Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan in The Kid
Credit: API
Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid, which was released to the public 100 years ago this month, was a landmark production which redoubled his global stardom by upping ambition, risking failure, and being unashamedly personal in its themes and settings. His first feature-length release, it achieved a combination of pin-sharp slapstick and affecting drama that would henceforth define the Chaplin brand. Into the bargain, it made his four-year-old discovery, Jackie Coogan, into cinema’s first major child star.
It was a miracle, however, that Chaplin even got to see a penny from it. For all the fluency and ease of the results on screen, The Kid was made during one of the most tumultuous phases of both Chaplin’s personal life and career. He was under enormous pressure to keep delivering two-reelers starring the Tramp, the character he had first unveiled in 1914, who’d become a global phenomenon in no time.