an orphanage. The Tramp escapes with him across the rooftops. They are reunited with the child's mother, who has since become wealthy and has been searching for her son.

What Chaplin and Totheroh achieved, on what was essentially a silent-comedy budget, was a sentimental melodrama with comic interludes. The tonal shifts are the film's technical achievement. Totheroh lit the comic sequences (the Tramp feeding the baby through a coffee-pot spout, the glazier scam with Jackie Coogan breaking windows) in a broad comic register. He lit the emotional sequences (the boy being taken from the Tramp, the Tramp's dream of heaven) in a low-key interior register that would not become noir vocabulary for another twenty years.

Jackie Coogan, at six, became the first child star in American cinema. His performance holds its own opposite Chaplin's. The famous shot of him crying with his arms raised toward the truck taking him to the orphanage is the one that set the template for every kid-in-peril scene in American film since.

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sources
[1] Chaplin, Charles. My Autobiography. Simon & Schuster, 1964.
[2] Robinson, David. Chaplin: His Life and Art. McGraw-Hill, 1985.
[3] Vance, Jeffrey. Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema. Abrams, 2003.
[4] Coogan, Jackie. The Kid as performer reflections, TCM 1991 documentary.