“Please love and care for this orphan child.”

Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid was a breakthrough for the ambitious filmmaker. Less a turning point than a summoning of all his burgeoning talents, channeled into an evergreen hour of silent drama. After years of making one- and two-reel slapstick comedies for Keystone, Essanay, Mutual, and First National—an extraordinarily prolific stint that saw his popularity soar as he developed his iconic Tramp persona—the young auteur was looking to expand the scope of his cinematic endeavors. In contrast to the pointed, in-and-out nature of his earlier shorts, with The Kid he aimed for a new level of artistic achievement by producing a six-reel film, a format that allowed a more sophisticated style of storytelling.

Nutshelled by an early intertitle that reads: “A picture with a smile—and perhaps, a tear,” Chaplin’s debut feature length film is a beautiful mixture of slapstick and sentimentality. Its comedy is derived from Chaplin’s delightful performance, its pathos is lent legitimacy by an astounding performance from vaudeville child actor Jackie Coogan, and its emotional weight is derived from a touching story informed by the untimely death of Chaplin’s firstborn shortly before production began. Immediately recognized as a work of staggering quality, The Kid is a truly timeless piece of art that remains an enduring monument of the silent era and a testament to the creative prowess of its producer, director, writer, editor, composer, and star.

The story finds Chaplin’s endearing Tramp character forced by unfortunate circumstances into adopting a newborn orphan and raising the boy as his own despite his impoverished living conditions. A young woman (Edna Purviance), abandoned by the father of her child, must rely on a charity hospital to deliver her baby boy. Another intertitle informs us that her sin is mere motherhood and an image of a cross-bearing Christ provocatively flashes onto the screen to underscore her agony. Envisioning the future hardships that she and her child might endure, she surreptitiously abandons him in a luxury car with a note requesting he be provided with love and care. However, the car is stolen by two thieves (one of whom humorously whips out a revolver when he hears the baby cry) who dump the bundle of joy in a back alley trash heap and hastily depart. Enter the Tramp, who’s wandering about on his morning promenade when he stumbles across the swaddled babe. Through a series of slapstick mishaps, he finds himself unable to locate the child’s mother or a suitable caregiver, and, under the now-suspicious eye of a diligent beat cop, resigns himself to the child’s upbringing.

Fast forward five years and the Tramp’s got himself a little ragamuffin sidekick. Christened John, the young lad is outfitted with coveralls and an outsize cap—garb to match the Tramp’s abnormal costume with his bowler cap, baggy pants, and oversized shoes. The Tramp fumbles his way through his vision of fatherhood, wiping behind his child’s ears, teaching him to pray before meals, giving him a pep talk between rounds of a brawl with a neighborhood bully. But even though the Tramp has shaped up in the intervening years, he’s still the Tramp. Together with his understudy he runs an effective scam in which his little urchin hurls rocks through streetfront windows a few minutes before the Tramp happens to wander by with replacement glass. But Chaplin’s comedic chops steer us away from anything resembling condemnation of his fathering skills. There’s an easygoing camaraderie between the pair, most evident when they share meals together in their dingy apartment. Chaplin expertly utilizes Coogan’s talent for mimicry to develop moments of humor and poignancy. For instance, at one point the boy cooks flapjacks for breakfast and then scolds the Tramp for remaining in bed while breakfast gets cold; the Tramp, in turn, pokes his head through a slit in the comforter and slides out of bed wearing it as a makeshift robe.

In Chaplin’s two-reel works he’s basically always the sole primary character. There simply isn’t enough time to develop the depth required for resonant secondary characters in the ~20 minutes afforded by the accepted slapstick format. And so Chaplin often relies on romantic love interests to generate the comedic pathos that made him famous. But here, with nearly an hour across his six reels, Chaplin is able to toss romance by the wayside and hone in on the father-son relationship, elevating his co-star to the same level as himself. Over the course of the story, the Tramp grows from an unwilling caregiver (consider that he contemplated chucking the Kid down a storm drain before deciding to raise him) to an ersatz father who cares for his adopted son to such a degree that the scenes in which they are momentarily separated produce deep pangs of sympathetic anguish.

As the Tramp and the Kid spend their days making ends meet and avoiding run-ins with the law, the boy’s mother comes to regret her decision. Balancing on a knife’s edge between his chosen modes of storytelling, Chaplin allows a melodramatic series of coincidences to bring the trio together in a kind of harmony without letting anything out of his control. When the father and son find themselves on the run from the authorities (who’ve discovered he’s not the boy’s real father), a greedy flophouse owner scoops the Kid up and turns him in for a $1000 reward. The dejected Tramp, fearing he’s lost the boy for good, curls up on his old stoop and dreams of his version of heaven: the same old tenement alleyway, adorned with flowers and brimming with angelic residents skipping around carefree and playing harps. Angel dogs flit around hither and yon on hidden wires. And the Kid’s there to tickle him awake with a feather from an angel’s wing. But even this dreamland is corrupted, and when he tries to fly away he is shot out of the sky. In an uplifting coda, as providence would have it, he’s shaken awake and chauffeured to a mansion where he’s greeted by the Kid and his mother.

Revisiting the film in his later years (which is when he added the score), Chaplin excised about fifteen minutes of scenes involving Purviance’s character. He deemed them too sentimental for modern audiences. And yet their removal only enhances the poignance of the central story. There’s an added effect that the missing scenes produce, in that the narrative becomes eccentrically fractured but still carefully honed toward its emotional peaks; effectively enhancing the timeless fairytale quality of Chaplin’s finely tuned work. Put away your rose-tinted glasses for you have no need for them; The Kid hasn’t aged a day.