CHARLIE CHAPLIN’S THE KID  

Like Snow White in her Disneyland forest. Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid is a tale whose underlying archetype has attracted audiences of all ages: the abandoned child found in the wilderness. But unlike his more privileged mythological predecessors, who at least had the good fortune to be deposited in lush, natural surroundings, Chaplin’s castoff child is discovered among the shabby detritus of modern society. A garbage-strewn alley in the dirty Red Light District in Los Angeles’ Chinatown of the 1920s serves as the shooting location, re-creating a mean street from Chaplin’s feral boyhood in the slums of South London.

Ambling down the alley, taking his daily constitutional while swiftly ducking the flying garbage swiftly ducking the flying garbage pushed by householders from the building windows above, the Little Tramp appears. With too gentle manners, he slips off his gloves before selecting a cigarette butt from his smoking case, an old sardine can, Just as he is about to surrender himself to the joys of his first smoke of the day, his tranquility is shattered by the squalling infant who has been abandoned on the garbage heap. Plaintively demanding to be heard by someone anyone.

Taking one glance at that miserable child, streetwise Charlie instinctively looks up as if to quiz both the refuse-throwing householders and the heavens above as to just exactly where this baby has come from. But before he can even begin to explore that question, a rapid-fire series of comic interactions with a neighborhood cop firmly est

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