the unlikely father and his beloved son
by Douglas Messerli
Charles Chaplin (screenwriter and director) The
Kid / 1920
Charles Chaplin’s 1920 release, The Kid,
was his first longer film—an hour in length—and was produced, beginning in 1919
during a period of his unsurety about continuing his shorts and personal
depression, since during this time he was also divorcing his wife.
Fortunately, he found the perfect child actor to play The Kid in Jackie
Coogan, and, basing the film, in part, on his own childhood in British slums,
he produced a brilliant and touching film about the New York City slums that
might have been predicted by the reformer photographer Jacob Riis.
Chaplin’s film, however, never preaches, but tenderly shows us how an
accidental encounter with a baby left on the streets to die, results in a close
father-son kinship between The Tramp and The Kid as he grows up and survives in
dire poverty.
The first few scenes represent almost brutal child abuse. The baby’s
unmarried mother (Edna Purviance) begins this as we see her leaving the Charity
Hospital. She obviously has no money and nowhere to turn. Seeing a beautiful
mansion with a new car sitting on the street outside, she carefully puts her
baby in the backseat, hoping that he will be taken in by the people nearby,
leaving a note “Please take care of this orphan child.” And in that sense we
begin almost where Oliver Twist began.
When The Tramp (Chaplin) accidently comes across the baby, he too tries
to rid himself of it, placing it in a pram a woman is pushing with another
child in it. But she virulently rejects it. When the local policeman sees The
Tramp with the child, he pulls it away and also attempts to put it in the same
pram.
She again rejects it pointing out that it belongs to the Tramp, so
Chaplin ends up holding the child again, briefly pondering what to do with it;
for an instant he even looks the grate that leads to the sewers, but kind man
that he truly is, he takes him into his almost barren room.
Before long, he has ensconced the baby in a kind of hammock, gerry-rigged
up to what seems to be whisky jug to deliver the child’s milk. In short he
quickly becomes a natural father.
As
the baby grows up to Coogan’s age, the Tramp cooks up big meals for him (unlike
Oliver’s fate), forces him to wash his face and hands, and to say his prayers
and meals at night.
Working as a glazier, The Tramp may “use” his son at moments to throw
rocks through windows so that he might be asked to repair them. But even that
seems more as a sport for the boy than child abuse.
In
short, the newly-minted father and son relationship is as healthy—perhaps
healthier—as those in the best homes of the city. Coogan’s love for his on-film
father is truly apparent, and people involved with the film have said that
Chaplin treated Coogan so lovingly that he might almost have truly been his
father, although the boy’s real father was on set most of the time and plays
the role of the pick-pocket when the two are forced to take refuge in an
overnight sleeping shelter for the poor.
As
in many a Chaplin film, the only true blockage to this loving relationship are
policeman and other authorities, and the rich. The child’s mother has since
become a famous and successful singer, and out of guilt often visits slum
neighborhoods with small gifts for the children There she encounters her own
son without knowing it, also providing him with two small toys, which he comes to
love and which, later, a bully steals from him.
When she later returns with other such trifles, the mother discovers that The Kid is extremely ill, and demands that The Tramp call the doctor.
Unable to afford a good doctor, he calls in a Country Doctor who is a
bumbling fool, who first sticks the thermometer into Chaplin’s mouth instead of
The Kid’s, and proceeds to clumsily fuss around the boy rather than actually
check him out.
When he asks The Tramp whether or not the child his truly his son,
Charlie answers “Practically,” providing the doctor with the note that was
wrapped up in the baby’s blanket.
That act leads the doctor to call the Orphan’s Home for them to come and
cart off the child. A fight ensues, with the boy nonetheless being locked up in
the back of an open truck, as if he some animal being led off to slaughter.
Locked
out of their own house, they take to the shelter I mentioned above. But
meanwhile, the mother has returned to check up on the child only to find the
doctor who, speechless over all that has just occurred, merely shows her the
note she herself has written. Recognizing the situation, she puts an
advertisement in the paper saying that there will be a financial reward for
anyone who brings the boy into the police station.
The manager of the sleeping shelter reads this as his customers fall to
sleep, and rushes the child off to the station over The Kid’s pleas for his
freedom.
Missing him in the bed, The Tramp goes looking everywhere for his son,
without any success, finally returning to his old home which in locked. Sitting
on the doorstep he falls asleep.
What follows is perhaps the most kitsch and silly scene in all of
Chaplin’s oeuvre, as many of the characters we have already seen wildly dance
together in the streets, all attired in angel wings.
Perhaps that was only to prepare us for the
slightly unbelievable ending, in which the policeman, finally capturing the
previously evasive Tramp, takes him personally to the mother’s house, wherein
The Kid is now ensconced. The Trap is invited in as if he might be asked to
stay forever.
It may be that this new world represents Chaplin’s current position in
life as opposed to his previous childhood poverty, but we might realize in this
just what Chaplin, in his own life, might be missing in his current opulence.
The rest of the film, however, has been so poignant and touching that
The Kid and The Tramp’s redemption are almost forgettable.
In
many respects these last scenes parallel Oliver Twist once again, when Oliver,
discovered by his rich uncle is given all the love and benefits he was
previously been missing But his new world seems partially dead, whereas
everything was so alive and wondrous in Fagin’s den.
Los Angeles, June 9, 2020
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June
2020).
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