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The Italian educationalist, Maria Montessori, once reflected that play is the work of the child. It remains a snappy and impactful way in which to articulate a self-evident truth; that children need play in order to learn and grow. But what happens when the play is robbed of its spontaneity and becomes codified, filmed, and monetised, so as to sustain a career?
Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan in The Kid Credit: API Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid, which was released to the public 100 years ago this month, was a landmark production which redoubled his global stardom by upping ambition, risking failure, and being unashamedly personal in its themes and settings. His first feature-length release, it achieved a combination of pin-sharp slapstick and affecting drama that would henceforth define the Chaplin brand. Into the bargain, it made his four-year-old discovery, Jackie Coogan, into cinema’s first major child star. It was a miracle, however, that Ch...
Join How do you define a breakthrough film when nearly everything that the talent behind it did was a breakthrough? This much is certain; by 1920, there was no bigger star in the world than Charlie Chaplin. The “Little Tramp” persona that he’d perfected in short films made him an internationally beloved figure. Already the highest paid person in movies with an unusual (for the time) amount of control over his pictures, Chaplin had 68 films under his belt by the time that The Kid was released. Premiering on January 21, 1921, the movie marked Chaplin’s full-length directorial debut. A...