Part of Arkadin’s CENTURY-OLD CINEMA series, spotlighting movies celebrating their 100th anniversary

“Arguably Chaplin’s most personal and autobiographical work,” according to biographer Jeffrey Vance, The Kid marked a watershed moment in the legendary silent comedian’s career. Chaplin’s first feature after years of hilarious and highly successful shorts, the film was an innovative combination of comedy and melodrama that melded the Tramp’s trademark slapstick with a social conscience and profoundly emotional core. Drawn from the harsh memories of Chaplin’s own hardscrabble upbringing, the film tells the simultaneously heartwarming and heartbreaking story of the impoverished but resilient Tramp and the adopted tot (Jackie Coogan) reluctantly abandoned by his unwed mother (Chaplin regular Edna Purviance). Unabashedly sentimental at times, the film is also one of Chaplin’s funniest, with adorably amusing scenes of the plucky Coogan cooking up pancakes and throwing rocks through windows. The Kid is undoubtedly, as Chaplin called it, a “picture with a smile—and perhaps, a tear.” The film will be preceded by Chaplin’s two-reeler The Idle Class, also from 1921, which also stars Purviance and features Chaplin in a dual role as the Tramp and a wealthy, absent-minded husband. The film bitingly contrasts the indolence of the wealthy elite with the liberated leisure of Chaplin’s insouciantly unmonied Tramp.