The Kid



The Pilgrim

With The Kid, Chaplin successfully established the fusion of slapstick and pathos that would serve him so well in years to come. He also found perhaps his ideal costar, six-year-old Jackie Coogan, capable of both brilliant comic mimicry and unaffected emotion. In a genuinely squalid slum, the Little Tramp stumbles upon an abandoned baby. After a few attempts to rid himself of this unexpected responsibility, he settles into his paternal role, instructing the child in the con game of survival—until the authorities arrive to break up their happy if dilapidated home. Chaplin’s own childhood experiences of poverty and abandonment come through in the film’s vividly imagined settings and its intensity of feeling.

—Juliet Clark

• Written by Chaplin. With Chaplin, Jackie Coogan, Edna Purviance. (60 mins)

Followed by:
The Pilgrim
Charles Chaplin (U.S., 1921)

As an escaped convict who adopts the first disguise that presents itself, a suit of clerical clothes, Chaplin sets in motion a sharp and funny spoof of religious pretense. The film’s comic centerpiece is a brilliant pantomime sermon that equates preaching with the performance of a ham actor. In the course of his desperate charade, our hero discovers that the life of the cloth is fraught with dangers: which is worse, a stint in prison or a church tea?—Juliet Clark

• Written by Chaplin. With Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Sydney Chaplin. (59 mins)

The Kid and The Pilgrim are repeated on Saturday, November 24.

• (Total running time: 119 mins, Silent with music track, B&W, 35mm, From MK2)