The Kid (1921)

'A picture with a smile- and perhaps a tear...'

‘Jackie Coogan: a remarkable performance…’

The newcomer to the Silent Cinema has my sympathy. It’s like jazz music. Where on earth do you start? Jazz is hardly played on the radio these days (apart from a few programmes on Radio 3). And it’s the same with the silent screen. Many of us growing up in the Britain of the Seventies will remember the old black and white stuff with affection— the BBC used to screen this sort of thing every Saturday morning. These days— forget it. But in 1980, Thames Television produced a fantastic documentary about the days of silent film. It’s called Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Cinema, and it’s written and directed by film historians Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, with narration by James Mason, and music by Carl Davis— a seriously distinguished line-up. Understandably, they had copyright problems, which explains why this fabulous series never made it to DVD. Still, there are various downloads on YouTube— some better than others in quality— and well worth watching if you can be bothered to find the best recording(s). There’s also a rather good coffee table book based on the series, Hollywood: The Pioneers, published in 1979, which you should be able to track down online, or in decent second-hand bookshops.

“One of the finest examples of the screen language…”

The Kid (1921): a masterpiece.

If Miles Davis' A Kind of Blue is a perfect introduction to jazz, then for the newcomer to silent cinema, Charlie Chaplin's The Kid (1921) is an excellent place to start. It's a masterpiece. A delicate balance between sentiment and slapstick. The plot is simple: the tramp (Chaplin) finds an orphaned child (Jackie Coogan) abandoned in the backstreets of Los Angeles and brings him up in his garret— until the dastardly authorities come to take Jackie away. This, of course, is an oversimplification— Edna Purviance also stars as the child's mother. But critics and the public immediately recognised Chaplin's genius, with Mary Pickford saying, "The Kid is one of the finest examples of screen language, depending upon its actions rather than upon subtitles." 

‘Stealing the show: the most moving scene in cinema history?’