The Kid

Charlie Chaplin's first feature-length masterpiece — the film where he proved that the Little Tramp could make you cry as hard as he made you laugh. A destitute tramp discovers an abandoned baby in an alley and raises him as his own. Five years later, the two have formed an inseparable partnership: the kid breaks windows, the tramp shows up to repair them. When authorities try to take the boy away and return him to his birth mother, Chaplin delivers one of cinema's most heartbreaking sequences — a rooftop chase that is simultaneously thrilling slapstick and devastating emotional drama. Jackie Coogan, just four years old, gives one of the great child performances in film history. The film that proved comedy could carry the emotional weight of any drama, and launched Chaplin into the stratosphere.