The Kid
Short description
The Kid follows a poor woman in London who leaves her newborn baby in a wealthy family's car, hoping he will have a better life. Through a series of circumstances, the child instead ends up in the care of a tramp, who raises him as his own son. Years later, the mother, now a successful performer, regrets her decision and longs to find the boy, setting up a conflict between the life the child has built with the tramp and the mother's wish to reclaim him.
Charlie Chaplin directed, wrote and produced the film, and also stars as the Tramp, with Jackie Coogan as the Kid, Carl Miller as the Man and Edna Purviance as the Woman. It was Chaplin's eleventh film as director, following The Bond and preceding The Pilgrim. The film cost little to make by later standards and went on to earn a substantial worldwide gross, with the figure of 5 million dollars underlining how widely it was seen. On IMDb the film holds a critics' rating of 8.7 from 49 reviews, while on TMDB it has 8.1 from over two thousand votes. The runtime is 68 minutes.
What's left behind the scenes
- Filming was completed in 1920, shortly after Chaplin's divorce from his first wife, Mildred Harris, who attempted to confiscate the footage through a lawsuit. Chaplin was forced to take the film from the studio in Salt Lake City, where, hiding from bailiffs, he finished editing the film.
- Filming took 154 working days, and another 118 working days were required for editing.
- Jackie Coogan, who played The Kid, was the son of vaudeville actor Jack Coogan Sr. (who played the Devil in the film's 'heavenly' episode). First National studio signed a contract with Coogan Sr., thereby giving Chaplin the opportunity to film Coogan Jr.
- Chaplin’s directorial demands can be judged by the fact that less than 2% of the filmed material made it into the finished film – a ratio extremely uncharacteristic of cinema at that time.
- Chaplin filmed 'The Kid' under a contract with First National, which stipulated that he create eight two-part short films. Although 'The Kid' was a feature-length film (6 parts), the company attempted to 'count' it as a short film and pay Chaplin three times less than he expected – $500,000 instead of $1.5 million. Unwilling to accept these terms, Chaplin took a copy of the film with him and negotiated with the company until he achieved conditions acceptable to him.
- 'The Kid' was released to incredible success and became the second highest-grossing film of 1921 (surpassed only by Rex Ingram’s 'The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse' starring Rudolph Valentino).
- In 1971, Chaplin released an updated version of 'The Kid' with musical accompaniment specially written by him for the film. A musical leitmotif of the film became a quote from Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony.
- Initially, the film was titled "Besprizorny" (engl. The Waif), but Chaplin renamed it "The Kid" during the production process.
- Chaplin became so engrossed in filming that he violated all possible deadlines, and his contract with "First National" studio was at risk of being terminated. The studio eventually gave Charlie additional time to complete the film after seeing the filming process and Jackie Coogan's performance.
- In December 2011, the film was included in the U.S. National Film Registry as "having significant cultural, historical, or aesthetic value."
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
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