The Kid

Charlie Chaplin's first feature film and one of the greatest films of the silent era. The Tramp discovers an abandoned baby in an alley and, after trying to leave it, raises the boy as his own. Five years later, the Kid (Jackie Coogan) is his partner in a glass-replacing scam, and the two share a tender, scrappy life together. When the boy falls ill and welfare officials try to take him away, the Tramp fights to keep him. Chaplin balanced broad comedy with genuine pathos, and Coogan's performance made him the first major child star in film history. The dream sequence, in which Chaplin imagines heaven as a rooftop populated by angels and devils, is one of the most imaginative passages in silent cinema. The film was co-founded through United Artists, the distribution company Chaplin had helped create in 1919. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.