Offensive Scenes
I watched this once on television in the late 1990s as a teen and recall enjoying it. Then I stumbled across it a couple of days ago and decided to add it to my movie collection, making it officially the oldest movie I have. Just finished watching it for the first time in decades and it's even better than I remember it. An absolute classic! It's hard to believe that the National Library of Congress waited until 2011 to preserve this movie. The fact that it's as funny and heart-warming today as I imagine it was 101 years ago is a testament to the monumental achievement in film making that Charlie Chaplin accomplished. I look forward to watching this again with my future kids some day. This is one of those rare movies that gets a perfect 10/10 from me.
Reading about The Kid on Wikipedia, as I always do after watching a movie, I came across the following puzzling review:
The reviewer for The New York Times had more of a mixed reception of the film writing, "Charlie Chaplin is himself again - at his best, in some ways better than his previous best, and also, it is to be regretted, at his worst, only not with so much of his worst as has spoiled some of his earlier pictures." The reviewer praises the plot, the comedy, the characters, and the "balance of sadness" with Chaplin being "more of a comedian than a clown," but writes that "the blemish on The Kid is the same that has marred many of Chaplin's other pictures - vulgarity, or coarseness. There is only a little of it in the present work, just two scenes that will be found particularly offensive by some. They are funny. That cannot be denied. One laughs at them, but many try not to, and are provoked with themselves and Chaplin for their laughing. This is not good. The laugh that offends good taste doesn't win. And these scenes would never be missed from The Kid. It has plenty of unadulterated fun to go far and long without them. Why can't Chaplin leave out such stuff? Why don't the exhibitors delete it?"
I'm confused. What two vulgar scenes is this guy talking about? There was absolutely nothing offensive in this movie, as far as I'm concerned. The only part that might have been offensive for conservative sensibilities in the 1920s might have been the scene where the tramp flirts a little with the policeman's wife, but surely that can't be it? share